Category: Philosophy

When People Say that Addressing Inequality is Just Class Warfare, They are Either Lying of Stupid

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As Paul Krugman notes, we know of specific policies (taxes, shareholder say on pay, etc.) to address inequality, but no one has cracked the secret to sustainable growth that raises all boats:

The usual answer to this is to point out that we don’t actually know much about how to produce rapid economic growth — conservatives may think they know (low taxes and all that), but there is no evidence to back up their certainty. And on the other hand, we know how to make a big difference to income distribution, especially how to reduce extreme poverty. So why not work on what we know, as at least part of our economic strategy?

He further notes that economic growth rates do not effect levels of child malnutrition, but inequality does:

But even this argument may be conceding too much. A new study finds that in poor and lower-middle-income countries, one of the most crucial aspects of well-being, child malnutrition, isn’t helped at all by faster growth:

………

Yes, rapid growth is good, but it doesn’t solve all problems even if you know how to make it happen, which you don’t.

We do know that the conservative prescriptions produce, inequality, speculation, bubbles, and panics.

The reason that we continue to hear these arguments is because it serves the rich and their lackeys, not because it has ever demonstrated that it has any relation to reality.

The First Law of Holes is………

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If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. (This is generally attributed to British politician Denis Healey)

Well two weeks after Randa Jarrar wrote a bigoted screed on non-Arabs belly dancing, and was pilloried for this, (I called her a bigoted moron) she writes a followup where she doubles down on her repellent thesis.

Rather uncharitably, my first reaction was a bit of smug self-satisfaction when she appeared to specifically mention my blog, “Other men on racist blogs called me a moron.”

Needless to say, I stand by my analysis of her earlier post, and her most recent article further reinforces the truth behind the Denis Healey quote.

The interesting thing is that from an aesthetic perspective we generally agree on the aesthetics of Middle Eastern dance, we both agree that the westernized cartoonized version of Middle Eastern dance, what I call “Cabaret”, is crap. (Of course, 90% of everything is crap [Sturgeon’s law])

Further we would agree that many, probably most, of the public performances of Middle Eastern dance in the west are crap.

I would go a bit further, and note that the same applies to public performances in Egypt, Turkey, Lebanaon, Syria, etc.

But there is a difference between objecting to the Disneyfication of an art form and saying that some ethnic group should not be allowed to practice that art.

Furthermore in she goes there, and explicitly states that, “It’s not possible,” for her to be a racist, one would assume because she is an Arab.

Bigotry much?

Finally, one of the commenters on this thread posted a Scribd document describing the history of Middle Eastern dance.  It’ is worth a read.

I’ve attached it after the break.

The Koch Suckers at the Cato Institute Just Came Out Against Investor-State Dispute Settlements

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Yes, Cato has come out against the the ISDS, that secret court that allows private entities to sue countries under arbitrary rules slanted in favor of investors.

This is kind of like Ford recommending General Motors pickup trucks for consumers:

Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition to a landmark EU-US trade agreement, a growing number of backers of the deal are starting to ask a simple question: might the future of transatlantic trade be better served if one of its most controversial provisions was simply dropped?

 Almost nine months after negotiations opened with great hope and fanfare, opponents of the mooted Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, are rallying against a plan that would allow private investors to use the pact to sue governments if they felt local laws threatened their investment.
Environmentalists worry that it would allow big US oil companies to challenge France’s anti-fracking laws and other environmental regulations, while consumer groups fret that it would open the EU’s sacrosanct ban on genetically modified organisms to a challenge from American agribusiness.

 The concerns in Europe over the inclusion of an “investor-state dispute settlement”, or ISDS, mechanism grew so loud earlier this year that Karel De Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, announced he would suspend negotiations on the relevant text to hold public consultations.

 But in recent weeks, as both sides have been preparing for Monday’s resumption of negotiations in Brussels, the opposition has spread beyond the traditional sceptics.

 In a paper released last week, Daniel Ikenson, director of the trade programme at the conservative Cato Institute, argued that the investor protection measure had become too toxic. And that in order to defuse the growing opposition, negotiators should simply drop what seemed like a superfluous provision.

 “ISDS is not even essential to the task of freeing trade. So why burden the effort by carrying needless baggage?” Mr Ikenson wrote in his paper, which called for the US to drop ISDS provisions from its push for a 12-country Pacific Rim deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well.

Cato, and the Kochs, are all about enforcing the primacy of the holders of capital over that of democratically elected government, so this turn around is a big deal, and it’s a good thing.

In an era of historically low tariffs, these increasingly anti-sovereignty provisions in trade deals are being viewed with well justified suspicion.

The old argument, “Because ……… Free Trade,” is simply no longer enough to justify trade deals with draconian IP and investor protections.

It’s a welcome side effect of the financial meltdown.

And I Would have Gotten Away With it Too, if it Weren’t for You Meddling Voters

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The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions:

The newest bit of “wisdom” for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have “a stable governance” and that’s why “they constantly get better every year.”

 Here’s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com (and you can watch the video below):

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do…So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

Actually, all charter schools don’t have stable governance and all of them aren’t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.

Note that Hastings has invested millions in Rocketship charger schools, and while they claim to to be a not for profit, stoprocketship.com does provide numerous links that seem to indicate that much of their activities are structured so as to provide profits for its principals and those who make contributions.

No wonder Reed Hastings thinks that voters are annoying.  It makes the grifting too hard.

Note that this is not limited to education, where charter schools do not (when comparing apples to apples) outperform the public school system, and where in the extreme case (New Orleans 90% charters) we are seeing increasing cases of malfeasance and misfeasance requiring greater oversight.

It also applies to things like trade deals, or the Simpson-Bowles commission.

Even if this actually resulted in good policy, it would be wrong, but when you look at things like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, etc., it is clear that all it does is that it creates an orgy of corruption and rent seeking.

When you decide to take democracy out of the mix, and run this stuff “like a business”, someone gets the profit, and ain’t the taxpayer.

Gee, You Think?

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In the Armed Forced Journal, Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis calls for the forced retirement of most of the US general officer corps:

The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.

 ………

 Events have granted us a short window of time in which we might address the problem. America is drawing down after two intense wars, while the potential threats of the future are not quite upon us. Seven decades ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall surveyed an officer corps similarly ill-suited for the tasks to come. He forced into retirement scores of generals, clearing the way for the ones who would help win World War II.

 Today’s times, like Marshall’s, call for a reformation of the general officer corps.

 ………

 After each of these failures, one might expect the Army and program leaders to have suffered censure. Instead, the opposite seems generally to have been the case. The leaders of failed programs and other efforts received prestigious medals, promotion to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort.

 ………

 Shrink the general officer corps. In 1945, about 2,000 general and flag officers led a total of about 12 million citizens in uniform. Today, we have about 900 generals and admirals and 1.4 million troops, and the ratio of leader-to-led has accelerated upward in the two decades since the end of the Cold War. In an age of unprecedented communications technology and with the education and training opportunities for today’s soldiers, this is indefensible. Many general officer billets are redundant and should be eliminated; others can effectively be filled by colonels or even lieutenant colonels.

I highly remommend this as a read, though I would argue that the “Up or Out” officer promotion and retention policies have also contributed to these problems.

It makes the consequences to challenging the Pentagon’s group think to be the end of a career.

I Called for Amputating the Financial Sector Years Ago

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See here.

JD Alt at New Economic Perspectives has just called for the same thing:

All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%. Write them off. Let them have their gated communities, their mega-yachts, their island retreats and off-shore bank accounts. What do we need them for?

 For one thing, we DON’T need their money. Even if we could get it—which we can’t because they steadfastly refuse to use it for anything other than casino gambling in their private and secretive financial networks. We wonder why we have a “jobless recovery”? Does it have anything to do with the fact that such a large percentage of our “capital” has, for all practical purposes, been removed from the economy?

 Even when the 1% decides to invest some of their Dollars to manufacture or build something, they rarely decide to manufacture or build anything we really need—only things we really don’t need. Like strip-mines in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, or pipe-lines across Nebraska’s freshwater aquifers, or rocket-planes for space-tourism. Thanks, but we really don’t need—or want—any of it. We’d much rather have fresh wild salmon (rather than the artificially colored hatchery-stuff) than more copper and gold, fresh water instead of tar-sands oil, and the good-old week-at-the-beach is just fine for a vacation.

He then gives the example of the huge transformers that are essential to our electrical grid.

We do not, and can not, make them in the United States, because the casino finance class doesn’t care, because they can always get them from Korea, with a a 2 year lead time.

If that’s a problem, they can always move to their summer house on a Greek island.

Here is how he poresents it going:

This little tale is made even more interesting by the fact that these very-large transformers—usually situated inside a compound protected by chain-link fencing—are easily destroyed with a few rounds of fire from a semi-automatic assault rifle. Thankfully, semi-automatic assault rifles are difficult to come by in the U.S., otherwise there might be cause for concern. The seventeen transformers recently shot to death in California (we can’t explain how this actually happened, since the NRA is only marginally active on the West Coast) are a cautionary tale: If this were repeated on just a little bit larger scale, the Department of Homeland Security has determined, our entire electric grid could be down for months—or even longer. (Come on South Korea, hurry it up…. We’re waiting!)

 So my example is this: Why doesn’t President Obama propose that since the 1% have no interest in doing it, the U.S. sovereign government build a plant to manufacture very-large transformers, hire engineers to train unemployed people to do the labor, pay those unemployed trainees for making the effort to learn how to make a giant-sized transformer, then hire those newly trained workers to run the manufacturing process? We could build a backup supply of these critical electric grid components so that in the (increasingly likely) event some crazy, anti-government sociopath seizes the opportunity to turn out America’s lights, we could turn them back on in fairly short order.

It’s an interesting mental exercise, and I am not sure how serious this proposal is,it has a Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal snarky feel to it.

Still, breaking the lock of the “Washington Consensus” of so-called free trade and the continuing financialization of our economy is a non trivial task.

That’s why my calls for amputation involve a zero tolerance criminal prosecution policy. 

Bigoted Moron of the Day

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Randa Jarrar, who just penned, “Why I can’t stand white belly dancers,” on Salon.

Seeing as how I know about 1 half dozen white who have made a study of traditional, as in pre 1600, Middle Eastern dance. Somehow Ms. Jarrar, the product of Sara Lawrence and UT Austin, believes that their interest is somehow inauthentic.

Art is supposed to be universal, and cross cultural art can produce some amazing things.

Feh.

I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier

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John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.

Notice that they are both smiling.

They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”

It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.

Just watch.

Mixed Emotions

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When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.

When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.

Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:

National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.

Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.

And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.

That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.

Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion.    It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.

Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?

H/t Salon.

Deep Thought

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The death of Pete Seeger has me thinking of Woody Guthrie:

See the label on his guitar saying, “This machine kills fascists?”

Folk songs are about not some sort of generic emotional warm fuzzies.

They are about life, and they are about deep moral outrage.

H/t TPM for the picture (c. 1943).

Not Enough Bullets………

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It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”

He actually invoked Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is ludicrous.

BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.

The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.

Clinton’s Reinventing Government Initiative Failure in One Corrupt Failure

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Remember when President Clinton put forward the idea of “Reinventing Government”?

It was all about how by unleashing “private sector efficiency” on government functions, with the inevitable result being better government for less money.

Leaving aside the historically dismal performance of such efforts ***cough*** Halliburton ***cough***, but one could make the argument that providing logistical service to the military, but when the part of the Office of Personnel Management responsible for security clearance investigations was spun off as a private firm, USIS, that was a core function.

It really doesn’t get any more “core” than preserving state secrets.

And now we see how “private sector efficiency” has allowed the security clearance process to descend into a morass of corruption and incompetence:

The company that conducted a background investigation on the contractor Edward J. Snowden fraudulently signed off on hundreds of thousands of incomplete security checks in recent years, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The government said the company, U.S. Investigations Services, defrauded the government of millions of dollars by submitting more than 650,000 investigations that had not been completed. The government uses those reports to help make hiring decisions and decide who gets access to national security secrets.

In addition to Mr. Snowden, the company performed the background check for Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old military contractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last year. Mr. Alexis, who died in a shootout with the police, left behind documents saying the government had been tormenting him with low-frequency radio waves.

The accusations highlight not just how reliant the government is on contractors to perform national security functions, but also how screening those contractors requires even more contractors. U.S. Investigations Service, now known as USIS, is the largest outside investigator for government security clearances. It is one of many companies that has found lucrative government work during the expansion of national security in the last decade.

From 2008 to 2012, about 40 percent of the company’s investigations were fraudulently submitted, the Justice Department said.

(emphasis mine)

It doesn’t save money.  All it does is increase the looting, and gives the looters more money to lobby for more looting.

This is disastrous for both our government and our society.

From I Have a Dream to I Have a Drone

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I’ve been thinking that on the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday I should offer some sort of comment, and I’ve kind of been at a loss.

Driving to work today, I had a flash of insight.

It’s not deep, but it is glib, and I think that it is an evocative way to give the lie to the idea that somehow or other Obama is a successor to Kings legacy.

Beneficiary, yes, successor, no f%$#ing way.

More generally,  I object to the the Disneyification of King’s memory.

At the core of his activism was a profound and deep moral outrage, and the process by which he has been reduced to some sort of “Magic Negro” by the mainstream media is a real shame.

It serves to dilute much of his message, which was not just about civil rights, but addressed poverty and labor rights as well.

Gun Control is More than Hitting the Target

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One of the facts about guns in the United States, and it is not acknowledged by either gun control advocates or opponents, is that something like ¼ of all gun owners are simply so stupid, or too negligent that their having access to a firearm is a hazard to themselves, their loved ones, and to society.

Case in point, actress, model, and wife of Miami Dolphins QB, Lauren Tannehill who left here AR-15 in a rental car:

A New York mom vacationing in South Florida was expecting a healthy dose of sun, surf and fun. Imagine her surprise when her daughter unzipped a bag in their rental Nissan Rogue and found a rifle — a big rifle. Looking just like the ones real soldiers use.

Horrified, she immediately called E-Z Rent-A-Car and then drove to the nearest police station.

And there would be one more surprise: The AR-15 semiautomatic had been left behind by model Lauren Tannehill, the wife of Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill.

“We got out of the car, we were kind of freaked out,” Judith Fleissig recalls of the moment this month when she and her daughter found the weapon. “I didn’t want to touch it.”

Fleissig on Jan. 6 turned over the gun to the closest police station, following the rental company’s recommendation, officials said.

………

“Though dangerous if it would have landed in the wrong hands, it’s not criminal,” Broward sheriff’s spokeswoman Keyla Concepción said. “They simply forgot it.”

Lauren Tannehill, 26, is a model who was featured on HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” a reality sports documentary television series. The couple married in January 2012.

A model in possession of an AR-15, the civilian’s version of the military’s M-16, may be incongruous to some. But it shouldn’t surprise Lauren Tannehill’s fans who view postings of her on Twitter.

I am not suggesting a solution here, I am simply suggewsting that there are way too many people who are simply too f%$#ed up to own firearms.

We want to keep firearms away from felons and the mentally ill, and I think that finding a way to keep them from the criminally stupid is a good idea as well.

Regrets………

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Mikhail Kalashnikov, after decades of denying any culpability for the deaths caused by the AK-47, felt profound remorse toward the end of his life:

The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle apparently wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church before he died expressing fears he was morally responsible for the people it killed.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died last month aged 94, wrote a long emotional letter to Patriarch Kirill in May 2012, church officials say.

He said he was suffering “spiritual pain” over the many deaths it caused.

Kalashnikov had previously refused to accept responsibility for those killed.

It does make me wonder how I’ll deal with the end of my life.

As a firmly middle-aged man, my most frequent regret is how few wild oats I sewed during my single days.

Hopefully, my regrets will become more profound as I age, but I’m just not that deep.

Where Maryland Gets Healthcare Right

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Proving once again, that the first problem is not cost it’s price

The Free State is expand an existing plan of price controls for healthcare:

The Obama administration is set to announce Friday an ambitious health-care experiment that will make Maryland a test case for whether aggressive government regulation of medical prices can dramatically cut health spending.

 Under the experiment, Maryland will cap hospital spending and set prices — and, if all goes as planned, cut $330 million in federal spending. The new plan, which has been under negotiation for more than a year, could leave Maryland looking more like Germany and Switzerland, which aggressively regulate prices, than its neighboring states. And it could serve as a model – or cautionary tale – for other states looking to follow in its footsteps.

 “You can put Maryland in the company of Massachusetts and perhaps Vermont as the three states furthest out in trying to invent a new future for cost accountability in health care spending,” added Harvard University’s John McDonough. “Success creates a model that other states will want to look at emulating. And failure means it’s an option more likely to be crossed off the list.”

 For Maryland, the new rules build on past success. Since the mid-1970s, it has been the only state to set the prices that hospitals charge patients. Typically, hospitals negotiate with each health insurer individually, leading to disparate rates. In Maryland, all customers — whether a private insurance plan, public program or uninsured patient — pay the same price. Researchers estimate the system has saved $45 billion for consumers over four decades and prices have grown more slowly in the state.

What they are adding is changing the billing to reduce incentives to provide unnecessary services:

Under the old system, prices in Maryland couldn’t grow faster than the prices set by the Medicare program. But as the cost of health care rose rapidly in recent years, the state struggled to hit that target.

 State officials also worried about the old system creating perverse incentives: The best way for a hospital to make money was to provide the highest volume of services, regardless of whether that care made patients healthier. That meant payers would simply sign checks for as many treatments as the hospitals recommended. The new system intends to end that revenue strategy by capping total spending.

 “It’s essentially moving away from a system that is focused on volume to one that is focused on value,” says John M. Colmers, executive director of Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission, which will oversee the effort.”

 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved Friday Maryland’s proposal to continue setting hospital prices while adding in a cap on all hospital spending. The state will limit hospital spending growth to 3.58 percent for the next five years, largely by giving each of the state’s 46 hospitals a firm budget to work within. That level of growth would be tied to the projected, overall growth of the state economy.

I’m not particularly excited about this second part. I just do not know enough about the healthcare market to know if it works, but if it provides an incentive for other states to implement price controls, this would be a good thing.

The free market is not, and will never be, the salvation of our healthcare system.  That is what the past 60 years has shown.

Libertarians Owned by Colorado Marijuana Legalization

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Over at Pruning Shears, Dan Fejes the incredibly conspicuous silence of Libertarians, and the Libertarian movement on pot legalization in Colorado:

For as long as I can remember the joke about libertarians is that they are Republicans who like to smoke pot. Those who identify as libertarian seem to go to great lengths to point out their ideological differences with Republicans (and conservatives more generally). They stress liberty above all and oppose anything – like, say, non-military government spending – they perceive as even peripherally infringing on it. In addition to heartily approving of the freedom to, say, die without insurance, libertarians have long denounced the drug war as a hateful incursion on peoples’ freedom.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many opportunities to tease out whether libertarians truly are independent gadflies or just slightly heterodox Republicans. To get a solid answer, we would need to see one of their favored policies enacted. Since their ideas (agree with them or not) aren’t really in the political mainstream, their commitment to them never really gets put to the test.

Happily, the decriminalization of marijuana in Colorado provides just one of those rare cases. Libertarians have long criticized the drug war, with leading voices such as Radley Balko and John Stossel weighing in against it, Matt Welch reporting on its hoped-for demise, and so on. (This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive survey. I pick up libertarian names from ambient political noise, so in this post I checked ones I was familiar with.)

………

We aren’t hearing that; what we are mostly hearing is crickets. If this really meant as much to libertarians as they’ve always claimed, they should be shouting the news from the rooftops – but that would not sit well with the GOP establishment. Or: They can either act as gadflies or as slightly heterodox Republicans. Most are choosing the latter. While that’s a little disappointing I can’t honestly say it’s surprising.

This is telling.

Not only are the “mainstream” Libertarians remarkably quiet about all this, but the Ron Paul “batsh%$ insane” wing is quiet as well.

Libertarians: Nothing more than a way for some people to feel good about pulling the lever for Republicans.

OK, I Did Not Expect this from Pope Francis

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Francis’ Message to The Culture Warrior Bishops

I know about outreach and all, but he just called for outreach to the children of LGBT and divorced parents:

Pope Francis has called for a rethink in the way the Catholic Church deals with the children of gay couples and divorced parents, warning against “administering a vaccine against faith.”

 “On an educational level, gay unions raise challenges for us today which for us are sometimes difficult to understand,” Francis said in a speech to the Catholic Union of Superiors General in November, extracts of which were published on Italian media websites on Saturday.

 ………

 The pontiff said educational leaders should ask themselves “how can we proclaim Christ to a generation that is changing?”

 “We must be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them,” the 77-year-old added.

 Though the Church has often been in conflict with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community over its opposition to same-sex marriage and to homosexuality, Francis has drawn praise for attempts to be inclusive.

I think that is equal parts pragmatism (the current crop of Catholics are not getting any younger) and a new focus on ministry as a duty, but nonetheless I am impressed.

This is an Affront to Human Decency

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For anyone who has followed the conservative movement, it comes as no surprise when they alter reality to match their own conclusions.

However, the recent actions of dead eyed Canadian PM Stephen Harper go far beyond this. He is aggressively destroying historical documents in an attempt to prevent to double down on Canada’s fossil fuel economy:

Back in 2012, when Canada’s Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.
Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives’ war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger’s 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update: a copy of these logs survives overseas.

The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned.

The news source The Tyee has what I think is the money quote on all of this:

“It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits,” said [Dalhousie University biologist Jeff] Hutchings. “What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn’t think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science? Or is it the idea that a good government is stripped down government? “

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of “fear and insecurity” within the Harper government, “about how to deal with science and knowledge.”

That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.

“There is a group of people who don’t know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective,” explained Hutchings.

They are now literally book burning fascist barbarians, and they are destroying our heritage (all of us, not just Canadians) to pursue an agenda of greed and spoil.

This is unalloyed evil.

The First Uber Death

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30 Miles, 40 Min, over the Bay Bridge, a toll road.
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Yesterday, I posted about the Libertarian delusional dream that is Uber.

Today, I read about an Uber driver hitting 3 pedestrians, killing a 6-year old girl
:

Update, 11:35 a.m.: Uber confirmed that Muzzafar was, indeed a contractor with the company. It’s since deactivated his account. An Uber spokesman stressed, again, that Muzzafar was not “providing services through the Uber system” at the time he struck and killed a 6 year-old girl at Polk and Ellis Streets.

Update, 9:46 a.m.: Police release name and photo of the self-identified Uber driver (See bottom).

 It’s been a rough year for Uber thus far. Just four hours before the car-hire startup planned to ring in 2014 — ideally with an onslaught of high-priced trips through San Francisco’s bustling downtown corridor — one of its contracted drivers allegedly hit a family in a Tenderloin crosswalk, killing a 6-year-old girl and critically injuring her mother and brother.

“There are no words to express the deep sadness and grief felt for young San Francisco resident, Sophia Liu,” Supervisor Jane Kim wrote in a statement issued shortly after the young girl’s death.

Kim added that the accident would have been “100 percent avoidable” had the driver followed basic traffic laws. She considered the incident a harbinger for app-based car-hire startups, indicating that it raises questions about driver training and compliance.

Notice the non denial denial?

In their blog, they said that, “This tragedy did not involve a vehicle or provider doing a trip on the Uber system.

Notice what they did not say?  They did not say that he wasn’t logged in, and that he wasn’t waiting for some of those lucrative,  “Onslaughts of high-priced trips.”

Why else would he be driving around San Francisco on New Years Eve?

Driving?  In San Francisco?  On New Years Eve?  That is nucking futs!  ……… Unless, of course, you are there to make some bank by getting dispatches from a certain Techno-Randian transportation company.

Then, it makes lots of sense.

It is telling that Uber has deliberately chosen a model which is structured largely to evade any responsibility, or liability, for the misdeeds of its drivers.

H/t Crooks & Liars.