politics

An excerpt from “A Christmas Carol” (amended for modern times)

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They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”

“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute of the United States of America, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many millions are in want of common health care insurance; hundreds of thousands are in the midst of medical bankruptcies, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Emergency Rooms?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman.

“Medicaid in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian care of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to American legislators engaged in the reform of their health care system. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. What good has health care reform ever done for the people of England!”

“You mean beside slightly longer life expectancy at forty percent of their health care expenditure?”

“Bah! Americans have their own institutions; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t take time off their jobs to wait many hours in emergency rooms, and Medicaid programs have long waiting lists and shortfalls in their budgets; until they reform their system, many Americans will die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman. “The BBC has—“

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

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(I wish I had time to write about the Spirit of Swine Flus Past)

Ho-ho-ho

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Well, it’s Christmas Eve and I’ve already stuck my foot in my mouth. How wonderful to be me!

We’ve had some good news, though: The Senate passed their health care reform bill. I’d hoped passage would have stopped my co-worker from her incessant coughing, but maybe she’s waiting for reconciliation.

Meanwhile, I’m day jobbing. Today’s revisions are done (and I would have accomplished more if I hadn’t been tasting my own toes) and nothing needs to be purchased for the holiday tomorrow. Presents are wrapped, fridge is stocked, books are stacked near the fireplace. It’s going to be a quiet day, and I’m looking forward to it.

Randomness for 12/16

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1) Library book overdue by 99 and a half years.

2) Humans vs. Zombies, the live game. Photos of the event. (Humans won! Yay humans!)

3) Connecting fructose and childhood diabetes.

4) And, for a different sort of unhealthy ingestion: Blood drinking 101

5) A wooden castle–built from 396,000 popsicle sticks.

6) Lawsuit seeks to remove atheist from public office. It seems North Carolina’s state constitution bars atheists from holding public office. It’s an unenforceable law, thanks to a decades-old Supreme Court decision, but it’s the basis of a suit seeking to have Cecil Bothwell removed from a city council seat.

7) In contrast to my Author’s Big Mistake post from earlier today, a hilarious book review with a very smart author response.

No public option, no expansion of Medicare

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Hearing that Lieberman had scotched the expansion of Medicare–a policy he’d explicitly endorsed three months ago–had me pretty irritated yesterday. Now I’m seeing comments around the internet suggesting progressives ditch health care reform entirely until it can be done “right.”

I think that’s a terrible idea, and this quote from last November explains why pretty clearly:

Truman sought single payer. His failure led to Kennedy and Johnson, who confined their ambitions to poor families and the elderly. Then came Nixon, whose reform plan was entirely based around private insurers and government regulation. He was followed by Carter, who favored an incremental, and private, approach, and Clinton, who again sought to reform the system by putting private insurers into a market that would be structured and regulated by the government. His failure birthed Obama’s much less ambitious proposal, which attempts to reform not the health-care system, but the small group and nongroup portions of the health-care system by putting a small minority of private insurance plans into a market that’s structured and regulated by the government, and closed off to most Americans.

Failure does not breed success. Obama’s defeat will not mean that more ambitious reforms have “a better chance of trying again.” It will mean that less ambitious reformers have a better chance of trying next time.

Conversely, success does breed success. Medicare and Medicaid began as fairly limited programs. Medicaid was pretty much limited to extremely poor children and their caregivers. Medicare didn’t cover prescription drugs, or individuals with disabilities, or home health services.

But once the programs were passed into law, they were slowly and continually improved. They became more expansive, with Medicaid growing to cover not only poor families but also poor adults, and the federal government giving states the option, and matching dollars, to include more people under the program’s umbrella. Medicare was charged with covering people with long-term disabilities, and it was eventually strengthened with a drug benefit, more preventive coverage, the option of supplementary plans and much more.

It is not hard to imagine health-care reform following a similar path.

That’s a little long, but I think it’s important. Tens of thousands of Americans die preventable deaths every year because they don’t have health insurance. The new, reformed system will save lives, and it will give us something to build on in the future.

Even though I really, really wanted to sign on with a public plan, dammit.

Randomness for 12/14

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1) So infuriating and depressing: What happened to Hope Witsell.

2) In a less awful note, Dominick Dunn: bestselling writer with appalling taste.

3) Comfortable interstellar travel

4) Terminator Offers Some Lessons for the Salvation of Your Novel

5) One thing that continually astonishes me about people is the way they leap to the defense of the powerful. Some seem to want to side with authority as a matter of habit. But before I could write about this–and about Dr. Peter Watts’s experience at the U.S./Canadian border–Jo Walton did it better than I ever could.

6) Frank Frazetta’s son smashes through the Frazetta museum with a backhoe to steal $20 million dollars worth of his father’s paintings. via James Nicoll

7) Joe Lieberman promises to filibuster health care reform. His current rational is that he’s against the expansion of Medicare. He had the opportunity to negotiate with Senators on this issue but refused to show up for those meetings. Of course, he previously supported the policy when he ran for VP. He doesn’t want to negotiate; he wants to obstruct. He’d previously opposed the public option for completely counterfactual reasons; in fact, he seemed about as knowledgeable on the subject as trolling conservative commenters on John Scalzi’s blog. Why did Connecticutters vote this asshole back in?

James Nicoll’s Nightmarish Future

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Global health and wealth, with UN data mining and an amazingly skillful presentation of data.

For you Facebook users, this is a TED video from 2006. You can watch it here.

Randomness for 12/3

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1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.

2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.

3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.

4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.

5) I do not want to know.

6) Patrick Nielsen Hayden on HP Lovecraft, the founding of SF fandom, and friendships with people you’ve never met in person.

Randomness for 12/2

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1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.

2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.

3) “The slush pile seems, in some sense, to serve as a sort of representative sampling of the collective unconscious of the American public—a surreal landscape of vengeance, conspiracy, otherworldly beings, and really big guns. Sexual relations between ladies and gentlemen are fraught with peril (especially given that one or more participants in any romantic endeavor may very likely be aliens, demons, were-vampires, undead, or in a coma); queerness is almost nonexistent, as is any sort of radical politics (unless by “radical” one means “hoping to overthrow the government and install in its place a parliament selected by extraterrestrials from a more spiritually advanced dimension”); and people of color exist only as grotesque caricatures.”

4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.

5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.

6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.

7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.

Merry Oppressmas!

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SCROOGE WAS RIGHT! Libertarian professor tries to defend Ebenezer Scrooge’s miserlyness.

Scrooge is skeptical that many would prefer death to the workhouse, and he is unmoved by talk of the workhouse’s cheerlessness. He is right to be unmoved, for society’s provisions for the poor must be, well, Dickensian. The more pleasant the alternatives to gainful employment, the greater will be the number of people who seek these alternatives, and the fewer there will be who engage in productive labor. If society expects anyone to work, work had better be a lot more attractive than idleness.

Apparently, the professor thinks that people who lose their jobs and can’t find another should have their children taken away from them, just as they did in the workhouses. Hey, if the poor have children they can’t support, what’s it to him? He never forced anyone “to father children he is having difficulty supporting.”

It’s a pathetic display that gets worse as it goes along. Don’t read it. Seriously.

When he testified before Congress regarding Dr. Wertham’s claims about the supposed harmfulness of comics, William Gaines said: “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” I strongly suspect that it would be just as difficult the explain the deep satisfaction of charity to that sad, stunted author of that post.

Randomness for 11/19

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1) How many baboons could you take in a fight, armed with only a giant dildo? My score: 38.

2) The milk industry responds to the findings of Jamie Oliver’s nutritious school lunch experiment, which I linked to in a previous Randomness. Naturally, they claim (falsely) that kids won’t drink milk without a ton of chocolate and sugar. My own son drinks milk once in a while, but I imagine it isn’t nearly as often as the dairy lobby would like.

3) Men married to smart women live longer. via E.E. Knight

4) Economic stimulus that makes sense: Cash for Caulkers. via Ezra Klein

5) The dummy-slap heard round the internet: RWA revokes Harlequin’s preferred-publisher status over new vanity press. I link to Making Light because the RWA still has their open letter behind a member login, for whatever reason.