kenlacrosse

SMART DIPLOMACY: The American-Saudi alliance is in danger of collapsing. “The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is by far the largest threat to both Saudi and American interests in the Middle East now, yet the Obama administration is buddying up with Vladimir Putin on Syria and allowing itself to be suckered by the Iranian regime’s new president Hassan Rouhani.”

UPDATE: Quietly, Israel and the Gulf States Draw Closer Together. “Seeing a hopelessly naive America, Jews and Arabs are finding common ground to face the Iranian menace.” They told me Obama would bring Jews and Arabs together via his unique approach to diplomacy. And they were right!

A quick animated look on the evolution of western dance music, a mixture and blend of various styles and cultures over time.

To make it easier to trace the threads of music history, we’ve created an interactive map detailing the evolution of western dance music over the last 100 years. The map shows the time and place where each of the music styles were born and which blend of genres influenced the next.

There's a cartogram in the background and lines connect countries and styles. It reminds me of those dance step charts with the feet on them.

THIS SHOULD PROVE POPULAR: Rand Paul pushes constitutional amendment on Congress. “The Kentucky freshman Republican has introduced a constitutional amendment that would preclude senators and congressmen from passing laws that don’t apply equally to U.S. citizens and Congress, the executive branch and the Supreme Court. The amendment is aimed squarely at Obamacare provisions specific to members of Congress and their staffs that became a central point of contention during the government shutdown.”

L.A. TIMES: Is It Time To End The War On Saturated Fat?

The British Medical Journal has issued a clarion call to all who want to ward off heart disease: Forget the statins and bring back the bacon (or at least the full-fat yogurt). Saturated fat is not the widow-maker it’s been made out to be, writes British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in a stinging “Observations” column in the BMJ: The more likely culprits are empty carbs and added sugar.

Virtually all the truths about preventing heart attacks that physicians and patients have held dear for more than a generation are wrong and need to be abandoned, Malhotra writes. He musters a passel of recent research that suggests that the “obsession” with lowering a patients’ total cholesterol with statins, and a public health message that has made all sources of saturated fat verboten to the health-conscious, have failed to reduce heart disease.

Indeed, he writes, they have set off market forces that have put people at greater risk.

This will all be familiar to readers of Gary Taubes, of course.

No matter how often denied, the differences are real.

JAMES TARANTO: ‘The Site Was Very Easy to Use:’ The Obama administration draws a red line and defies reality to intrude.

The Obama administration is even deeper in denial about the ObamaCare fiasco than the president’s shockingly bewildered speech yesterday indicated. Witness the new ad touting HealthCare.gov, the nonfunctioning website (don’t worry, they put it on YouTube). “The site was very easy to use,” declares Deborah Lielasus, a self-employed quinquagenarian New Hampshire woman, who, according to the YouTube blurb, “will save hundreds of dollars each month” and “has better coverage, lower deductibles, and lower co-pays.”

Did she really find the site “very easy to use”? We suppose this is subjective, and maybe she has preternatural patience or is some kind of computer savant. But National Review’s Sterling Beard managed to track her down, and she “said it actually took her three days to enroll.” The ad would be deceptive if it weren’t so unbelievable to begin with.

There’s another problem here: Lielasus is purportedly getting a free lunch: better coverage with lower premiums, deductibles and copayments than someone with her risk profile would be able to negotiate absent price controls. But people can get a free lunch only if other people pick up the tab. The technical term for those other people is “suckers.” In the case of ObamaCare the suckers are young and healthy people who normally would be cheaper to insure.

Another ObamaCare ad suggests that they’ve found at least one sucker. Meet Daniel McNaughton, 22, a Florida college student who was able to buy insurance from the federal exchange.

According to NR’s Beard, however, McNaughton is not a typical 22-year-old. He has served as “the webmaster of his local Democratic party,” as “the chairman of the Young Democrats of Lee County and as a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention.” In other words, he has a political motivation to participate in ObamaCare. If he’s a sucker, he’s like the sucker who joins a religious cult and gives it all his money.

But it turns out he isn’t a sucker after all, for his lunch is, if not free, at least highly discounted. He says in the ad: “Getting coverage this good at this price, I’m thrilled.” Beard reports McNaughton is receiving a $200-a-month subsidy from taxpayers on a $270 insurance plan. His premium may be enough to balance out some older person’s price-controlled one, but it’s paid for in part with money borrowed from the Chinese.

It’s Potemkin villages all the way down.

There’s the scary headline. The details are worse:

Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.

More people in Florida alone have been dumped onto the exchanges, than have managed to even just create an user name at Healthcare.gov.

THIS SEEMS RIGHT TO ME: Third Circuit Requires Warrant for GPS Monitoring and Limits Good-Faith Exception in United States v. Katzin. Also, I think that to the extent that law enforcement gets a “good faith” exception for breaking the law, so should the rest of us.

NARRATIVE: Unlike Halliburton in the Bush 43 Era, No-Bid Nature of CGI’s Obamacare Contract Is a Media-Kept Secret.

(John Hinderaker)

Washington is abuzz tonight with talk of delaying Obamacare’s individual mandate. The Obamacare launch has been such a flop that Democratic Senators who are up for re-election next year are supporting the proposal. How fast the worm has turned! Two weeks ago, delaying the mandate was a wacko bird idea promoted by Republican anarchists and traitors. Today, it is advocated by the likes of Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Pryor. Schadenfreude? Absolutely: go ahead and enjoy it.

The movement to delay the individual mandate to buy health insurance raises a more fundamental question: what mandate? Under Obamacare, individuals are required to have health insurance. If they are not part of a group plan, they are supposed to purchase individual insurance through one of the exchanges. If they fail to do so, they have to pay a tax, or a penalty, or whatever it is. This tax/penalty was a major focus of the Supreme Court’s decision that narrowly upheld the ACA. These days, many commentators are advising healthy young people to forget about buying expensive Obamacare insurance, which is generally a bad investment for them, and instead go ahead and pay the penalty.

But they don’t have to pay the penalty. The mandate is a sham, and always has been. Theoretically, someone who chooses to be uninsured owes the government money, but the government is prohibited by the ACA from trying to collect it. What kind of a debt is it that can’t be collected?

The Joint Tax Committee prepared a summary of Obamacare that includes this discussion of the mandate:

The penalty applies to any period the individual does not maintain minimum essential coverage and is determined monthly. The penalty is assessed through the Code and accounted for as an additional amount of Federal tax owed. However, it is not subject to the enforcement provisions of subtitle F of the Code. The use of liens and seizures otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty. Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the Code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner.

As I understand it, the only way the IRS can possibly collect the penalty is by withholding your tax refund. No problem: if you arrange your taxes so that you don’t overpay, the penalty can never be collected from you.

Which is to say that there is no penalty for failing to comply with the Obamacare “mandate.” Many commentators have pointed this out, including us. Oddly, however, some observers who should know better continue to tell young people they should pay the penalty and forgo expensive insurance. No: young people, if they want to follow their self-interest, should forgo expensive insurance and NOT pay the penalty, because it can never be collected from them.

This is one of the reasons why many analysts say that Obamacare was designed to fail, that it is a house of cards that was always meant to collapse. Without any way to force healthy young people into the system to subsidize the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, the Obamacare system is actuarially doomed. Either it is repealed; or insurance companies go bankrupt or refuse to participate further; or socialized medicine is achieved via the back door, i.e., taxpayers subsidize pretty much everyone so that the government inevitably takes control. Barack Obama is on video explaining that this is the real purpose of Obamacare; if you search our archives, you should find it.

Be that as it may, one thing is certain: there is no penalty for failure to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate. If there is no penalty, there is no mandate. Which lends an other-worldly aura to the current discussion of delaying the effective date of the mandate.

GENERATIONAL THEFT: How Washington Really Redistributes Income.

Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He’s a member of the 1%—make that the 0.001%—one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don’t hear out of Washington. It’s how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller’s generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.

“I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, ” his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft. Harlem Children’s Zone President Geoffrey Canada and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh have joined him at stops along the tour.

Mr. Druckenmiller describes the reaction of students: “The biggest question I got was, ‘How do we start a movement?’ And my answer was ‘I’m a 60-year-old washed-up money manager. I don’t know how to start a movement. That’s your job. But we did it in Vietnam without Twitter and without Facebook and without any social media. That’s your job.’ But the enthusiasm—they get it.”

Even at Berkeley, he says, “they got it. There is tremendous energy in the room and of course they understand it. I’d say it’s a combination of appalled but motivated. That’s the response I’ve been getting, and it’s been overwhelming.”

They should be appalled. But be warned: “This president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, ‘I won’t negotiate with a gun at my head.’ OK, you’ve been president for five years.”

GENTRY LIBERALISM: Well-Heeled in the Windy City: Rahm Emanuel splurges on amenities for the elite, while poor and middle-class Chicagoans suffer.

JOEL KOTKIN: Stuck At The Bottom.

Declining prospects for upward mobility, and the simultaneous social inequality, are the existential issues of our time. The percentage of adults who believe things will be better for their kids is at its lowest point in 30 years, with a majority now saying upward mobility for the next generation is not likely. The kids, God bless them, are still far more optimistic.

Despite President Obama’s occasional class-warfare rhetoric, this gap has widened significantly under his watch; the top 1 percent of earners garnered more than 90 percent of the income growth in his first two years, compared with 65 percent under George W. Bush. But the problem is more extensive than one or two administrations. Most Americans’ incomes have stagnated for almost a quarter century. . . .

This growing inequality, with its racial connotations, is fundamentally socially unsustainable. Yet how to restart upward mobility remains a difficult proposition. Progressives might shout loudest about inequality, but their economic policies have failed to produce either upward mobility or greater equality.

Indeed, under the current liberal regime, the prospects for the poor and working class have decreased markedly while the wealthy, often villainized by the administration, have luxuriated. During much of the tenure of the first black president, the gap between Anglo incomes on the one side and those of blacks and Hispanics has widened, doubling since the Great Recession.

Indeed, racial economic disparities are mostly unchanged or are growing. The black unemployment rate remains more than double the white jobless rate and reaches 40 percent among black youth.

A debate is needed now about what policies best promote upward mobility. Some combination of encouraging broader-based economic growth and nurturing fundamental values of education, family and social engagement arguably offers the best approach. It is a message likely neither political party particularly wants to hear, but it’s one they need to acknowledge and confront.

Well, I’ve offered my plan already.

MICKEY KAUS: FORGET THE SHUTDOWN THEATER. Obamacare is in Crisis Now. Right Now. “It’s time to panic. Now. Why? Because the exchanges are the way to sign up young, healthy people and prevent the fabled “death spiral,” in which only older, sicker people sign up for insurance, causing rates to rise and healthier people to drop out, causing rates to rise even more, etc. Young people won’t make the effort to look up insurance companies on their own when they don’t really care that much about getting insurance anyway. They won’t try 50 times to use a balky web site.”

Plus, the whole enterprise just seems lame.

IT’S BECOME A RACKET: Richard Kahlenberg: The Terrible Fall of the Civil Rights Movement.

According to a new study, high long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid content in blood may lower the risk of small brain infarcts and other brain abnormalities in the elderly.

So, two weeks in, Covered California is piling on the statistics, releasing on Tuesday a flurry of figures: number of unique visitors to its website since Oct. 1, number of calls to its call centers, number of navigators certified and number of navigators not certified. But one number was missing: how many people have completed applications for coverage. After week one, that number was 16,311. Who knows what it is now? Now, you can call me cranky, curmudgeonly, difficult or undiplomatic -- many…

William Galston, writing in the Wall Street Journal warns that the institutional Republican Party — the political equivalent of the Washington Generals — may have lost its  audience after the longest losing streak in history.   A large part of the GOP base is walking out — led by an “aroused, angry and above all fearful [Jacksonian America] in full revolt against a new elite”. They’re no longer entertained, no longer spellbound by suspense after finally being convinced that the Washington General’s secret job is to lose every exhibition match against the Democratic Party Hokum Globetrotters.

Galston has impeccable liberal credentials. “A former policy advisor to President Clinton … his current research focuses on … the implications of political polarization”, he should be celebrating the crackup of the Republican Party. But instead he is worried because the Mighty Wurlitzer is broken. Galston writes, “it’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.”

Translation: who’s going to keep the gravy train running if people stop making gravy? His immediate concern is that “defeating” John Boehner in the showdown over Obamacare may have put consensus out of reach. ‘Persuading’ the GOP establishment to turn on its base destroyed the mechanism the establishment used to bring skeptical parts of the electorate into the fold. Those skeptics are now out the door, having finally figured out the game is fixed.

This is more than a columnist’s speculation. Stan Greenberg, a Democratic survey researcher whose focus groups with Macomb County Reagan Democrats in Michigan transformed political discourse in the 1980s, has recently released a similar study of the tea party. Supporters of the tea party, he finds, see President Obama as anti-Christian, and the president’s expansive use of executive authority evokes charges of “tyranny.” Mr. Obama, they believe, is pursuing a conscious strategy of building political support by increasing Americans’ dependence on government. A vast expansion of food stamps and disability programs and the push for immigration reform are key steps down that road.

But ObamaCare is the tipping point, the tea party believes. Unless the law is defunded, the land of limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility will be gone forever, and the new America, dominated by dependent minorities who assert their “rights” without accepting their responsibilities, will have no place for people like them.

For the tea party, ObamaCare is much more than a policy dispute; it is an existential struggle.

Galston is running ahead to warn his bretheren about the new threat, the better to defeat them. He can see the torches and pitchforks in the distance coming closer and closer. Nor is he alone in noticing the trend. Gallup reports that “60% of Americans say the Democratic and Republicans parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed. That is the highest Gallup has measured in the 10-year history of this question. A new low of 26% believe the two major parties adequately represent Americans.”

The results are consistent with Gallup’s finding of more negative opinions of both parties since the shutdown began, including a new low favorable rating for the Republican Party, and Americans’ widespread dissatisfaction with the way the nation is being governed.

The prior highs in perceived need for a third party came in August 2010, shortly before that year’s midterm elections, when Americans were dissatisfied with government and the Tea Party movement was emerging as a political force; and in 2007, when the newly elected Democratic congressional majority was clashing with then-President George W. Bush.

Taken together they suggest that the old consensus model may be collapsing. Why then should only the conservatives be in revolt? For at the heart of the crisis is money. The system of hitting up The Man in order to buy votes from a captive electorate dependent on the federal government,  so successful during the postwar boom, has finally stopped working.

The very issues over which the shutdown was bitterly fought underscore this. The establishment “won” not because it was rich and powerful but because it was so poor it resorted to hair-pulling, eye-gouging and and ear-biting. The elite can only continue to sustain itself by borrowing.  That was what the crisis was about, borrowing. Obama’s basic demand was simple: let me borrow and borrow without limit. His ‘victory’, if so it can be called, is the victory of a bankrupt who has compelled his relatives to mortgage the farm so he can return to his losing streak at the casino.

But the assumption that Third Party must only come from conservative ranks bears closer examination. For the Democrats need money too.  In fact they need it more than anyone else, a fact underscored by their obsession to lift every limit on their credit cards.  The truth is they are only one step ahead of disaster; for if once the EBT system stops working, even momentarily,  there is a drastic disturbance in the force.

Nor is this surprising. It has been argued and proved by natural disasters that the entire fabric of civilization is but nine meals from anarchy. After 3 days without food most people are willing to do anything to anybody to get a meal. The hard reality is that the current deficit system will inexorably create a situation when the grub literally runs out.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s argued that slavery should be abolished because it was a money loser. “The colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and richer than those in which slavery flourished”. That fading system was not only bad, but bad for business. Similarly it can be said wide sections of the Democratic Party have an interest in rising against The Plantation in order to survive.

In the same way that Tocqueville maintained that slavery could be condemned “in the name of the master”, so it can be said that the members of Democratic Party should also rise in the ‘name of their pensions, jobs and other expected benefits’. Without reform those ‘gains’ are toast. Lincoln Steffens once said of Soviet Russia, “I have seen the future and it works.” People with pensions should visit Detroit. That is the future and it doesn’t work.

Galston’s argues that the conservative insurgency is rooted in some kind of atavism; that it arises from a nostalgic hankering after an America long past in the face of new demography. Nothing could be further from the truth. The hell with demography. People would be just fine with changes in demography if only times were good. When times are bad homogeneity is irrelevant. Rats of the exact same breed will fight to the death over the last piece of cheese.

It’s the cheese that matters. The conservative insurgency is rooted in a lack of money. And so will the coming liberal one. The unrest is not driven by a desire to return to the past. On the contrary it is propelled almost entirely by the growing belief that there is no future.

---

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
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DECOLONIZATION CAME TOO SOON:

Facing sectarian violence and a collapsing state, the Central African Republic (CAR) is soliciting intervention from its former colonial master. In March, a coup led by the Muslim Seleka rebel group removed President François Bozizé from office. Since then, the predominately Christian country has seen intense, armed conflict between Muslim rebels and Christian militias. With more than 440,000 displaced, the people of CAR are calling on France to step in and calm the situation down. . . .

The situation in CAR is one example of a storyline that is repeating itself in nations across Africa. The Christian-Muslim divide is generating economic and security breakdown, leading to calls for French intervention in a region where they were once reviled.

The US and France are sometimes unlikely partners, and here they share common concerns for the security situation across Africa. Though many of the issues tormenting the region aren’t religious in origin, local Muslim groups can easily be infiltrated by internationally connected and well-funded jihadis. This can quickly turn a local spat into a headache for everyone concerned about the phenomenon we are resolutely not calling the global war on terror.

And even without the Islamic angle, you’ve got things like Zimbabweans nostalgic for Rhodesia and Ian Smith, when at least they had jobs, food, and a reasonable degree of safety.

John Kerry could not be reached for comment.

More seriously, it’s nice to see America catch up to us here at Casa Verde, where salsa supplanted ketchup a quarter century ago.

Conrad Black is on fire at NRO today:

Respect for “the law of the land” is almost never how the law actually works in the U.S. The legal cartel has an unimpoverishable ability to drag things out forever; there are always appeals and there is always a window to attack targets in prosecutions again. People, guilty and innocent, sit on Death Row for decades. Over 4,000 laws and regulations with serious sanctions are adopted every year in the U.S., and everybody is regularly committing some infraction of something. But this sort of prim, moralistic finality – “the day in court is over, the verdict is in” — is especially irritating coming from legislators who spend their lives creating more herniating masses of official authority to assist their colleagues in the practice of the law in the extraction of their comfortable livings. And it is terribly annoying when this self-righteousness comes from Democrats, the party complicit in the skulduggery that enabled the Affordable Care Act to be passed in the first place.

Read the whole thing, ye mighty, and despair.

Robert Hahn and Peter Passell for the LA Times:

The Republicans’ obsession with Obamacare has been variously described as a tactical ploy to preserve the semblance of unity in a divided party or as a fundraising magnet to raise money from the sort of folks who think President Obama is a reincarnation of Lenin. It may be either (or both). But the idea of closing down the government, and even threatening to precipitate a global credit crisis, over the healthcare law has been widely written off as myopia on the part of the live-free-or-die crowd.

We’re not so sure. Focusing on Obamacare in general, and mandatory coverage in particular, could prove a plausible strategy for broadening the anti-Obama coalition to include voters in their 20s and 30s by bringing attention to what economists call the “cross-subsidy” inherent in any insurance system based on mandatory coverage. And, with hindsight, it may yet be seen as the opening salvo in a generational war, one fed by the reality that older Americans are a rapidly growing burden on younger workers, who can ill afford it.

In Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, there was a brief mention that future Earth passed a law that everyone reaching the age of 75 became legally dead. Their wills went into effect, their benefits stopped, you could even kill them for fun and not be charged with a crime. This followed a period known as “the Crazy Years.”

I’m pretty sure we’re in them now.

It’s getting more expensive — much more expensive — to eat in China and India:

Consumer prices in China rose 3.1 percent last month as food costs advanced the most since May 2012, statistics bureau figures showed today in Beijing, while India’s Commerce Ministry said inflation unexpectedly accelerated to a seven-month high. Both gauges increased more than economists had estimated.

“In both countries, in recent months, food seems to be the primary driver of the increase in inflation,” said Robert Prior-Wandesforde, a Singapore-based economist at Credit Suisse Group AG, who added that it’s “not the ideal combination” when prices accelerate as growth slows. “It complicates the life of the policy makers.”

Maybe if we stopped filling our gas tanks with food…

Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend.

Nihilumbra ($2.99 Universal, $8.99 Mac) is a story based puzzle game where you play the part of odd little creature that just wants to be free of The Void.

The story starts out with the strange little oddity you play being born into a strange world. Being a creature of what is known as The Void, it was not thought possible to escape this alternate world. Be that as it may, escape came natural to you and into the real world the adventure begins. You soon learn that gaining your freedom and keeping it are two entirely different things. As soon as you escape into the real world, an army of various creatures from The Void are sent out to capture you and bring you back. Thus begins your life, constantly on the run from The Void.

To start out, moving around is accomplished with a right and left controls and a button to jump with. You can also choose to use a tilt based control to move your way through each of the different worlds you encounter. Along the way, you begin to face various obstacles that prevent you from escaping The Void. Sometimes you need to master jumping from one platform to another, while others you must find a way around the obstruction that blocks your way. When a new type of challenge is presented to you, the game will hint at a solution. Later on when that particular skill is need once again, the stakes are much higher and the challenge is more difficult.

There are five different worlds that you escape into as you run from The Void. Each world has a different color to offer you. These colors become important as they unlock special abilities that you use to overcome the obstacles in the game. You use each color to paint the various surfaces in your surroundings. Once painted, the surface takes on a unique ability. Blue, which is acquired from a flower on the frozen mountain top, will turn the surface to ice. This makes you move faster and thus able to achieve longer jumps. You can even use the edge of an icy cliff to send your enemies falling.

The color you start out with, purple, allows you to erase any of the other colors you paint on each surface. This corrects a situations where you made a surface slippery when you really meant to make it sticky. With each new world you find another flower and a new color. Each color has its own ability. You never lose the colors you collect, and often times you will need to paint with more than one color to get through the obstacles that stand before you. The enemies that you face from The Void vary with each level as well. Some chase you while others will just block your way. Let them touch you and you will be sent back to The Void. There are various save points along the way in the form of lights you find in trees and bushes. Once you pass each light, you will start over again from that point.

At the end of each level is a timed series of puzzles you must overtake. From the left side of the screen The Void comes tumbling after you. You can never get more than one screen ahead of it. This makes evaluating the upcoming obstacle somewhat challenging. You must make a split decision to jump up to a higher platform, or jump down to a lower platform to run away. What may not be obvious is which of the two directions is blocked on the next screen. Going back to choose the other route is not always an option, as The Void is constantly pushing its way towards you.

The soundtrack is a perfect match for the overall eeriness of the game. There is an ongoing narrative in the form of textual messages that is The Void speaking to you, taunting you, trying to wear you down. The opposite of a self-help audio recording. If you feel that you have the self-esteem it takes to overcome such a constant antagonist, then use your free time and try to escape The Void this weekend.

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Two great comments under yesterday’s post asking, “Who Broke Healthcare.gov?” The first one comes from longtime VP reader, Mr. Lion:

The last major network and application rollout I did cost the company I did it for about 100k. It took me, working alone, about three months to roll out. It routinely handled millions of fairly expensive (CPU wise) transactions, not just hits, per day. It was a mission critical setup, the outage of which would have cost the company millions in advertising revenue per day.

Never had a single issue.

That’s what happens when a competent manager hires a competent consultant. E.g. the exact polar opposite of everything government.

It’s interesting to note that not all that long ago, when we were cranking out a few hundred airplanes per day to go blow up Europe, that’s exactly how the War Dept. worked.

Peacetime military procurement always takes too long and costs too much. Describing peacetime civilian procurement requires swear words so vile they haven’t been invented yet. Which brings us to Greg Hill:

Holy. Sh*t.

I just downloaded the javascript file you’re pointing to. It’s over 500k in size! And that’s just one file. Apparently there are dozens. They’re being downloaded separately, rather than in one, compressed file.

And I can’t even begin to figure out what the f*ck they’re trying to accomplish. There doesn’t appear to be any AJAX employed to streamline the initial download and push some of the optional data to a background thread. (yes, that would increase the number of calls to the server, but it also reduces the size of the initial download, and prevents downloading data that is not necessary for a particular customer)

And here’s something even more interesting, in a “look at the train wreck mommy!” kinda way–the url protocol is https. That’s supposed to be secure. If they had their sh*t together, we shouldn’t be able to see *anything* at https://www.healthcare.gov/ (except for a login page) without logging in first. Now that’s not, obviously, something that is deal breaker for functionality. And if the rest of the site were actually, you know, WORKING, I’d shrug it off as a “fix it with rev2.” But the fact that it’s open is definitely not a “good” practice.

Jeebus. This just gets worse and worse.

I’d say “unbelievable.” But that’s just not the case anymore, is it?

The promises we’re hearing from ObamaCare apologists is that every major website rollout sucks, and that they’ll get the kinks ironed out in a few weeks, or at worst in a couple months. But if Messrs Lion and Hill are correct, we’re looking at an untangle-able clusterfudge of truly federal proportions.

Can anyone else in IT please take a look and help enlighten us?

Now that Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s 28-year sentence is established fact, a local TV station’s documentary video of his rise and fall provides a fascinating look back, not simply at the man, but at the system. Kilpatrick’s career arc has a unnerving familiarity, first of all in the contrast between his public high mindedness and the reality of private crooked behavior.

The one is distilled by the scenes in which the young, burly mayor frankly promises the audience to lift them up. You can feel the hope; you can taste the expecation in response. It is in his touching remarks about the sanctity of his home, the celebration of the high moral character of his father; or in his pledges of the inviolability of his marriage. There is in those inspiring clips a glimpse of all we want him — and all we want ourselves — to be.

This stands in marked contrast to the later scenes when we watch Kilpatrick deny the tawdry crimes he was later to apologize for in the next video sequence.  It comes through in the on-camera complaints by black businessmen who heard Kwame’s supposedly noble father declare that he didn’t need them any more after taking their contributions since “now that we won we can get all the white money we want.”

Through this invidious parade of contrasts there appears not an iota of remorse; not the shadow of irony. Even as Kilpatrick is led from office he gamely says “you’re setting me up for a comeback”; he is still the king of the hill, still the prince of summer and sunlight, untouched by the shadow of anything he might have said or done.

Only occasionally does reality burn through, as when one of Kilpatrick’s bodyguards shoves a nosy newspaperman against a wall or when his pal Bobby Ferguson emerges from his office to menace, with fake solicitude, a news camera crew working outside.

But the Kilpatrick saga is familiar in yet another sense. It’s like a fictional mini-series. All the props are there: the lavish hotel stays, the cars, clothes, the mistress, even the stripper party at the mayor’s mansion complete with the mysterious demise of one of the dancers who witnessed the proceedings.

There’s even a philosophical look back by a journalist, like a kind of Nick Carraway, invoking hope as the excuse of his investigative blindness. “Like many Detroit journalists, I counted myself for some years among the seduced. I’m not sure I ever trusted Kilpatrick, but I know I wanted to.”

This was not for want of exposure to skeptics.

There was the retired Detroit cop who remembered encountering Kilpatrick and his pals when they were teenagers, and dismissed my theory that Kilpatrick had matured with the observation: “Once a punk, always a punk.”

There was the restaurateur who bristled every time Kilpatrick’s wife led her entourage into his establishment, partook regally of his hospitality, and left with no thought of paying the check, much less tipping the staff.

And there was the CEO whose wife refused to speak to him after he agreed to underwrite the eleventh-hour advertising blitz that allowed Kilpatrick to snatch his 2005 re-election from the jaws of a near-certain defeat. “How,” my friend’s spouse demanded, “could you be so stupid?”

Well, because, like the journalist said. “I wanted to”. The “I did it for Love” line is the most famous of Famous Last Words. That’s when the Audacity of Hope becomes the Blinkers of Crime.

These dramatic elements make the story of Kilpatrick’s fall less about one man than a parable about politics. This is evident in the reader comments to Kilpatrick’s 28-year sentence. ‘Why so harsh?’ they lament.  ’There are others — many others — out there’.  That is the general tenor. And they’d be factually correct.

Sure there are others. Most reform campaigns are a process of simply shoveling the s**t against the tide. To invert the angler’s lament, the Detroit Mayor is the one that didn’t get away. You should see the ones that did, the ones still in the pond.

Elmer Gantry, Jay Gatsby, Vito Corleone and Willie Stark are probably more representative of the human condition than Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein or Mother Theresa. I’m not sure that I’ve met an actual saint yet but I am pretty sure I know a fair number of grifters. The founders may have known this and in their wisdom designed a government for sinners.

They understood that human nature being what it was, the only way to limit the damage of bad government and prevent tyranny was to limit the scope of government itself and impose upon it a system of checks and balances. That and not allegiance to individual politicians and still less loyalty to the GOP or the Democrats, is the best guaranty, not of Good Government, but against Bad Government.

For man is a piece of work. Many are, anyway.

Perhaps we ought, unlike the Detroit journalist, seek not to believe, but on the contrary to disbelieve. We should force ourselves not to trust in anything other than statistical penchant of the common herd to follow its self interest. We can count on people to look out for Number One. Your mileage thereafter may vary.

Hope is a dangerous commodity when applied to government. There is in Hope a kind of temptation to avert our sight from reality, to believe in Unicorns, websites you can only reach by dialing a phone number or a world without nuclear weapons. There was once a time when we knew better than to trust people who promised to look after us. Long ago we knew we were fallen and remembered what the angel with the flaming sword once said about Adam, “once a punk, always a punk.”

That didn’t mean all was lost. But it definitely meant we had to go back by another way. Lincoln once said, ”you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” To believe in that statistical promise is to trust somehow in the workings of God, even if we don’t believe He exists.

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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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(Scott Johnson)

The featured article in the new issue of the Weekly Standard is Christopher Conover’s “Health reform breaks bad.” Conover methodically addresses what I have been calling the lies of Obamacare. Conover addresses these foundational lies as five deceptions:

Deception #1: universal coverage

Deception #2: no new taxes on the middle class

Deception #3: annual premium savings of $2,500

Deception #4: no increase in the deficit

Deception #5: you can keep your plan if you like it

Conover exposes these “deceptions” as blatant falsehoods. In their own way the willfulness and magnitude of the falsehoods with which Obama sold Obamacare are shocking. We’ve become inured to it, but it is true.

This is my refrain: If only we had a free press, Obamacare would be a bloody, unrelenting scandal, like Abu Ghraib, or Watergate. As it is, it is only business as usual for liberals and liberalism.

Kathleen Sebelius went on The Daily Show and got grilled by Jon Stewart:

The segment became more contentious as Stewart turned to the subject of the individual mandate, specifically the fact that while many businesses were given a one-year delay to comply with the law, individuals were not.

“If I’m an individual that doesn’t want this, it would be hard for me to look at a big business getting a waiver,” Stewart said. “I would feel like you are favoring big business because they lobbied you … but you’re not allowing individuals that same courtesy.”

Sebelius denied that was the case, but danced around answering the question directly, sticking instead to talking points.

After pressing her further on the issue to no avail, a somewhat exasperated Stewart finally smiled and asked, “Am I a stupid man?”

Later, as he threw to commercial, Stewart said he still was “not sure why individuals can’t delay” and asked the secretary if he could keep asking her that same question when they returned.

It’s easy to laugh at 20somethings who say they get their news from Stewart, but you have to wonder if maybe they don’t have the right idea.

Has anyone from the MSM been so tough and direct with Sebelius?

Anyone?

One of those worlds is ObamaCare. The other world is a little place we like to call reality. Amy Otto explains:

Affordable — they keep using that word.

And of course Amy discovered that her less-affordable plan is even less less affordable, because in addition to higher premiums, it also comes with higher copays and a higher deductible.

Go read the whole thing, because Amy has done some impressive, if distressing, research on just how badly we’ve been screwed.

Is any of this supposed to surprise us? Details from Maryland’s ObamaCare exchange:

Should you decide to apply for health coverage through Maryland Health Connection, the information you supply in your application will be used to determine whether you are eligible for health and dental coverage offered through Maryland Health Connection and for insurance affordability programs. It also may be used to assist you in making a payment for the insurance plan you select, and for related automated reminders or other activities permitted by law. We will preserve the privacy of personal records and protect confidential or privileged information in full accordance with federal and State law. We will not sell your information to others. Any information that you provide to us in your application will be used only to carry out the functions of Maryland Health Connection. The only exception to this policy is that we may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities.

Which authorities? Enforcing which laws? Audit activities? What the hell does that even mean? What that last line tells me is, the government can and will share your medical information with pretty much whomever, and for whatever reason.

Are you in compliance, comrade?