kenlacrosse

News that Obamacare would cause the economy to shed 2.3 million jobs is being greeted with jubilation by some quarters.  This was foreseen long ago.  FactCheck.Org pointed out even in 2011 that unemployment is not the right word for the loss of remunerative activities caused by the program.  The word’s not “unemployment”. “That’s a distortion. CBO said some Americans would work less or leave their jobs if they can get health insurance outside the workplace.” It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

Employment is a prison, didn’t you know? Nancy Pelosi exults that breadwinners now can escape the confines of “job-lock”. The Washington Post reports on this wonderful new addition to the political lexicon.

“Yesterday, the CBO projected that by 2021 the Affordable Care Act will enable more than 2 million workers to escape ‘job-lock’ – the situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office said in a news release.

“Job-lock”. Now there’s a word. But it’s new days, mourning in America, the 21st century. A time of wonders and prodigies. Joblessness is no longer uncool but something everyone should look forward to.  Why, only the other day SFGate touted the benefits of “funemployment”.  It wrote about the wonderful new situation those who no longer have to work are finding themselves in. “People are saying screw it, and they’re leaving companies. We need to figure out how to make companies work better for everybody. Until that happens … early retirements and furloughs are going to continue. People are going to opt out of the system.”

One system you can’t opt out of though, is the Obamacare. Eugene Robinson says there’s no going back. Ever.

Now that the fight over Obamacare is history, perhaps everyone can finally focus on making the program work the way it was designed. Or, preferably, better.

The fight is history, you realize. Done. Finito. Yesterday’s news.

Any existential threat to the Affordable Care Act ended with the popping of champagne corks as the new year arrived. That was when an estimated 6 million uninsured Americans received coverage through expanded Medicaid eligibility or the federal and state health insurance exchanges.

Obamacare is now a fait accompli; nobody is going to take this coverage away.

That’s too bad. Because as John Podhoretz notes that the other thing the CBO report pointed out, besides the fact that the unemployment rolls would swell by 2.3 million, was there would be more people uninsured after Obamacare than before.

Even more damaging is this projection: “About 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents.”

Why? Because, in selling the bill to the American people in a nationally televised September 2009 address, President Obama said the need for ObamaCare was urgent precisely because “there are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”

Now the CBO is saying is that in 10 years, about the same number of people will lack insurance as before. This, after new expenditures of as much as $2 trillion and a colossal disruption of the US medical system.

So you go round in a circle, two trillion dollars poorer to wind up in exactly the same place. Except this time forever. What’s changed, besides insurance bailouts, data loss, penalties, higher premiums and more deductibles? Nothing. But Robinson’s right about one thing. Obamacare wants to stay. Insists on staying. Like some HAL 2000 it can’t be disconnected.

The Cato Institute notes that embedded in the Obamacare statue itself are provisions createing an Indepedent Payment Advisory Board whose decisions can’t be repealed. Not even by passing a law against it. Health care decisions are made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which in turns gives orders to the HHS Secretary. And not even Congress can overrule it.

IPAB consists of up to 15 unelected government “experts.” Its stated purpose is to restrain Medicare spending. If projected spending exceeds certain targets, Obamacare requires IPAB to issue “legislative proposals” to reduce future spending. Those proposals could include drastic cuts that jeopardize seniors’ access to care, leading some critics to label IPAB a “death panel.”

But the really dangerous part is that these are not mere “proposals.” Obamacare requires the secretary of Health and Human Services to implement them — which means they become law automatically — unless Congress takes certain steps to head them off. Congress may replace the Board’s proposal with its own cuts, at least initially. But Obamacare requires a three-fifths vote in the Senate to pass any replacement that spends more than the Board’s proposal. In other words, to override IPAB’s proposal completely, opponents must assemble a simple majority in the House and a three-fifths majority in the Senate and the president’s signature

Once an IPAB “death panel” condemns you — that’s it folks. It’s job lock over forever. Funemployment forever, here we come.

One group that wants out — despite Eugene Robinson’s belief that Obamacare is the Hotel California — are union supporters of president Obama himself. Steven Mufson and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post explain:

Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.

Their complaints reflect a broad sense of disappointment among many labor leaders, who say the Affordable Care Act has subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges. …

“We want to hold the president to his word: If you like your health-care coverage, you can keep it, and that just hasn’t been the case,” said Donald “D.” Taylor, president of Unite Here, the union that represents about 400,000 hotel and restaurant workers and provided a crucial boost to Obama by endorsing him just after his rival Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the New Hampshire primary. …

“The unions here are asking to double dip,” said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant in Washington. “It is an unfair request. The Obama plan is very simple: If your employer pays for your health plan, you are not eligible for a government subsidy. What the unions are asking for is government and employers to fund their benefits.” …

During preparations for a September meeting of the AFL-CIO, administration officials lobbied to alter a resolution so that it called for repair, not repeal, of the health-care legislation. The resolution passed unanimously. At the meeting, O’Sullivan said, “We’ll be damned if we’re going to lose our health insurance because of un­intended consequences in a law. It needs to be changed, it needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now.”

What? They don’t like it? The unions want an exemption? Well they won’t be the only ones. As is well known, Obama and many top Federal bureaucrats exempted themselves from this wonderful program from the beginning. Which only goes to show how beneficial it is. Why else would these hard working, selfless bureaucrats and union officials to pass up the chance of leisure and idle abundance that only an escape from the “job lock” can provide?

No. They must remain at their hardship posts posts.  For the doughty apparatchik stern duty calls and the pitiless requirements of public service means they must make the sacrifice and remaining laboring in the vineyards of the Lord.

… and then there’s Immigration Reform, which is the next attraction.

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LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck.

Perhaps things haven’t come all that far from the early days of hope and change, when this iconic photo captured the national mood.

THE HILL: CBO: ObamaCare Slowing Growth, Contributing To Job Losses. “The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be ‘substantially larger’ than what it had previously anticipated. The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected.”

UPDATE: This must have been painful for Chuck Todd to write: “CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on health care. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Flashback: FactCheck.Org: A ‘Job-Killing’ Law? House Republicans misrepresent the facts. Experts predict the health care law will have little effect on employment. So were these “fact-checkers” right about anything? Or were they just engaged to defend the Obama narrative until after the election?

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Going On 30, Living With Mom And Dad. “Perhaps a chunk of millennials will never catch up, our lives channeled by the deep grooves of an economic calamity forced upon us by the timing of our births and graduations.”

I once got a humorous column out of my unwillingness to provide my personal data to Healthcare.gov, which is now looking like a very smart move:

U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.

The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns last week. Specifically, officials warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected of inserting malicious code that could be used for cyber attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the concerns.

The federal government subcontracted out to Belarus?

Remakes are an inevitable part of the Hollywood development process, but for fans of the original films, said remakes are often horrifying. But few respond as passionately as producer David Seger did when he found out that Robocop was about to be “updated” for modern audiences.

Seger, who currently works as a commercial director after years of participating in the Los Angeles video community, assembled a team of 59 other collaborators for Our Robocop Remake, an unauthorized ode to the original 1987 film directed by Paul Verhoeven. Charging under the the banner of “If anyone is going to ruin Robocop, it’s going to be us,” the creators involved (including Cracked.com, Fatal Farms, Waverly Films, ScreenJunkies, JD Ryznar, Paul Bonanno, Team Tiger Awesome and The Indie Machines) each took a scene from the original film and remade it in their own way.

When you watch Our Robocop Remake, you get to see 10 Alex Murphys, 12 Broddickers, 15 Lewises, and 30 Robocops. The players include cartoons, puppets, babies, street dancers, a Robocop cosplayer (who drove from Arizona to Los Angeles to film his scene) and guys dressed in the official Robocop Halloween costume. The violent climax becomes a trippy video remix. There’s an original musical number. There’s even some modern dance.

Legally, ORR walks a fine line with regards to the rules about fair use and parody (especially as it does include original footage from the film and some copywritten music). But the endeavor is entirely not-for-profit: While the film screened several times over the last weekend in Los Angeles, and will be shown in New York on Wednesday, Feb. 5th, tickets are and were entirely free.

And they’ve gotten away with it before: ORR is a follow up to Our Footloose Remake, an equally unauthorized 2010 remake of the Kevin Bacon dance classic made in response to the 2011 remake directed by Craig Brewer.

According to Seger in a phone interview, the only legal blowback he and the OFR team experienced from that project was when the company behind the Footloose remake’s DVD release asked to interview them for a featurette about Footloose‘s cultural impact — only to be told, six weeks after being interviewed, that the company’s lawyers had forbidden their inclusion. “The legal department said we couldn’t show any of the footage or mention your remake at all,” he said.

ORR (as well as OFR) was made possible in no small part thanks to Channel 101, the 11-year-old screening series founded by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon (the latter of whom is the once-ousted-but-back-again creator of NBC’s Community).

Channel 101′s premise is simple: People submit five-minute episodes of shows, ten are screened each month, and five are voted back to continue the next month. Over its run, Channel 101 has featured comedians like Jack Black and Sarah Silverman, but more importantly created a community of people passionate about having fun making videos — many of whom were contributors to ORR.

In fact, Seger did the numbers, and of the 60 scenes, 36 were made by currently active Channel 101 filmmakers, while seven were made by those who at one time had participated in Channel 101. Though the concept of a Channel 101 alumni participating in ORR was awkward for Seger to explain: “Once you catch the bug, you’re still submitting shows if you’re interested in doing something like [ORR],” he said.

Seger has been submitting to Channel 101 for eight years, even before he moved to Los Angeles, and creating shows for the community also was a help to him professionally. “Almost every job I’ve gotten in L.A. has been through doing stuff for fun at Channel 101,” he said.

This included working as Harmon’s assistant for the first two seasons of Community while also creating web content for the show, and Seger has continued to shoot behind-the-scenes and second-unit material. But on top of all that, plus producing ORR, he has an active Channel 101 series, Car-Jumper going.

“People ask why I keep submitting,” Seger said. “But it’s really satisfying to sit in a room and listen to people laugh at stuff you make.”

In fact, that’s a big factor in why he keeps producing projects like Our Robocop Remake. “I kind of love that stuff, and watching it with filmmakers, celebrating the effort we put into it. So many of us in this industry have to work stuff that isn’t necessarily fun. But this is such a fun thing — that’s why I got into making movies in the first place.”

Our Robocop Remake will not be available on DVD. But it will be released online, Seger promised, ad-free and “soon.” Meanwhile, they’re considering their own remake of Point Break, prior to the proposed plan to remake it officially, even though the official version, at this point, is “all talk.”

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: Asia’s 1937 Syndrome.

FISH FEELS ABANDONED BY BICYCLE: “Where are our men? Why are they not protecting us?”

I dunno, but I have an idea. Though despite the complaints, there’s this: “In Thursday’s incident, a 24-year-old man and his girlfriend, 23, had just left his house on 26th Street near Lehigh Avenue at 11:53 p.m. when a thief grabbed the woman’s bag. When the boyfriend gave chase, a second man shot him in the chest.” No matter what you do, it’s never enough.

YOU KNOW, IT DOES: The SR-71 Factory Floor Looks Like The Rebel Base In Star Wars.

Witness once again our Smart Diplomacy™ in action — er, inaction:

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been engaged in secret contacts with the Taliban about reaching a peace agreement without the involvement of his American and Western allies, further corroding already strained relations with the United States.

The secret contacts appear to help explain a string of actions by Mr. Karzai that seem intended to antagonize his American backers, Western and Afghan officials said. In recent weeks, Mr. Karzai has continued to refuse to sign a long-term security agreement with Washington that he negotiated, insisted on releasing hardened Taliban militants from prison and distributed distorted evidence of what he called American war crimes.

On the one hand, Karzai has totally sold us out — which reminds me of nothing but the story of the scorpion and the frog. On the other hand, when your negotiating partner is none other than the feckless Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom, can you really blame Karzai?

He means to keep his life, his position, and maybe even his power. This to him is almost certainly the only way to accomplish those goals.

SPACE: Why It Matters That There’s So Much Water in the Asteroid Belt. For the last decade or two, most of our space discoveries have tended to make colonization look easier.

(Paul Mirengoff)

A new Kaiser poll finds that just 24 percent of uninsured Americans have a favorable view of Obamacare, while 47 percent of the uninsured view it unfavorably.

Thus, two uninsured Americans dislike Obamacare for every one American who likes it. And the ratio becomes slightly more damning when the question to the uninsured is whether they see themselves as better or worse off due to Obamacare. 30 percent say they are worse off; 13 percent say better.

Kaiser’s numbers represent an erosion of support of Obamacare among the uninsured. In December, 36 percent of the uninsured favored Obamcare while 43 percent viewed it unfavorably.

By December, the disastrous rollout of Obamacare had been well-publicized. What was happened since to sour the insured even more? Perhaps increased knowledge about what Obamacare plans cost and what the deductibles, etc. look like.

In this sense, the only thing worse for the Obama administration than a failing website is a website that works. It reminds me of the journalist who complained about the acoustics in the Senate because they enabled him to hear every word that was said.

It’s not terribly surprising that the uninsured aren’t enthusiastic about Obamacare. Broadly speaking, the uninsured have consisted of non-poor people who, with the exception of those with pre-existing conditions, opted not to obtain health insurance (there are, though, poor people who are uninsured because they don’t take advantage of Medicaid). Having made that decision, they can be forgiven if Obamacare left them cold once they realized they were going to have to pay for Obamacare plans.

To be sure, Obamacare offers subsidies to many who opted not to purchase insurance. To the extent that word of the subsidies gets out, which hasn’t yet happened to the degree the administration had hoped, it causes some of the uninsured to view Obamacare favorably, assuming confidence in the program (a dubious assumption, so far).

But for many, including some who are eligible for partial subsidies, the obligation to purchase health insurance (on penalty of being “taxed”) remains unwelcome. And, as Kaiser’s polling shows, the more that is learned about the plans that can be purchased, the more unwelcome the obligation becomes.

Obamacare has created a new of class of uninsured — those who have lost their insurance because it wasn’t gold-plated enough to satisfy Washington. I assume that this cohort, which will grow significantly, wasn’t deemed “uninsured” in the Kaiser survey. I also assume that it overwhelmingly disfavors Obamacare.

One of the few things Russians do really well, with a truly national passion and zeal, is stealing.

Everyone knows the scene from innumerable Western movies: it begins in a town where everyone is packing heat. To settle things down the town fathers hire a sheriff who makes everyone to check in their shootin’ irons upon arrival. Then the credits roll. What the movie does not show is the sheriff’s retirement. He hangs up his guns and the town fathers buy him an expensive watch. After the credits everyone goes back to strolling around with a six-shooter.

When president Obama announced his intention to create a world without nuclear weapons, beginning with America, the real signal to the world was that the sheriff was retiring. Hanging up his Colts. And that meant not a “world without nuclear weapons”, but a world in which every man Jack had nuclear weapons. The National Interest examines how America’s Pacific allies are planning to arm up. The article begins with the slow dawning in Asian capitals that the administration has gone fishing.

Publicly and in private discussions, Japanese and South Korean officials insist that they trust US defense commitments. But they ask revealing questions about the conditions under which the United States would act, and how it would do so. They wonder about their roles and responsibilities, as Washington presses them to assume more of the defense and deterrence burden. And they worry about the reduction of roles and numbers of nuclear weapons in US strategy and, despite Washington’s rebalance to Asia, the ability of the United States to defend them well in a fiscally constrained environment. Plainly, US disengagement is a concern.

Well at first they thought it wasn’t true but later saw it was. The article goes on to describe the possible nuclear plans of allies and examines the question of whether America ought to stop the allies from strapping on their own six-guns.

Could these concerns drive Japan and South Korea to resort to self-help and develop nuclear weapons? Both are technologically capable of going nuclear quickly, and this would be the cheapest way of increasing their indigenous military capabilities. But the real question is whether they would be willing to do so. While Japan remains allergic to the idea of crossing the nuclear threshold, there is growing public support, backed by influential elites, for manufacture of nuclear weapons in South Korea. …

What reaction, then, should they expect from Washington? There are two alternatives. One is that while unhappy, the United States would keep its alliances to maintain a favorable balance of power in East Asia….

The second alternative is that the United States would terminate its alliances. Washington would conclude that permitting a nuclear-armed Japan and South Korea to remain as allies would drive others to follow suit. It would assess that the odds of this happening in Asia are high given growing nuclear latency, complex regional dynamics, and the absence of an organization like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to hold US allies and partners together. Washington would also fear that this cascade could spill over into other regions, threatening the entire nonproliferation regime, creating instability, increasing war prospects, and ultimately eclipsing the US role as a responsible stakeholder for international order. Here, nonproliferation considerations would drive the US reaction.

Would America stop its friends from defending itself. Maybe. Past events suggest the administration is only willing to bully its friends. It’s enemies get a free pass on everything. No maybe about that. The US State Department says Russia is repeatedly violating arms control agreements which were key to ending the Cold War.

U.S. State Department officials say Russia has repeatedly violated the terms of a treaty forged by former President Ronald Reagan and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by conducting numerous flight tests of a cruise missile — but the White House is so far reluctant to take up the charges and address them with President Vladimir Putin directly.

U.S. military officials warned NATO allies in recent weeks that Russia has been testing its latest ground-launched missile, in apparent violation of the 1987 arms control agreement, The New York Times reported. The treaty has long been seen as the main reason the two nations dropped a Cold War mentality.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, but the administration has no energy for vigilance. It is almost congenitally indisposed to work or competence. But it does do speeches which only require a teleprompter and a nice suit. But speeches only work sometimes. The the president might rail Japan getting nukes because they listen, but according to sources quoted by Politico, Iran has already been given a free pass since they don’t. If you want president Obama to be powerless over you, buy a set of earplugs.

Thus Josh Gerstein at Politico quotes a US intelligence assessment saying that Iran is held back from a nuclear weapon only by its sacred word. That’s as far as they’ll agree to.

Iran’s ability to make missiles loaded with nuclear warheads now rests primarily on the “political will” of its leaders, rather than any technical constraints, according to an annual U.S. intelligence assessment presented on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

“Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas — including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors, and ballistic missiles — from which it could draw if it decided to build missile-deliverable nuclear weapons,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in written testimony submitted as he appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “These technical advancements strengthen our assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so.”

Translation: the Iranian prisoner is now securely held in an unlocked jail cell from which he surely cannot escape having given his word not to do so. That’s the administration’s containment policy. A speech and a press release.

The phrase “political will” is interesting in this context. In an interview with CNN, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Jim Sciutto that president Obama’s tough talk on Iran was for “domestic consumption”. That is to say the SOTU happy talk about Iran was meant for the low information voters who believe all that stuff about “a world without nuclear weapons”.

Reality is quite different from talk. Newsweek describes the weasel way in which the administration is secretly letting everyone do what they want so long as they maintain the appearance of control.

as the West and Iran have moved closer to a nuclear accommodation, signs are emerging that the monarchy is ready to give the world a peek at a new missile strike force of its own – which has been upgraded with Washington’s careful connivance.

According to a well-placed intelligence source, Saudi Arabia bought ballistic missiles from China in 2007 in a hitherto unreported deal that won Washington’s quiet approval on the condition that CIA technical experts could verify they were not designed to carry nuclear warheads.

Translation: you Sauids can buy sa revolver if you don’t buy the ammunition at the same time to guard against the possible escape of the prisoner languishing in the unlocked jail cell who’s given his word not to escape.  Just don’t tell the LIVs, we don’t want them to know.

Alan Dershowitz bawls out that he’s been had. What a shock it must be to discover that you’re a LIV after all.

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said Sunday that the Obama administration was naive and had possibly made a “cataclysmic error of gigantic proportions” in its deal to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for an opening up of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

“I think it could turn out to be a cataclysmic error of gigantic proportions,” Dershowitz said of the deal, which he described as “naive.”

Naive? Who’s Dershowitz calling naive? He was the one which supported an administration that double crossed him; he was the guy that trusted the man who stabbed him in the back. And now he complains he’s been shafted.

What was “naive” was to imagine that power did not abhor a vacuum; that one could safely dismantle the Pax Americana and expect things to go on as before. That you could retire the sheriff and the Clanton Brothers would remain as meek as before. What was naive was to think that by playing nice that ruthless men would go away. Everybody sing now, “I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love …”

That kind of mindset was hard to understand, it seemed so counterintuitive. But recently I got a clue. A friend in the Philippines reported that the home of a wealthy doctor who lived next door had been invaded by armed men. However the robbers found no money in the house nor anyone of consequence to kidnap, for the inmates were all out to dinner.

But the doctor on returning, brooded over the incident, because he knew they might return; he knew from other incidents that armed robbers were often driven into a frenzy of anger if they found no money the premises and would often take mindless revenge on the cashless victims.

Considering the problem he decided to withdraw a large sum from the bank the next day and stash it in the house against eventualities. “That way,” he told his wife, “if we are robbed again then the robbers will have something to steal.”

Perhaps that is the way the administration has been thinking. It’s perverse thinking but not original to history. It’s called the Danegeld. Give the Dane the gold and the Dane will go away. And that sounds good until you realize it may not work.  There is in this a remarkable reversal of roles with the administration watching too many BBC history specials and while America’s allies have been watching too many Westerns.

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The New York Times has enjoined Congress not to impose further sanctions on Iran because the administration is on the verge of a “deal”. The gist of the NYT’s argument is that after years of waiting, the chance for a diplomatic solution with Tehran is now at hand. Here is their reasoning.

Amazingly, after 34 years of mostly diplomatic silence between Iran and the United States, we are in the midst of negotiations with the potential to eliminate the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran….

under the terms of the interim agreement, the Iranians have six months to prove they are serious about this process. If they fail this test, the United States will surely act immediately to impose additional sanctions, and our international partners, understanding that we have given a negotiated approach a chance to succeed, are likely to join us.

We don’t know whether Iran can be persuaded to peacefully give up its nuclear weapons ambitions — but it is very much in our interest to give this diplomatic process every chance to succeed.

Thus we should grasp at this ‘chance for peace’ — whatever the risks — before it passes us by. There are a number of logical problems with this approach one of which might best be described by a citing an analogy.

Imagine someone is offering to buy the New York Times. The terms are that the Times hands over its assets today and the buyer has six months to prove they are serious about paying. If the buyer doesn’t pay then the Times can sue in court to repossess their building. A great deal isn’t it?

Of course it is not. It’s a terrible deal, one likely to cause more trouble than it averted; but it is precisely the kind of deal that the NYT is asking the legislature to agree to. The problem with taking Iran at its word is the general difficulty of dealing with those who have bad credit ratings. When you are dealing with someone you don’t trust or who has a record of defaulting, the only reliable method is cash on the nail. Otherwise you are bound to be taken to the cleaners.

But there is a much stronger objection to accepting a deal with Tehran largely on faith: the problem of conceding more power to Iran over the negotiating process over time. The power relationship between two parties gradually changes with the years. The question is, who is rising and who is in decline? Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under president Obama, explained how with each passing step the administration would have to up and up the ante in an interview with Hugh Hewitt.

Gates said: [Emphasis mine]

We, I think we are seeing in the Iranian’s willingness to come to the table the potential success of a strategy pursued by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama of ratcheting up the economic pressures on Iran to the point where it hurts so badly, the Iranian people, that their government is forced to come to the table or be at risk of having domestic turmoil. I think that’s happened. I think what’s really important is what happens in six months. And my view is that the administration ought to set a specific date. You know, they talk about six months. My view is, and what I would be arguing if I were in the Situation Room is okay, then the negotiations begin on whatever the date, January 25th or whatever. Exactly six months from then, the negotiations stop. Either they’re successful or they’re not, because the Iranians are perhaps the world’s best at slow rolling a negotiation. Well, it’s just, we’re close. Let’s do another month. Let’s do another two months. I think we ought to have a firm deadline. I think that while I oppose the imposition of additional sanctions right now, because I do think it would blow up this opportunity, I don’t see why there is opposition to the Congress passing sanctions that would be triggered at that six month point, so that in essence, the message to the Iranians is if there is no successful negotiations, an agreement at the end of six months, you are going to be significantly worse off than you were when these negotiations began. It’s not going to be a return to the status quo before the negotiations. And finally, from my standpoint, the only agreement that we ought to be willing to sign up to is one that rolls back the Iranian program to the point where they are no longer a nuclear weapon threshold state, a state that could go to a nuclear weapon relatively quickly. So I think the important agreement, it’s not that we began the negotiations that it’s a bad idea. I think that what people ought to be focused on is what happens at the other end of those negotiations, and what kind of an agreement we get. And a poor agreement is clearly far worse than no agreement at all, in my view.

The longer you wait the more you have to threaten. In other words, if the Iranians take the money and run, America would have to brandish really dire consequences in six months. Why let the customer take your product and risk his absconding in the belief you can hire a SWAT team to repossess your goods in a half year’s time. Is this wise policy? Or would it not have been better to charge him for it as he walked out the door? Who believes that in those six months the credibility of the Obama administration to act severely against Iran will have increased rather than decreased?

In all probability the Obama administration will be even less able to issue dire threats to Iran than it can today. Power will shifted in their favor over time with this agreement. This brings up something the New York Times misses entirely. Shifting power to Iran is destabilizing in itself.  A bad deal actually increases the risks of war.

Students of international relations have long argued that rapid shifts in relative power can lead to war. ‘The growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’ or the rise of Germany, for example, are common explanations for the Peloponnesian war and World War I, respectively.

More recently, the economic and military rise of China has led many to wonder about the likelihood of a war with its neighbors or the United States. In each case, the declining state fears that it will negotiate in a position of weakness once the balance of power has shifted, and hence it is argued, prefers fighting now.

If America is to drive an advantageous bargain now is the time. In fact the anticipation of this shift is already causing the Sunni states to arm up. Only a few days ago the Royal United Services Institute had this to say about the consequences of a deal with Iran.

The Geneva agreement envisions allowing Iran to possess a ‘mutually defined enrichment programme’, wording that represents a conditional recognition of Iran’s claimed right to enrich. If a comprehensive agreement includes Iranian enrichment to lower levels, Saudi Arabia would most likely demand exactly the same scope for its own emerging nuclear programme. Also, if the interim or a future deal confers upon Tehran a special status in the Gulf and in the wider Fertile Crescent, then it is most likely that the Kingdom would not accept it, and may pursue a regional revisionist policy to assuage its own security fears.

The deal the NYT hankers after is not some static, paradaisal state, a long-sought solution that will fix things for good. It will simply be another starting point from which, by all indications, the Sunni states will start acquiring equivalent rights to enrich uranium. The NYT makes the mistake of begging the question. They assume that all change must be for the better. They ignore the fact that up until now, both countries have not openly gone to war. The real test of the undisclosed deal is whether it will have the effect of maintaining at least that state of affairs.

And that is by no means guaranteed. The Obama administration is rapidly losing influence internationally. To use the metaphor of the movie Sunset Boulevard, if the administration is not “ready for its close-up” now it will be even less photogenic six months from today. The argument is all in favor of taking the close up now.

There is no argument that a good deal with Iran can be desirable. But can such a deal be negotiated? And if so why not throw everything into the diplomatic effort now? Taking an IOU from Tehran in the belief that a hollow agreement now can be made good by threats in the future does not look like a good deal.

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The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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THE COOLEST PAPER AIRPLANE EVER. “The 22-year-old constructed this incredible 1:60-scale replica of a Boeing 777 in his spare time, relying on photographs and engineering drawings to recreate the jet in minute detail. This attention to detail shows through in everything from the intricate landing gear to the airplane’s life-like seat cushions.”

PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EXPIRATION DATE REACHED: Labor union officials say Obama betrayed them in health-care rollout.

(Paul Mirengoff)

Everett Pyatt has a not-new plan to save the Warthog from the Air Force’s decades-old desire to rid itself of that unwelcome beast of a plane: Give it to the Army. That idea has been floated pretty much every time the Air Force has threatened to retire its A-10 air fleet. They wanted to kill the A-10 after the Cold War ended, but then the ‘Hog became the stuff of legend during the First Gulf War. It survived the axe again thanks to continued stellar performances in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So why doesn’t the Air Force want to keep such an effective plane, especially one that’s so cheap to operate? Two reasons:

• It isn’t a fast sexy fighter.

• It serves an Army function.

But the Air Force steadfastly refuses to let the Army have the ‘Hog, either. The Air Force has a legal monopoly on fixed-wing aircraft and is afraid that breaking their monopoly would put them at a disadvantage with the Army at obtaining money for future planes.

Well, OK — the Navy and Marines are allowed to have fixed-wing aircraft, too. But not if the Air Force had anything to say about it.

Fact is, the Air Force was divorced from the Army after WWII, and lives in fear of a forced reconciliation. That’s bad for the A-10 which is bad for the Army and a boon to the bad guys.

(Steven Hayward)

DON SURBER ON the seeds sown by Stalin.

WHEN YOU EAT YOUR SUPER BOWL GUACAMOLE, YOU’RE SUPPORTING GENUINE HEROES: The Avocado Uprising: Mexican growers in the world’s avocado capital chase off violent extortionists. “In November, a band of Tancítaro residents wielding wooden clubs and old hunting rifles joined forces with well-armed vigilantes from nearby towns to run off most members of the Knights Templar, a criminal gang allegedly involved in extortion, kidnapping, rape and homicide throughout the state.” The people, united, will never be defeated.

I fell down a rabbit hole today. By reading this: An Incomplete Guide to Feminist infighting. Bemused, I chased links and read manifestos and counter-manifestos for a couple of hours until the sources just began to repeat themselves. But in some respects my confusion was just beginning.

As I was falling through all these diatribes like Alice wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, one of the thoughts uppermost in my mind was Poe’s Law: “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

There was no humor down this rabbit hole. I found myself in the land beyond parody. On this evidence, I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to write a literate spoof of modern feminism that even many of its disputants wouldn’t blithely mistake for a real ideological position. And I found myself thinking of the Sokal Hoax.

Somebody, I thought, really ought to go all hermeneutics-of-quantum-gravity on these women just to see what happens. And then it hit me: maybe someone already has! It is impossible to tell how many of these women are ironists being “performative” (one of their favorite words) because all of them sound so precisely like an anti-feminist’s cruelest parody of the movement.

I mean, are they even women, really? On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Could these feminist twitter wars be an elaborate fiction accidentally generated by beer-swilling men in wife-beater T-shirts, each a master of the art of satire but utterly convinced by circumstances that everyone else in the flamewars is a sincere paragon of feminist outrage with immaculate activist credentials?

Fucked if I know. Sure, there are external checks one would apply – some of the disputants report having jobs at identifiable institutions. My point is that I can’t tell how anybody could falsify the wife-beater hypothesis going strictly on the rhetoric. That’s how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Actually, in a way it would it would be nice to think the wife-beater hypothesis is true and real feminists are off doing something healthier and more useful. Alas, I doubt this is the case; I suspect what we see here is what we get. So, under that depressing premise, what does it look like down the rabbit hole?

The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze “privilege” from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively “oppressed” blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It’s the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years – even decades – without facing a reality check.

And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there’s a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim.

While these children of privilege are filling out their victimological bingo cards…elsewhere, women are treated like chattels. Raped under color of law. Genitally mutilated. But none of this enters the charmed circle of modern American feminism. So much safer to rage at the Amerikkan phallocracy that provides them with cushy jobs writing about their outrage for audiences almost as insulated from reality as they are. Not to mention all those obliging men who will grow their food, fix their plumbing, mow their lawns, and know their place.

There were pictures. Such pictures! They all look alike, from the cutesy white chicks with hipster glasses to the black WOCs with dreadlocks. It took me a while to figure out why, but I got it eventually. It was like browsing some Renaissance painter’s gallery of fin-de-race noblemen. Such arrogance, such entitlement, all those faces suffused with a a bland and unimpeachable conviction of their own superiority and righteousness. No wonder they fight each other like cats in a sack!

I cannot do justice to the sheer, pluripotent absurdity revealed by these twitter wars; it would take the powers of a Jonathan Swift to do that. I think I may have some light to shed on how it got so hilariously you can’t-make-this-stuff-up awful, though.

Years ago, I wrote about kafkatrapping, and uttered this warning: “At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.”

I think that is almost exactly what has happened here. While I had certain varieties of feminism in mind when I wrote that, it now appears that I grossly underestimated the degree to which closure had taken hold or would do so. While I wasn’t looking, they went from incestuous to plain ridiculous.

And to return to an older theme – I think this sort of bitter involution is what eventually and inevitably happens when you marinate in left-wing duckspeak for long enough. (Clue: if you find yourself using the word “neoliberal” as non-ironically as these women do, you’re there. For utter lack of meaning outside of a dense thicket of self-referential cod-Marxist presuppositions disconnected from reality, this one has few rivals.)

Accordingly, George Orwell would have no trouble at all identifying the language of the feminist twitter wars as a form of Newspeak, designed not to convey thought but suppress it. Indeed, part of the content of the wars is that some of these women dimly sort of get this – see the whole argument over “callout culture”. But none of them can wake up enough to see that the problem is not just individual behaviors. Because to do that they’d have to face how irretrievably rotten and oppressive their entire discourse has become, and their worldview would collapse.

Ah well. This too shall pass. The university system and establishment journalism are both in the process of collapsing under their own weight. With them will go most of the ecological niches that support these precious, precious creatures in their luxury. Massive reality check a’coming. No doubt the twitter wars will continue, but in historical terms they won’t last long.

Though largely indifferent to actual science the public is obsessed with scientists; and while textbooks may warn against judging scientific truth from “authority” the public in fact does exactly that.  Truth comes from the biggest name. Once a famous scientist pronounces on a subject then it must be true. So when Stephen Hawking recently declared that Black Holes didn’t exist after decades of being famous for them the public did the natural thing. It reversed its beliefs. OK. Black Holes don’t exist.

But as Brian Koberlin notes in the Universe Today that’s an oversimplification at best. Hawking has acknowledged that Black Holes have ‘leaked’ for a long time, meaning they aren’t really “Black”. The ‘leak’ was required to reconcile two conflict mandates, one from quantum mechanics and the other from classical relativity.

On the one hand, classical relatively predicted that an inescapable Black Hole which possessed a gravitational field so large that nothing could escape from it. But on the other hand quantum mechanics decreed that information could never be destroyed. If Black Holes existed then whatever fell into them was lost forever and information was destroyed. This was called the Black Hole Information Paradox which was nothing less than a direct clash between the fundamental tenets of two foundational theories in the world of physics. So some method of escape had to be invented which observed the rules of each in order for them to both be valid.

The resolution to the problem was to posit a slow leakage due to quantum physics in which one entangled particle popped up on one side of the event horizon and its companion on the other. That allowed both relativity and quantum mechanics to call it a draw. But this notion created two problems in return.  The proposed escape mechanism required a gasket-like firewall.

it would create a firewall of high energy particles near the surface of the event horizon. This is often called the firewall paradox because according to general relativity if you happen to be near the event horizon of a black hole you shouldn’t notice anything unusual. The fundamental idea of general relativity (the principle of equivalence) requires that if you are freely falling toward near the event horizon there shouldn’t be a raging firewall of high energy particles. In his paper, Hawking proposed a solution to this paradox by proposing that black holes don’t have event horizons. Instead they have apparent horizons that don’t require a firewall to obey thermodynamics. Hence the declaration of “no more black holes” in the popular press.

But that only created worse problems, for relativity decreed there could no observable Hollywood-style firewall. Nor did it propitiate the quantum gods. The new slowly evaporating Black Hole still destroyed information. Matt Ford writing for Ars Technica put it this way.

The black hole information paradox began life, so to speak, in 1975, when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein proved that black holes were not really black, but that they emitted thermal radiation and eventually evaporated. This leads to a problem; other cosmological tenets (the no-hair theorem) suggest that the Hawking radiation that leaves a black hole should be independent of the material that goes in. This is problematic, because if one could have an initial quantum state where everything is known with exact certainty and send it into a black hole, then as the black hole evaporates and evolves, the final state of the system cannot be predicted. In this case, the best result is that a probable outcome can be computed. Here information has been lost: you knew exactly what went in, but you don’t know exactly what may come out—quantum mechanics has been violated.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder actually claims that Hawking has said nothing new so far. That is to say the problem and paradox remains unsolved. Hossenfelder says: “The actual quote is: ‘The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.’” which only means she says that the gasket doesn’t last forever.

What Hawking is saying is essentially that he believes that a matter collapse only leads to a temporary apparent horizon but not to an eternal event horizon. That is an opinion which is shared by many of his colleagues (including me) and there is nothing new about this idea whatsoever….

Having said that, Hawking’s “paper” is really just a writeup of a talk he gave last year. It’s mostly a summary of his thoughts on the black hole firewall, none of which I found very exciting or remarkable. Had this paper been posted by anybody else, nobody would have paid attention to it.

In summary, nothing has changed in our understanding of black holes due to Hawking’s paper. Move on, there’s nothing to see here.

And we have a headline without news. We still don’t know how reality does what it does, only that it does. And though we see stuff happening we can’t figure out how it works.

That doesn’t mean we never will. Ethan Siegel notes that there are mathematical possibilities (some developed by Sabine Hossenfelder) which allow the problem of the firewall to be sidestepped and which taken together suggest “there is no firewall and that the resolution to the firewall paradox is that the first assumption, that Hawking radiation is in a pure state [entangled in a particular way], is the one that’s flawed.”

Pardoxes hold a special place in human knowledge. They are markers not just for the things we do not know but for problems we do not know how to think about. As BG Sidharth once observed, “the greatest breakthroughs in our concepts of physics, and science in general, have been counterintuitive.”  Progress occurs when we learn how to think about a problem. And in that respect it is the unsolved problem, the outlier, rather than in the well trodden mean where new knowledge is to be found.

In this age of “settled science” and “scientific consensus” is often important to remember that in the end there’s the Truth and there’s us. And we learn from Truth — and not from men. Then for better or for worse, however crazy it may seem, the Truth shall make us free.

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Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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That’s how many the average American unwittingly commits, every day of the week.

This video is from last year, but it’s new to me — and certainly hasn’t lost any of it timeliness. Not a bad way to kill some time (and some Tums) waiting for the game to start.

HOW WASHINGTON WORKS: Congressman Michael ‘I will break you in half’ Grimm is literally indebted to K Street giant Patton Boggs.

Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., recently famous for threatening violence against a reporter, is under scrutiny for campaign finance matters. His recent campaign finance filings show he owes more than $416,000 in legal fees to a law firm (h/t Dave Levinthal). That firm happens to be K Street kingpin Patton Boggs.

Grimm sits on the Financial Services Committee. The firm to which he is indebted represents Citigroup, Visa, AIG, Prudential, Goldman Sachs, and many others under his committee’s jurisdiction.

I’m sure he’s totally impartial.

WORK: Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? And who is the audience for this dictum?

DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace. . . . If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

Well, there’s work, and then there’s work. Work need not be self-actualizing to be valuable, to the worker and to others. But even when you love your work as much as I love mine, there are days when you’d really rather just stay in bed.

YA THINK? Yes Rep. Pelosi, Congress has a revolving door.

“The revolving door is not so much Congress as the executive branch.”

That statement comes from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., during her Thursday night appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The declaration may seem counterintuitive, given that Pelosi’s office is one of the largest incubators of revolving door talent on Capitol Hill. According to data from Open Secrets at least 28 current and former Pelosi staffers have represented (or currently represent) special interests.

During her appearance, Stewart pressed the congresswoman on the obstacles facing small IT contractors who wanted to compete for bids working on the Affordable Care Act’s website. Stewart questioned whether an overly burdensome procurement process was allowed to continue because it favored big government contractors with the resources to successfully navigate the regulations.

When Stewart broached the issue that corporations may have too much influence on members of Congress, Pelosi was apparently unaware that one of her former staffers now works for Boeing. “I don’t know that, well… who?”

“Is it possible that the people within the system don’t have enough distance from it to see that people in congressional offices end up going and becoming lobbyists in corporations, these corporations lobby to get all kinds of arcane things put in to the regulation… can our Congress, maybe, not see the corruption inherent in that?”

Just another argument for my revolving-door surtax proposal. And, clearly, Rep. Pelosi won’t mind it applying to Congress, since there’s so little of that sort of thing going on there, anyway. . . .

Mark Stambler was making award-winning baguette in his Los Angeles home. But then the health department “descended like a ton of bricks on the two stores that were selling my bread… they could no longer sell my bread.” Then they showed up at his house and shut him down. Here’s what happened next:

That’s when he “became an activist,” Stambler said in an email interview.

He started researching other states’ cottage food laws, which allow homemade food to be sold. To qualify as a cottage food, it must be designated by the state as “non-potentially hazardous,” meaning it has a low risk of spreading bacteria.

Out of the blue, he got a call from his Assemblyman, Mike Gatto, who read The Los Angeles Times profile, and wanted to help him and other small businesses.

Stambler helped Assemblyman Gatto draft the California Homemade Food Act (AB 1616) to legalize cottage food. AB 1616 was overwhelmingly popular with lawmakers, passing the California State Assembly 60 to 16 and unanimously passing the state Senate in August 2012. Upon signing the bill, Gov. Jerry Brown praised AB 1616 as a way to “make it easier for people to do business in California.”

In January 2013, just a few days after the law went into effect, Stambler became the first person in Los Angeles County to sell homemade food legally.

Stories like this one, especially coming out of the Once-Golden State, give a glimmer of hope, don’t they?