There are those who believe the two-party system of this country insufficiently represents the diversity of political views of this country.
So, my high school political science teacher posted this on Facebook:
It’s an interesting exercise. Of course, political parties aren’t part of the Constitution. But imagine the governing chaos of a country where no party has anything close to a majority. But you don’t have to imagine that. Look at Italy and Greece.
In a historic move, President Donald Trump announced Friday that hospitals will be required to disclose the rates they privately negotiate with insurers.
Part of a larger transparency push aimed at reducing health care costs, the controversial requirement has already raised the ire of the powerful industry. Four hospital groups quickly promised to file a legal challenge, arguing the rule exceeds the administration’s authority.
The rule is the latest in a series of steps the administration has taken to show what Trump is doing to lower health care costs — a key concern among Americans and one of his main promises as he heads into the 2020 campaign.
Under the final rule, which stems from an executive order Trump issued this summer, hospitals will have to make public by 2021 the rates they negotiate with insurers and the amounts they are willing to accept in cash for an item or service. In addition, they must provide this information in an online, searchable way for 300 common services, such as X-rays, outpatient visits, Cesarean deliveries and lab tests.
Hospitals that don’t comply will face a civil penalty of up to $300 a day.
Also, the administration released a proposed rule that would require insurers to provide consumers with estimates of their out-of-pocket costs for all health care services through an online tool. Carriers would have to disclose their negotiated rates for in-network providers as well as the allowed amounts paid for out-of-network providers. This proposal was prompted by feedback that consumers are more interested in what they are on the hook for based on their insurance plans’ deductibles and copays or coinsurance.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said this announcement may be “a more significant improvement to American health care markets than any other single thing the Trump administration has done.”
“American patients have been at the mercy of a shadowy system with little access to the information they need to make decisions about their own care,” Azar said. “This shadowy system has to change.”
The secretary added that he believes the changes will survive any legal challenges from hospitals.
Negotiated rates are closely guarded secrets, though they are eventually revealed to patients when they receive explanations of benefits from their insurers. That information should be available before the person receives care, administration officials say.
The administration argues that increasing price transparency will lead to a more competitive marketplace.
The Supremes became the first all-girl group with a British number-one single today in 1964:
The Supremes had our number one single two years later:
The number one album today in 1994 was Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York” …
… on the same day that David Crosby had a liver transplant to replace the original that was ruined by hepatitis C and considerable drug and alcohol use:
I am a great believer in Senator Marco Rubio, in his excellent intentions, and in the undoubtable ability of Senator Marco Rubio and his excellent intentions together to screw up anything they touch.
Senator Rubio, writing in National Review, joins the ranks of those who propose to reinvent capitalism — “common-good capitalism,” he calls it. Senator Elizabeth Warren also proposes to reinvent capitalism and calls her version “accountable capitalism.” Dear old Bernie Sanders still proposes to overthrow capitalism and be done with it, bless his heart.
Senator Rubio, working from remarks originally delivered in a speech at Catholic University, references a series of popes — Leo XIII, mostly, but also Benedict and Francis — to describe (whether the senator understands this or not) the familiar moral basis of fascist economic thinking, beginning from the premise that “workers and businesses are not competitors for their share of limited resources, but partners in an effort that strengthens the entire nation.” Under the careful tutelage of the state, of course. I write this as a fellow Catholic: God defend us from these backward, primitive-minded Catholic social reformers. Pope Francis would do mortal harm to the poor of this world if he had any real political power; blessedly, Providence has relieved him and us of that burden.
It is the case that resources are limited — scarcity is an inescapable fact — and that firms and workers compete with one another (as do consumers; politicians never talk about that, for some reason). What to make of that? Nothing. Senator Rubio simply proceeds with his shallow moralizing as though these facts were not facts. Some people like Chevy trucks, some like Fords, and some of us prefer Toyotas built in Texas. Does the marginal sale of one of these vs. one of the others “strengthen the entire nation”? Of course not. Apple, Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are fighting one another tooth and talon for market share in the entertainment industry, and “the nation” has no especial vested interest in any particular outcome. Nobody really even takes seriously the kind of rhetoric that Senator Rubio here is relying upon. These are just words that come out of the mouths of men who want power.
And power is what is at issue.
Men such as Senator Rubio desire for themselves the power to overrule markets — to limit trade and property rights, enterprise and exchange — in the service of what Senator Rubio describes as the “common good.” The problems with that are several. For one thing, Senator Rubio does not know what the common good is and has no way of knowing. For another thing, we know quite well, from long experience, how such vague and plastic notions of the “common good” interact with the discrete good.
Take, for example, Senator Rubio’s own servility on behalf of subsidies for the billionaire sugar barons of his home state, arguing that such handouts to business interests are a matter of “national security,” a position that the senator has defended by twisting himself into absurd positions that Bikram Choudhury himself would blanch to contemplate. I write this not because Senator Rubio represents the worst of what Washington has to offer but because he represents the best of what Washington has to offer. His heart is in the right place. His head is .. elsewhere. Like most of the men and women who find success in politics, Senator Rubio has the wrong kind of intelligence for the task he imagines he is undertaking. He is clever, like most politicians, and like most politicians believes that a clever tweak here or there will make moot certain inconvenient realities such as economic scarcity. He is wrong about this.
He is wrong about a great deal. He worries about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, which is largely a myth. (The share of assets controlled by financial firms has held steady around 2 percent for a long time.) He worries that the lack of satisfying employment in certain communities has led to substance abuse and a decline in marriage without considering the possibility that the unemployment is a symptom of the same noneconomic pathology as the addiction and family dysfunction. “Diagnosing the problem is something we should be able to achieve across the political spectrum, though even that seems challenging at times,” he writes. But Dr. Rubio has got it wrong. “Ultimately, deciding what the government should do about it must be the core question of our politics,” he continues. Misunderstanding the problem and then reorienting government toward the execution of a program of therapy dreamt up by quacks with no special expertise or genuine knowledge of the disease in question is exactly the catastrophe you get when you encounter the word “diagnosis” in a sentence written by a lawyer.
Capitalism is what happens when government respects property rights, which include the rights to trade and to work. What we need from men in government is not the quasi-metaphysical project of reinventing capitalism in the name of the “common good.” What we need from government is — government. The government in which Senator Rubio serves cannot manage to appropriate money through regular order, to cease its own ruinous accumulation of debt, or to secure a clear and lasting military victory over a rabble of half-organized fanatics festering in the wilderness of Afghanistan. So, no, I do not think they know how to run Apple or Facebook or Ford. If Senator Rubio cares about the common good, then he can butt right out while the people who produce the goods and innovations that bring with them such ancillary benefits as jobs and tax payments do what they do.
Which is not to say that there is no role for government in this. This is not a brief for anarchism. Government can — or could, or should — play an irreplaceable role in this by providing a predictable and stable policy environment (including in the matter of business taxes and regulation) that will allow firms to make long-term investments under reasonably stable conditions. Do you know what is not a synonym for “policy stability?” Reinventing capitalism. The federal government exists to provide public goods that are necessarily national in scope; in reality, most of the money it spends is simple redistribution of income, either directly through Social Security and other payments or indirectly through the provision and subsidy of medical benefits. And, if Senator Rubio would care to have a gander at the books over there at the Social Security Administration, it would be obvious that Washington cannot even do that right.
The nation does not need your philosophy, Senator Rubio. (Although, given how weakly articulated it is, may I recommend that you revise the part of your stump speech in which you make fun of philosophy majors?) We do not need your half-assed moralizing. We need stability and predictability from a government that secures our liberty and our property in the least obtrusive way that can be managed. And if you could manage that without bankrupting the nation, we would be grateful.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to vote for Rubio in 2016.
Since a new Billboard Hot 100 list came out today, this was the number one single six days later, when John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy traveled to Dallas.
The number one album today in 1968 was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland”:
The fragile state of psyches today means that anyone who dares express an opinion risks causing someone who disagrees to have a meltdown.
This sometimes happens when expressing political opinions. “Sometimes” as only in the a.m. and p.m.
However, an online challenge from someone called Feo Amante challenges us to express 10 nonpolitical opinions that are likely to be very unpopular. Feo’s include:
3. AVATAR was not only the worst movie James Cameron ever directed, even SyFy channel has shown better work. …
5. A Matter Transmitter in THE FLY and STAR TREK sense (extraordinarily precise disassembling and reassembling of the atomic structure of living beings into the same living beings), isn’t as viably efficient a technology as transmitting matter whole from point A to point B via wormhole and String “bundling” (imaginatively launching from where we currently understand the concepts). …
7. We do not have a Bee die off Crisis, since the accuracy of research/counting of Bee populations / Colonies remains reproducible only when limited to Beekeepers and not the unknown but (in all likelihood) overwhelmingly larger populations of bees in the wild (which are virtually impossible to monitor thanks to their ever-changing nomadic lifestyle – though some scientists are trying). …
10. Extending the human lifespan more than 10 times its current limit is not only possible, but environmentally desirable.
Well … “Avatar” (not to be confused with the non-Cameron “Avatar”) was, from what I remember, entertaining. So was “Waterworld,” but neither was probably worth the hype nor the expense. The last two seem to be somewhat political comments to me, but that’s his list.
Readers may not be surprised to know that I have not shied away from expressing potentially controversial opinions. (Really? readers respond.) I once wrote a column for the Madison La Follette High School student newspaper, The Lance, that applied the concept from the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche for “Real Lancers,” including such opinions as that women don’t wear more than one earring per ear. That didn’t make my girlfriend of the time, who had two earrings in one year (which was not as many as the five of a classmate of mine, which prompted the idea), very happy.
Facebook Friend Mike Baron, who first posted this, got some contributions:
I like pineapple on pizza.
Star Wars bores the shit out of me. I think it’s the most overrated franchise in entertainment history. Very weak tea.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is not the best Star Trek movie. That honor belongs to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Oh, and Blade Runner is boring.
… there should be a five-year moratorium on anything Batman-related. No new movies, no new comics, nothing.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is an overrated movie.
[Steven] Spielberg is overrated.
James Cameron should have retired from filmmaking after T2.
Pink Floyd and U2 are highly overrated.
Bruce Springsteen sucks. Two good songs – that’s it.
The Rolling Stones stink.
The Beatles suck.
No one actually enjoys those new IPAs. They just like to be known as someone who enjoys them.
I get the most hostile reactions to non-political posts. These are the things that really get people riled up:
1. Any challenge to complaints about “incorrect” grammar, usage, spelling, or punctuation. These complaints are invariably bogus and ignore actual language history, e.g., there never has been a commonly observed distinction between “lay” and “lie.”
2. Common names are more useful than “scientific” names in many contexts.
3. The metric system is no more scientific than any other system.
4. Civilization will not collapse because children don’t learn the difference between a salad fork and a regular fork.
5. Health appears to have very little to do with diet.
6. It is possible to overestimate the earth-saving potential of hemp.
7. People who flock to stores to buy gifts on Black Friday are not being selfish. Just the opposite.
OK, let’s see how I do, and whether I can stick to the politics prohibition. (Without that, one thing I would say is that no one should be a member of a political party. Another is that fewer people should be voting.)
One: I do not like (which means you should not like) any musical group’s complete body of work. Every group has mutts among its thoroughbreds, and every artist’s or group’s song should be judged based on the quality of the piece, not on whether or not you like the group. Even Michael Bolton, the dubious talent of the ’80s, recorded one good song (because it was written by Bob Dylan). Even my favorite rock group, Chicago, recorded far too many sappy crappy ballads, which are among the group’s best selling singles. Which demonstrates that …
Two: “Quality” and “popularity” are not synonyms. (In fact, no one should ever be concerned about the popularity of anything, or make decisions based on popularity, in any area. No one should ever do, watch or buy something becasue of its popularity.) Which leads to …
3A: “Change” and “progress” are not synonyms. (I question the judgment and values of anyone who claims we must embrace change.) However …
3B: … those who say that things were better in the “old days” usually have selective memory. In fact, no one ever thinks things are good today, whenever “today” is, or was.
Four: This is my printable response to people of any ideology who claim to be offended at something:
Grow up. The fact you have an opinion makes it no more important than anyone else’s. Your claim that your feelings are hurt or you are offended means you weren’t raised right. I’d add a few other words, but I’m trying to avoid obscenity. Speaking of which …
Five: There are right times and places to use obscenities, and wrong times and places. Mature people know when and where, though they may not be flawless in their use of obscenities, though we should all strive to use obscenities with correct English.
6A: Many sports fans don’t know what they’re talking about. That includes (A) those who want everyone to be fired with every loss, (B) those who don’t realize that all players have sell-by dates (as Branch Rickey put it, better to get rid of a player a year too early than a year too late), and (C) those who don’t know what they don’t know because they have acquired no knowledge of the sport. However …
6B: No pro sports player, coach or executive should be beyond criticism. For that matter, no public figure — politician, entertainer, etc. — should be above criticism. What follows from that is …
Seven: Too many people who don’t know what they’re talking about express opinions. A lot of it is because of social media, but there have been people who couldn’t keep their mouths shut since speech was invented. One sign they don’t know what they’re talking about is their inability to justify their opinion by facts or logic. Such people sometimes resort to emotion (especially anger) and name-calling, which is not an argument, jackwagon.
Eight: I like roundabouts. I vastly prefer roundabouts to intersections with stoplights or, worse, four-way stops. I do not understand why people don’t like and cannot drive around roundabouts. I like roundabouts because …
Nine: … the only truly, provably nonrenewable resource is time.
Ten: Most people have the wrong attitude about work. On the one hand, I’ve never been able to understand those who claim to love their job and claim they’ve never worked a day in their life. For one thing, you should never love your job, because your job does not love you. (Bonus opinion: The word “love” is horribly overused, as is “hate.”) On the other hand, those who do the minimum to get paid are violating our duty to work, as stated throughout the Bible. You should do the maximum you can, because you’re supposed to, not out of loyalty to your employer (who is paying you the minimum he or she can pay you), but for yourself. The corollary to that is …
Eleven: People need to stop sucking at doing things. In other words, if you’re doing something, but you’re bad at it, and you’re not interested in doing it better, stop. Our world is a screwed-up mess in large part because of incompetence.
Twelve: There are at least two TV series where the original theme song was better than its more popular replacement.
Thirteen. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a life-threatening disease, but I believe that quality of life is more important than quantity of life. No one should expect perfect health, but I don’t want to spend my remaining years being useless. (Keep in mind, though, that, as economist John Maynard Keynes observed, in the long run we are all dead.)
Fourteen: Every human is flawed. Therefore, every human institution is flawed. That has always been the case, and that will always be the case. The corollary to that is …
Fifteen: People have the choice to be good or bad based on their actions. However, most people are not innately good. Most people will do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong thing only because of the consequences.
There are 15 points here, not 10. As I often say, journalism is the opposite of math.
I recently picked up Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Courtfor the first time. Finding the plot rather amusing, I began relaying it to my father over the weekend. Because he had never read the book, I was rather surprised when he began asking informed questions about the story. In no time at all, he was the one schooling me on plot elements I had not yet reached.
“Wait a minute,” I asked. “Are you sure you’ve never read this book?”
“No, never have,” he replied, “but I saw a cartoon version of the story when I was younger and everything I know comes from that.”
His revelation was intriguing, and to be honest, not the first of its kind. Like many in the Boomer generation, my father grew up watching classic cartoons, numbers of which were produced by the likes of Warner Bros.
But those cartoons did more than mind-numbingly entertain a generation of children. They also introduced millions of young people to key facets of cultural literacy, particularly in the realm of literature and music.
Beyond the aforementioned case of Mark Twain’s novel, these cartoons introduced children to stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through the medium of Bugs Bunny. Key quotations and scenes from William Shakespeare’s works were the main theme in a Goofy Gophers cartoon known as A Ham in a Role. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha was placed front and center in a Walt Disney short called Little Hiawatha.
Perhaps even more famous than the literature references are the many ways in which cartoons introduced children to the world of classical music, including both instrumental and operatic selections, one of which is the famous Rabbit of Saville. American film critic Leonard Maltin describes the situation well:
“An enormous amount of my musical education came at the hands of [Warner Bros. composer] Carl Stalling, only I didn’t realize it, I wasn’t aware, it just seeped into my brain all those years I was watching Warner’s cartoons day after day after day. I learned Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody because of the Warner Bros. cartoons, they used it so often, famously when Friz Freleng had a skyscraper built to it in Rhapsody and Rivets.”
But Maltin wasn’t the only one learning from these classical music forays. In fact, as the famous pianist Lang Lang testifies, it was Tom and Jerry’s rendition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in The Cat Concerto which first inspired him to start piano at age two.
These examples just brush the surface of the cultural literacy lessons which the old cartoons taught our parents and grandparents. Even if they never learned these elements in school, they at least had some frame of reference upon which they could build their understanding of the books and music and even ideas which have impacted culture and the world we live in today.
But can the same be said of the current generation? Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed in current cartoon offerings, but a quick search of popular titles seems to suggest that the answer is no. A majority of the time they seem to offer fluff, fantasy, and a focus on the here and now.
In short, neither schools, nor Saturday morning cartoons seem to be passing on the torch of cultural knowledge and literacy. Could such a scenario be one reason why we see an increased apathy and lack of substance in the current generation?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 