The Health Care Mess and How We Got Here

This presentation is dedicated to the the distressed Anarcho-Capitalist on Reddit who asked, “How do old people afford health care unless the government provides it?” (For the uninitiated: an anarcho-capitalist is like a Libertarian, only even more so.)

Before World War II, most people paid cash to doctors. Many doctors were not wealthy, but those who were loyal to their patients and willing (and able) to stretch out their medical bills into regular payments were some of the most highly respected people in their communities.

Two forms of “health insurance” tended to exist:

1. Local mutual aid societies or unions offered health insurance, using their own members as a risk pool.
2. A group of doctors would form prepaid physician groups, charging members a low monthly rate for various future medical services.¹

All this changed during World War II. In 1943, the National War Labor Board had a problem. Price and wage controls were tight, but some businesses could not get the workers they needed. They could have upped the wages for those industries, but that was deemed "unfair."²

So: they decided that businesses could provide employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) to their employees, and it would not count as income.

Cute.

In 1951, the IRS decided to "keep" this classification (remember, the military draft would not end until 1973), which, all the Very Wise Men agreed, was awesome.

Note:

1. This provision was in place without benefit of Congress until 1954, since it was only a "regulation" and not a "law". (An inheritance from the American Progressives.)³
2. Congress implemented a 25 percent deduction for self-employed health insurance premiums in 1987 and made it permanent in 1994. The self-employed received even better news in 2003 when premiums became 100 percent deductible. You read that correctly: self-employed little guys did not get the tax break that General Motors and General Electric employees were getting since 1943.⁴
3. Many smaller businesses could not afford this kind of insurance at all.
4. Only very large or profitable businesses were wealthy enough to keep retirees on this insurance, the rest had to kick them off. ESI never covered more than 70% of American households.
5. For those who got kicked off their company's insurance, and who had therefore never saved money for health care, Medicare was created in 1965.
6. Social Security cost 2% of an employee's paycheck in 1936, doubling to 4% by 1954. From 1961 to 1971, it went from 6% to 10.4%. It finally topped out in 1990 at 15.3%.
   
7. Medicare was added to FICA (Federal Insurance "Contributions" Act, aka Social Security), which as of 1980 costs each employee 15.3%. FICA SS is capped ($137,700), so it is very regressive: it taxes low-earners more. FICA Medicare is uncapped.

The employee pays 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare. The employer “matches” that with 7.65% to FICA, the combined contribution totaling 15.3%. The maximum taxable earnings for employees as of 2020 is $137,700. There is no wage limit for Medicare.

Note also the following:

1. The system is a lie. It misrepresents how much you actually make at your job. In other words, it violates Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich von Hayek's discovery of the pricing mechanism as an information exchange. This will become important later.
2. After the 1970s, the idea of working for a single business for all your life began to die, fast. Technological innovation guaranteed that many businesses would become obsolete much quicker.
3. ESI also penalizes people who have one or two part-time jobs. (This is not necessarily poverty. A factory worker trying to break into web design, say, could sensibly work both jobs part-time until they make it as a designer.)
4. Since ESI only goes to people healthy enough to work, ESI discriminates against the elderly, the unemployed, children, the disabled, the chronically ill, and older job-seekers.
5. ESI discriminates against the self-employed, since one person cannot negotiate a better insurance deal than General Motors or UPS.
6. Thus, ESI inevitably favors Big Business and Big Government.
7. If you're sick, and you change jobs or get laid off, you now have a "pre-existing condition." In other words, you've just made what is an emergency in anyone's life worse.
8. Social Security does not provide enough for a cheap but comfortable retirement.
9. If you are an employee, you are paying twice the FICA you think you are paying: 15.3%.⁵ (An additional tax, the Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9%, is levied on any income in excess of $200,000.)⁶
10. For retirement, FedGuv offers 401(k)s which are basically "Wall Street LARPing". If I recited stories to you of real people who have retired only to see their 401(k)s collapse, you would sweat blood.
11. According to my pay slips, my employer paid $11,000 a year for my health insurance. When a tooth cracked in half six months after I was laid off, I suddenly had no way to pay for it. I was employed there for six years. Does that make any sense?
12. We used to have a Social Security Trust Fund. It had no money in it, just a pile of Treasury bills (T-bills, or debt notes) that said, in the fine print, "We the Government of the USA promise to pay this bill by taxing your children and grandchildren until they bleed from the eyes." Some people are still salty that this fake "Trust Fund" was eliminated.

Note that the pre-dominant U.S. health care insurance system combines Socialism (FICA) with neo-Feudalism (ESI). There is nothing capitalist about it.

Currently, "a male average earner who retired at age 65 in 2010 paid out $345,000 in total Social Security and Medicare taxes, but will receive $417,000 in total lifetime benefits ($464,000 for a woman)."⁷

Interest rates worked out by Calculator.net's Interest Calculator:

Savings accounts at 3% compounded yearly

Yearly pay	$15.00/hr × 40hrs × 50wks ────────── $30,000	$20.00/hr × 40hrs × 50wks ────────── $40,000	"average" Social Security 0.903% interest (1.4% if female)
Payout at current FICA rates	× .153 ────────── $4,590	× .153 ────────── $6,120	────────── $8,625
Total payments	× 40 yrs ────────── $183,600	× 40 yrs ────────── $244,800	× 40 yrs ────────── $345,000
Interest	+ $172,875	+ $230,499	+ $72,050
Total	────────── $356,475	────────── $475,299	────────── $417,050

Cannon and Tanner of Cato.org reviewed the industrialized world's health care systems in Replacing Obamacare. The care they provide ranges from mediocre to poor, but all are brutally expensive.

How can America do better? First, we assume:

1. People save money for emergencies.
2. Assuming you don't get hit by a bus or die of a heart attack (really, quite rare), you will die of old age.
3. Being old is just another health emergency: the elderly are unable to work as hard as they used to (or at all).
4. You will probably need medical care to make sure you live to see old age in the first place.
5. In other words, monies saved for retirement and monies saved for medical emergencies are identical. Once they took our retirement savings (FICA), of course they had to start socializing health care.

So: What would a capitalist retirement and health care plan look like?

It's hard to convince some people to save money, out of their own short-sightedness, or out of sheer bloody-mindedness. But these are often the same people who hate their jobs and would like to retire early. Combining an HSA with retirement funds helps even undermotivated people save for medical emergencies and retirement.

Using retirement as a second use for a HSA funds, the HRSA, creates price competition. Perhaps only two-thirds of our 140 million households will look at a doctor's prices while weighing their retirement, but we don't need every last person to be a "super predator" consumer. We just need enough of them to force prices down.

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) have been small accounts since Bush created HSAs in 2003 (revising a previous 1996 program). It's a typical GOPe plan: leave the fundamental disease in place, but slap a band-aid on top of it. Obamacare actually knee-capped HSAs, which still exist, but in a currently useless form:

• 2014, HSAs Under the Affordable Care Act. ACA better than feared over HSAs, but see below.
• 2016, HSAs Under Attack In Obamacare Exchanges. Remember, ACA was founded on the idea of filtering all your health care through a third party, an insurance company. This was mandatory and you could be fined for not having health insurance. HSAs clogged the process of taking your money from you at gun point and giving it to the insurance company.
• 2017, Nine Unfortunate Facts of HSAs. This is a damning list. The big one: you cannot buy insurance with your HSA (you can only pay for COBRA extension insurance, which is ungodly expensive).
• 2018, Obamacare’s Cost Sharing Is Too High, Even for HSAs. "Only 30 percent of plans sold on the federal Obamacare exchange meet the criteria of having both a high-enough deductible and a low-enough out-of-pocket limit to qualify as HSA-compatible."

How do we turn HSAs into something useful?

By exploiting capitalism, and by pushing the responsibility and benefits of saving for your health care and retirement as low as possible:

1. We create Health and Retirement Savings Accounts: HRSAs. Up to a cap, any deposits into them, and any earned interest, are tax-free. This cap is per dependent, say, $400,000.
2. (We might want to add a proper retirement savings account, where you would pay 50% of income tax on deposits, and then half of income tax on withdrawals, up to another $200,000, but this is not the core of HRSAs.)
3. You are not allowed to withdraw any money from your HRSA unless to pay for
   1. medical care,
   2. health/disability insurance, or
   3. retirement.
4. We redirect FICA and your ESI (if you have any) to your new HRSA.
5. You may donate freely to direct line descendants, or your direct forebears (parents and grandparents) with court permission.
6. In fact, if you have kids, you will probably need to. If you and your spouse have two kids, and you've managed to accumulate $1,500,000 in your HRSA, and the two kids move out and get jobs, you will be presented with a whopping tax bill on $700,000 of your HRSA unless you take $700K of your account and put it into your kids' HRSAs.
7. You or your employer are allowed to pay more into your HRSA, up to, say, 30% of your income that year, up to a certain cap, say, $30K a year.
8. We outlaw ESI and 401(k)s. Also employer pensions except to military (and maybe police), since we may need to guarantee the military's loyalty and obedience. You want to play the stock market? Fine, but use your post-tax earnings, please.
9. All government officials, elected or appointed, would be on HRSAs, just like you. They would have a direct interest in making HRSAs work.
10. Retirement cuts in at 65. We just divide your total HRSA by how many more months you are going to live, and you can withdraw 80% of that. (In case you beat the stats.)
11. If you discover you have a disease that will kill you at age 50, you can apply to a court to access your savings early or adjust your FICA rate.
12. You might go your entire working life without making more than 5-6 claims on your health insurance. You would need HI only for true emergencies (broken bones, cancer, cardiac arrest, disability, &c.), but you would still get the tax benefit for all your other medical care.
13. Since spending more on health care would make it harder to retire, intense price competition for medical care would ensue. Currently, your doctors, your employers' insurers, and hospitals conspire to drive prices up.

But how would you transition to an HRSA system?

1. The current U.S. national debt is $23 trillion. If we take $345,000 as the average FICA pay in, and halve it, for 140 million households, we get a little over $24 trillion. Paying our current "owed" FICA into people's HRSAs would double the U.S. debt.
2. But: the Federal deficit would fall, since most entitlements would cease. (Social Security and Medicare ($1.3 trillion a year alone), Medicaid, Obamacare, State Children's Health Insurance Program, &c.)
3. Many people would start spending immediately: the sick, the old. However, many people would start saving more. (Putting more into Social Security gets you a little, saving more into your HRSA gets you a lot.)
4. An HRSA system would immediately lower the cost of borrowing money. Austrian economics says the solution to stagflation is saving more money.
5. A five-year amnesty for pre-existing conditions would accompany the establishment of the HRSA system.
6. A HRSA system would immediately incentivize a strong dollar. "Quantitative easing" would end.
7. The private HRSA banks would stop borrowing money from the Federal Reserve. They would have plenty of cash reserves (and would probably own a lot of T-bills).
8. Did you know FedGuv controlled how many hospitals and ERs are allowed to operate in any area? Shouldn't the market decide that? That would save a lot of money. Many health care regulations would need to be repealed.

Wouldn't this benefit mostly rich people?

The more money rich people put into HRSA, the less tax benefit they receive. Once they hit the cap, they would pay full income tax. If they start throwing cash into their children's and granchildren's HRSAs, they will simply be guaranteeing that all their descendants will be paying the full income tax.

How would you pay back the $24 trillion?

We would lose FICA and Medicare receipts, but we would no longer be paying out FICA and Medicare. We could also close a lot of other health care entitlements. We'd also be paying a lot less interest on the national debt, since the cost of borrowing would drop.

But: If the cost of health care drops, investment in more profitable economic sectors would take off. It would be necessary to either trim the U.S. budget or temporarily raise the income tax. However, since the cost of capital would be driven down, this would not crush economic growth.

Can we test this first?

It should be possible to leave half of the states in FICA/Social Security/ESI/ACA, and let the other half experiment with a HRSA system.

---

1. Chapin, Christy Ford, May 2020. "How Doctors Broke Health Care and politicians made things even worse," Reason.com. ↩
   
2. Wikipedia, Health insurance in the United States, late 2019. ↩
   
3. U.S. Health Policy Gateway. "VI. Key Issues: Financing and Delivery >> C. Health Financing," accessed May 2020. ↩
   
4. healthinsurance.org. "Self-employed health insurance deduction: Deduction for the self-employed isn’t new," accessed May 2020. ↩
   
5. IRS. "Social Security & Medicare Tax Rates" (historical). ↩
   
6. IRS. Topic No. 751 Social Security and Medicare Withholding Rates. ↩
   
7. Whelehan, Barbara, Jan. 7, 2011. "Social Security benefits vs. taxes," from the Urban Institute. ↩
   

Modern Grotesque

Stephen Green compares, properly, San Francisco's Planning Commission to the Red Guards: “In a 5–0 vote, it ordered Johnston to build an exact replica of the house he destroyed, save for the addition of a new plaque explaining the details of the building’s demolition and reconstruction.”
“Mao would have understand the purpose behind the plaque,” Mr Green writes. But it gets funnier when you read the witnesses for the defense of that poor, defenseless house:

Despite its international renown, Neutra’s work has sparked intense preservation battles.

I bet. The 1935 house is nothing but a white concrete block blob with those glass bricks, all done with the true modernist's disdain for symmetry and organic flow. All Neutra’s houses on That Wiki are sharp-cornered cubes, right down to the edges where the swimming pools meet the concrete walk ways, exactly the kind of environment you want for small children:

Like so many Neutra houses, Largent is now all white, although it may well have once been unpainted cement block and redwood siding...

So it was uglier before...?

While Neutra houses are thick on the ground in the Los Angeles area, there are only five in San Francisco...

I'm getting Delta smelt vibes here: “We have thick populations of Neutra smelt in L.A., but few in San Francisco, therefore we must assume that Neutra smelt should be living in the latter.”

To make looking at Neutra in San Francisco a little easier...

Good luck.

“It speaks to an attitude in our planning and building departments that nothing is sacred,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin, an advocate for affordable housing...

What exactly is a partisan hack and single-issue lobbyist, for that must be what Mr Peskin surely is, doing advocating for the sacred? And why does that quality exist in a single-family home? Is he pushing for the castle doctrine in the Bay Area? (If so, good for him.) I also love “advocate for affordable housing.” You mean, “housing”? All homes, unless built by the government, are sold (must be) and so are affordable. It becomes more affordable to more people the older and seedier it gets, until it finally drops below the habitability of a slum and is razed and replaced. Is Mr Peskin advocating for purpose-built slums?

One Barbara Lamprecht, in a video linked on one of the two pages above, says about another Neutra house that the second-floor view used to enjoy a closer shoreline and a flooded first-floor roof which created a seamless water view from the base of the window to the far lake shore. This destruction of boundaries contrasts very harshly with her claim that Neutra was inspired by evolutionary psychology and that our artificial environments should reflect the African veldt. Apparently, those Africans in the old National Geographic pictorials were a decadent bourgeoisie, because many of them lived in walled villages.

Further amusement is provided in the sidebar, with a picture of the demolished Neutra right below an in-site link to the article, “Curbed SF's most beautiful homes of 2018,” illustrated with a classic 1885 “Italianate villa in wood,” the Gable Mansion in no-kidding Yolo County, that the website tellingly admits is the “most jaw-dropping” on that list. Richard Neutra’s lopsided “Darling House” at #8 would have been rejected for a storage shed in the Victorian Age, and somehow was not chosen to lure the reader into the article.

But even this gets better: the list-icle starts with, “how often does one get to see designs by Angela Danadjieva, Daniel Liebermann, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, and—blessed be—Ettore Sottsass on the market in the same year?” Can you spot the Wiccan? How blessed is the owner-occupant of a genuine Ettore Sottsass? You be the judge.

I always say I didn't have any choice in which architect to use. Sottsass would have killed me if I didn't have him design my house.

“Moderates get the bullet too.”

Pete Seeger's "Firefly"

Whilst browsing Reddit (I know, I know), I read:

Firefly is a space cowboy metaphor for the rise of the south

Rise? More like Reconstruction, only the Union is lily-white and the Confederacy is racially integrated. (The total absence of Chinese actors in FF is still one of the Eight Wonders of Hollywood, unless Sino-American rule is divided, like Niven & Pournelle’s US-Soviet CoDominium.)

Joss Whedon traffics in emotional manipulation without internal logic. Buffy seasons 2-3 were the best ones because probably the last thing Whedon "got" was high school. He's the Pete Seeger of our generation:

There is a steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always carefully disguised as American.

Ah, Hiram. You could have been a hero, with just a slight attitude adjustment. Oh, well.

Consider "Heart of Gold." Consider how little time was spent thinking this stuff out in favor of mindless "white patriarchal cis-het scumlord" bigotry. What is the policy of the Companions Guild towards pregnancy? Unless contraception is mandatory and enforced, they must have some of the busiest uteri in the 'Verse.

If not, what happens to men who find out their usual girl has suddenly taken a ten month vacation? Surely some of them want those kids? Companions are expensive; surely the men who hire them are wealthy, which means many of them are also powerful. Does male birth control exist? Is the assumption that, if you knock up a girl outside of marriage (or something like a pre-nup) the male gets no control over the kid?

But just saying a guy has no legal rights doesn't eliminate all trouble. Does the Guild have no rules, or strong social mores, against handing the kids over to the dads? If they don't, then you've just set the rule, "Any baby between a Companion and client is the Companion's unless you manage to convince her otherwise. That is like setting a rule that may not be changed unless your kids whine at you really hard.

And, of course, Burgess’ immediate stooping to violence is mindless. Whatever happened to rich men buying their way out of trouble? Is this hooker really turning down her own small house in town, and regular opportunities to see her kid? If Burgess is really this violent and crazy, why bang him in the first place? Does he really have no enemies?

"Oh, look, there’s a space ship! Hey, Spreads-Her-Legs-For-Cash, why not waddle onto that ship and get off the planet controlled by the psycho-killer and have that kid somewhere else? You know, so everyone else can live through this?"

The attack? It's the worst! Any halfway decent corporal would:

1. put Mal, Zoe and Jane in three covered foxholes, in a short arc, between the town and the brothel, close enough to mutually support;
2. put Book, Simon or both on a hill near town to observe the enemy forces departing for the engagement, and/or
3. launch Serenity for observation/air power;
4. wait for Burgess’ land speeder to pass over the foxholes, then
5. shoot the SOB in the back.
6. And everyone flying in with him, too.
7. Then knock over the local bank.
8. Then run like Hell.

Because God loves him who loves his kill box.

The dumbest, greenest U.S. Army private would know their best bet is to get out of the house. And yet our lovable gang of idiots failed to use the most basic military tactics! No wonder the Browncoats lost: they deserved to.

And where is Mrs Sterile in all this? Yes, yes, I know, unFeminist Women Have No Agency. But is she really incapable of seeing how a deal between her and the hooker would advantage both? Failing that, why not pop over to the brothel for a quick visit, and when your hostess politely hands you your  cup of tea, whip out a derringer and put two bullets in that swollen belly? Now that would be a real public service announcement on the evils of prostitution.

"Girls and boys as young as twelve may begin training..." What happens if they quit at 19? Who pays for all that training? Also, I'm impressed that Islam was extinguished before they left Earth; otherwise the "Madrassa," AKA Inara's Hooker High, would have a sign, "Incoming mujahideen please use service entrance."

Weekly post

I’ll just update this post as the week goes by.

David Cole of Takimag is a treasure of un-PC thought:

Get the joke? Van Der Mark claimed that Jews were using people of color to do their bidding, and in response a bunch of Jews used people of color to do their bidding. … And what we’re left with is a story with no good guys.

Be sure to read his two linked posts: “The Negro Jim Conley’s Baadasssss Song,” and “Deserve’s Got Nothin’ to Do With It, Precious.” (Cole is King of the Title Mash-Ups.)

Ace of Spades HQ links to former Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s “To Save the Republic, Robert Mueller and the Deep State Must be Stopped”; describes what order he hopes the God Emperor will give the FBI; and links to Hot Air’s “Andrew McCarthy: The DOJ’s disparate treatment of Trump and Clinton.”

Via Instapundit: Stefan Halper is the name of the spy/agent provocateur that Obama's intelligence officers had used on the Trump campaign.

Vox Day excoriates Ben Shapiro, and recites a lesson on democracy from the Risorgimento at the blog and on the Dark Stream:



As I noted, “If Halper et al. were ‘merely’ spying, or sowing dissent, American standing will be 98% untouched, though there will (I hope) be domestic hell to pay. If votes were suppressed/altered, hang on to your butt.”

A Russian’s Devastating Verdict on Norway: Bruce Bawer, American ex-pat, Norwegian citizen, became a Russian bot/Putin stooge so slowly I hardly noticed.

Glenn Reynolds: school shootings are now a competition for media coverage. Of course, journalists are unfocused, indecisive untermenschen (the science is settled!) so don’t expect them to mend their ways.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders rubs it in: “Democrats are losing their war against women in the Trump administration.”

Paul Gottfried reviews Jonah Goldberg

Paul Gottfried, the true father of the alt right, reviews Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West:

Goldberg has crassly stolen the title of James Burnham’s great work… Goldberg’s random opinions represent the very pathology that Burnham railed against. Goldberg hates national identities (although he makes an exception for Israel), opponents of the Deep State, immigration patriots, and those who imagine that democracy has something to do with the popular will… Goldberg identifies “conservatism” with resisting Donald Trump.

 Hat tip to Vox Day.

R.I.P. Adam Parfrey from David Cole

David Cole, author of Republican Party Animal, remembers Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House, editor and publisher of Apocalypse Culture:

But something about him changed after the 2016 election. He became obsessively, humorlessly anti-Trump… Adam always loved the idea of anarchy, of mixing things up, of overturning the old order… surely he could appreciate the absurdity, the surrealism, of the current situation. Surely he could embrace the chaos… It kills me that I’ll never have that conversation.

Surely that was why he was anti-Trump: so long as this culture war rages, Parfrey had made a living from it. A restoration of the old American modus vivendi would return the old bourgeois ascendancy to power, end the chaos, and knock the weirdos down from cult leaders to individual eccentrics. The Democrats simply did not threaten Parfrey the way a Trump or the insurgent Right does (though a few decades under under the Socialist pillow might have changed his mind).

But Apocalypse Culture is a fascinating book, and you should read it. (A fun game: look over the political landscape and try to determine who would ban it if they could.)

Spengler (AKA David P. Goldman) reviews Frederick Crews’s Making of an Illusion:

Crews has here misread both Nietzsche and Freud… Nietzsche did not say that Christianity was the revenge of the weak against the strong; he wrote (in 1887’s The Genealogy of Morals) that Christianity was Jewish revenge on the pagan world… Freud read Nietzsche more carefully than Crews… Freud’s argument that “hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity” in my view is on the mark.

Mollie Hemingway lists “Ten takeaways from the New York Times’ defense of FBI spying on Trump”:

The New York Times writes, “Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. ‘I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,’ Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.”

There are multiple problems with this claim. For one, Strzok wrote that text in all caps with obvious eagerness. As the Wall Street Journal noted months ago, “Mr. Strzok emphasized the seriousness with which he viewed the allegations in a message to Ms. Page on Aug. 11, just a few days before the ‘insurance’ text. ‘OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS,’ he texted.”

Slightly different. And the Ace of Spades asks, “Was it all a set up, from the very start?”

Via Instapundit:

• A collection of tweets from the people leaking their source about the dangers of leaking their source.
• The piece is tailored to Bowles’ message: Peterson is a horrifying misogynist. Her evidence of this is that lots of young men listen to Peterson, and that Peterson believes in innate differences between men and women. She then proceeds to snip his comments, surround them with her suggestive perspective, and roll the whole ball of wax into an anti-Peterson grenade.
• Man ‘firing gun and ranting about Trump’ shot by police at Trump National Doral, gunman ID’d.
• Wolfe was flummoxed, Grass silent as their co-panelists described the nightmares and injustices taking place outside the hall. "Suddenly," Wolfe recollected, "I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: ‘My God, what are you talking about? We're in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!"

The Federalist: “For instance, to write Back to Blood Tom Wolfe spent five years traveling to and from Miami, living for months there and interviewing everybody in sight, going to every neighborhood.”

More from the Fed: “New Data Show California Kids’ Math Achievement Took A Nosedive After Common Core.” Because redefining “college-ready” down is a risk-free strategy.

Male Feminist Ally: Anorexia is bad for girls, great for boys

Reason continues to cover itself in shame, then glory with two story pairs:

• “Incels Are the Product of an Incomplete Sexual Revolution” (“The sexual industry in the broadest sense hasn't matured enough yet to cater to the myriad and diverse needs of lonely single people”),
• “Tom Wolfe Is Dead but the 'Me Decade' Lives On (and That's a Good Thing),” according to whom?, 
• “The Intellectual Dark Web and Its Heretics,” wherein Reason comes near to Vox Day's tone on Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin et al. (i.e., not-so-dark and a lot more Left than you may be lead to believe), and
• “2 New Court Decisions Are Quietly Eliminating Californians’ Second Amendment Rights”

But let’s take a look at the feminist ally over at the New York Times: “Welcome to the Age of the Twink.” First, in the name of Good Journalism, we are reminded of a (very hot) gay male sex scene in a movie (I can only assume). Then, we are reminded that Straight Males Acting Gay Is The Second Best Thing Ever, just under the latest revelation that Some Guys Are Twinks.

We are then treated to some shabby etymology (“it’s a vulgar riff on the cream-filled Hostess snack...”) No, it is not vulgar (though the pun is definitely there), it is exactly analogous to the slang term “cream puff,” only in a milieu of gay males instead of soft-touch high school teachers.

We are then treated to some twink fan-girling before the Weighty Conclusion:

Female body types have always cycled in and out of style

So have male types. Woman have very definite tastes in male beauty, and fads have come and gone. (Remember Camille Paglia raving over “the narrowness of Cary Grant’s pumps”?)

alternatives to the ideal of imposing [male] physicality have usually been ignored or lampooned.

Hundreds of thousands of male nudes of every shape adorn art museums, but the author may not be aware.

But as women continue to use their voices to undo that legacy of toxic masculinity

/voms

These twinks, after all, aren’t just enviably lean boys or the latest unrealistic gay fantasy, but a new answer to the problem of what makes a man.

Oh, unholy Hell, I could unpack this for months. But to start: no, they are no part of any answer on “what makes a man” except, “a temporary stage on some guys’ paths to manhood.” Yes, some of them will still be beanpoles when they are fifty but most of them will not. (Where do they report to turn in their Numale ID cards? And will we gather outside Twink HQ chanting “Carousel! Carousel!”)

Isn’t “unrealistic” the very definition of “fantasy”? (Not all gay share this fantasy and wow, that was insulting.) And “enviably lean boys”: if you swapped the sexes in this article, feminists would REEEE!! themselves to death in the rush to accuse you of promoting anorexia. (And if you admire a fit woman with a nice layer of subcutaneous fat, you're a “beach body ready” fascist.)

2 dead at Central Michigan U. Subject quietly dropped.

19 year-old black man shoots both of his parents dead, mainstream media blackout frenzy still in progress.

Murdering Trump with your mother-in-law’s cookies and East Asian Realpolitik

Tablet magazine is usually rather good, but today…

• Kassam Eid accuses Samantha Power, Ben “Dem Gullible MSM” Rhodes and Barack Obama of “covering up the evidence of war crimes and genocide in Syria and twisting facts to serve their political agenda and public image.” Trump is praised for exposing this deceit.
• Also Tablet: “((Brit))) writes TIMELY book about how killing a Trump-like politician would be so TIMELY.”
• Tablet coup de grâce: woman drones on in print about tossing her mother-in-law’s cookies. The Mob has shorter grudges, and I’m damn sure even their stories without body counts are more entertaining: “I never made them while she was still alive because I could never have subjected myself to her comments after tasting one… My mother-in-law complained about everyone’s baking except her own… I did not willingly bake for my mother-in-law until the year before she died.”

These articles were all on the same page.

Strategy Page writes: “European nations have a problems with the many widows and children of ISIL fighters now under arrest in Syria and Iraq. Many of these widows are asking to be returned to their European homelands…” Those aren’t their homelands.

“European nations have finally come around to acknowledging that Islamic radicals and their supporters, especially those in Europe, are eager to radicalize their children and produce another generation of Europe based Islamic terrorists. For a long time European governments either ignored or denied this.”

Also Strategy Page: North Korea steals South Korean war plans, realize they’re screwed.

Emperor Xi Jinping pushes for removal of term limits, tightens his control.

Laura Southern on South Africa's Farm Murders

You can read more about the ANC’s imminent South African race war here.



Jeanine’s story:







The crazy politicians stoking the hate:







Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have a long talk about South Africa and the ANC:

Culture: support, extend, transform

I get Jordan B. Peterson’s point here but not his larger point:

Who are you accusing of doing nothing to support their own culture? The far right? On what basis? As far as I've ever seen, the dominant criticism of the far right is that they seek to support their own culture too much, not too little.

— Amy VanHym (@AmyVanHym) November 28, 2017

"When someone is proud of his culture despite having done nothing to support it, extend it or transform it." I suppose everyone I know could write a novella, a short story, a poem, or a comic book, but not one in a thousand could write one that others would willingly read. Still, I have frequented fanfic communities (to pick a random group), and will testify that, yes, Sturgeon's Iron Law is still valid, but some people do manage to bang out readable, enjoyable fiction, and, further, a few people in those communities can write fiction that one reads, keeps, and adopts, whether as a favorite story or a model for one’s own writing.

To write something that other people adopt, even a few people, even in a transient fan community, is truly an achievement that extends one’s culture, at any scale. But not one in ten thousand can achieve this, and many who can never do: too busy, too discouraged, too, too … gainfully employed.

And to transform one’s culture, I think perhaps no nation on Earth has ever had more than ten of those creatures alive any given instant, even including science and engineering, where a few Newtons and Maxwells are followed by diligent craftsmen working out the obscure, but life-changing, derivations of the giants’ ideas.

Finally, we come down to support. I wonder what Mr Peterson means here, since most of the neo-Reactionary/Alternative Right pay income taxes to the kinds of schools that hire Mr Petersons, and to Government Art Agencies that use their glorious, tax-funded largess to shove crucifixes into bottles of piss.

Does he refer to the support from men accomplished at working in the heavy, frictious world of things, where piles of lumber stubbornly refuse to become houses without large inputs of thought and work, where “cleanliness is next to Godliness” fights the Second Law of thermodynamics, where the wrong kind of dirt changes building plans, causing us to mutter, as we have since time out of mind, “The Devil is in the details”?

Does he refer to the ad hoc funding Joshua Bell famously failed to receive in the D.C. Metro? Or the education that relegated classical music to “dead, white male” status?

Does he refer to the paying audiences that gave American television, movies and music a global reach?

Call me “curious red.”

Roy Moore loss

Everyone starts with the primary, but that is too late.

Luther Strange lost the Alabama Lt. Governor election to a Democrat, then later won Attorney General, a much lower profile. He won one AG incumbency, but incumbents are a different beast so I do not count them.

So, a candidate with a 50% loss rate is run for a U.S. Senate seat. Like George H. W. Bush, he had little electability.

Strange took 33% in primary, while Moore got only 39% (Also like Akin, who got 35% in primary, with two opponents each with 32%.) Moore took the run-off 55-45. The bottom line:

1. The loss begins with the governor nominating his AG, a move supported by Karl Rove.
2. It continues with Moore failing to defend himself effectively. He can't even stop his wife from babbling "some of our best friends are Jews." (My God, it's CURRENT_YEAR!)

As we saw with Akin, good Christian credentials are important in the South, and elsewhere. But "too much Jesus" does really exist.

Now: candidates like Moore and Akin are fundamentally unavoidable. So long as we have primaries, we will have them, but the Party is expected to head them off without calling its own voters bigots or religious nuts.

The National GOP should have been at the governor's door, asking his price for a solid Senate candidate, as opposed to a buddy.

You can also lay a little blame at Trump's door. He should have asked about the possible replacement for Sessions. I am sure he won't make that mistake again. I feel bad for him, he must be seeing US CEO as a completely thankless job.

Blinded by a nostalgic glow: Three times Acculturated magazine doesn't get parenting

Not unlike Robert Conquest’s Three Laws, I have my own rule: any group of social conservatives, unless radicalized, substitute mindless nostalgia for socio-economic repair or innovation, and brainless speculation for close observation. Three examples:

If parents didn’t give their children chores and make them participate in housekeeping, lawn care, and home repairs, or if they outsourced those things altogether, why should they point and laugh at millennials who need tutorials on doing laundry, using lawn mowers, and fixing faucets?

… In their defense, older generations probably tried to do their children a favor by shielding them from the kind of challenging childhoods many of them endured … source

No. This is a result both of divorced parents, and of intact but two income families. You have a fixed amount of time for the kids, and you must spend it on working, cooking, cleaning, home and auto maintenance, and all the rest. Teaching children how to do any of these increases the time to do them significantly, and cuts the time you could spend supervising homework. Also, teaching kids is best started young, when they are more pliable and obedient. Any long interruption of the learning habit may kill parental teaching permanently.

Consider two divorced parents: Mom lives in a home partly (perhaps fully) funded by child support. Dad lives in an apartment. Both are working. Dad knows how to fix homes and cars, but has no home and no garage space to work on the car. Mom hires it all out. Results: children unable to read a tape measure. Or consider reading a paper map: with one parent driving, one can teach map reading. It is always harder to do it alone.

No fictional “shielding” involved.

There have never been more advantages to relationships with older men, precisely because Tinder and its ilk have made dating feel impossible to those of us who don’t want to participate in the battle of who-cares-less. Reach back two decades and you are more likely to find a man who can’t fathom swiping through a series of pictures to find a mate for the night. source

Red Pill? Sexual market value? No radical, shocking truth, please, we’re innocuous. Bonus: note how Jessica regards the problems of same-age males as completely beyond her scope. Judgy Bitch was right: women find it very hard to care about men.

Could a Return to Old-Fashioned Dating Help Solve Our Sexual Harassment Problem?

No, damn it.

“It takes a heart of stone to read the social media death of Little Joss without laughing.”

Oh, feminism. Never change:

Xander, however? Xander is the poster-boy for white male entitlement.

In conclusion, Joss Whedon is often a good writer, except not always. He tries — he does — but he doesn’t really get it, not completely. And he never will until he surrounds himself with women… [emphases mine]

Pardonnez-moi? Would these be women like Marti Noxon, the woman (I presume, with only her pictures to judge) who wrote the Spike-Buffy assault scene these other women hate? Who wrote that scene based upon an attempted sexual assault from her own past? (With a huge twist I will not reveal here. And to be fair: most ByVS fans despised season six and that scene was a very big reason.)

Ecce feminist.

That’s it, Joss. Bathe the podium in F-rays. Activate those six social justice warriors I worked so hard on.

He’d have to be at full speed to dodge them all.

He isn’t. I watch as they kick him around for a few minutes.



I’ve had worse times.

(sauce)

Neither celibate nor prostituted: isn’t there a word for that?

Mises.org is wrong: Hitler traded extensively with the Soviet Union before Unternehmen Barbarossa. Weimar’s Sozialdemokratische Partei and the Catholic Zentrum did the same. In fact, Imperial Germany’s secret war manufactures were moved to the brand-new Soviet Union before the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

Once, since time out of mind, all men acknowledged that economic union was impossible without political union.

Postwar America accepted “free” trade (in reality, heavily restricted on both sides) with Japan and Germany only because our troops occupied Okinawa and Mitteleuropa. We paid this price for the benefit of ensuring the next war would be fought on someone else’s dirt.

If free trade is great, why does China not just import everything from the U.S.? Why manipulate its currency to keep cheap exports moving? Why should we thank them for this? Do they get nothing out of it?

Outlawing trade 100% would obviously damage America: isn’t it also obvious that zero restrictions on trade could also damage a nation? A mindless trade policy is probably a bad one; one based on slogans is hardly better.

I am incapable of hearing economists mewling about how we “enjoy” cheap Asian cars without wondering how they would react to cheap Asian heroin in their children’s schools. Or free “A”’s, awarded to the children without any effort.

Obviously, “cheap” is not an automatic good when applied to drugs or grades: why are cars different? Our industrial base is a precious, irreplaceable good; so is our employment base. Yes, there is a cost to keeping a certain amount of manufacturing in the US; we may be better off paying it. The Defense Department had a strict policy of building all weapons on American soil (does it still?). During WWII, almost all domestic manufacturers became war manufacturers. Would the US have been better off without those civilian manufacturers? Are we necessarily better off now without them?

Bloomberg: Donald Trump, Threat or Menace?

The impartiality of former New York mayor, former Republican, and full-time hoplophobe Michael Bloomberg is hard to impugn. Why, on their four-member Trump panel, he had:

1. David “Axis of Evil” Frum (#NeverTrump, senior editor of The Atlantic),
2. Michael Waldman (President, William J. “the Progressive Voice of SCOTUS” Brennan Center For Like Totally Nonpartisan Justice), and
3. cross-eyed Clive Crook (see his avatar on Bloomberg), old-hand pro (…I mean, journalist), who once breathed, “Flies any angel more impartial than Ezra Klein?” and who despises WaPo’s Fact Checker for being unfair to Obama.

(Sample articles: “Obama’s Failing Was a Lack of Ambition”; “Beating Trump Won’t Mend America”; “Chavez Proves Democracy Isn’t Enough”; “Trump’s Corrosive Incompetence on Migrants”; and “Consider This: Trump Might Be a Good President.” The last conceded only given record low expectations.)

Crook simpers:

I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate last night, speaking for the motion, “Give Trump a Chance.” My partner, Gayle Trotter, and I were soundly beaten by David Frum and Michael Waldman. Here’s the link: I think you’ll enjoy it.

Our side, I’m afraid, was a house divided against itself -- an enthusiastic Trump supporter and me, who agrees with Frum and Waldman that Trump was a terrible choice and is shaping up to be a terrible president.

Gayle Trotter was, I am serious, the only Trumpista on the panel, and she only got national visibility about three years ago. Did I mention Crook was on her pro-Trump team? Really, given those advantages, how could she lose?

CNN, Lemony Sticket and “Talcum X”

In order:

1. Accused of being white??? Did His Immaculate Hands actually make that a crime?
2. Legally black?? What the hell is that??
3. Sexism? Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King got lit up the same way at the same time.
4. Dolezal resigned as NAACP branch president, probably at their polite request. King is merely a columnist at a general newspaper: had his employer been an organization dedicated to black Americans’ welfare, he would probably have been removed as well. Lemony Sticket’s accusation of sexism (in favor of King) here is plainly below-the-brainstem.
5. Shaun King is clearly a liar but this is secondary to his white-hating ways (so odd to type that). This high school “hate crime” was completely dismissed by the police in 1995: the injuries were “minor” and he did not have “multiple spinal surgeries.” Six witnesses said the “attack” was a one-on-one fight.

No white people care if Rachel and Shaun run around pretending to be black. Yes, we think that’s bent, but prosecuting it would only publicize a bizarre behavior. Black people care, but that’s little of my business.

No, what we care about is Shaun and Rachel publishing their fantasies about hate crimes, directed at them, as true stories. (Talcum X’s fake attack, and “... at least eight documented hate crimes targeted Dolezal and her children.”) This is fomenting racial hatred, inciting a race war and in a real country, they would both be hanged for faking hate crimes.

The GOP is the Stupid Party

Political and other horror-show aficionados will recognize this as the moment just before the beast gets up and takes a giant bite out of Our Hero:

History is not bending toward acceptance of big government, nor is it moving toward submersion of national identity into globalism. — Michael Barone

Sounds nice.

Sure he can change Obama’s executive actions with a quick stroke of the pen. But rule changes require justification following a Reagan-era court case mandating that regulation changes aren’t done on a whim. — McClatchy

Wait, what?

As noted before, the Administrative Procedure Act takes, not power, but responsibility away from Congress. But the Devil is truly in the details.

To pass a law, Congress must pass the same Bill in both Houses. In the upper house, 60 Senators must vote for cloture to try and pass a bill with 51 votes (or 50 Senators plus the Vice-President). Two-thirds of both houses must pass the law if the President vetoes, of course.

To compare: when the Executive branch wants to pass a law (sorry, “rule”) it merely publishes it and waits six months. That is all: the Civil Service appointees have the power to simply have their desired rules materialize.

Now, let us suppose Congress wants to oppose, or repeal, some of these Executive “rules.” To prevent the new rules from becoming law, the Congress must act within six months, a deadline Congress does not benefit from. If the Senate wants a law and the House disagrees, the House is under no deadline to stop the Senate. They need not even vote: sheer inertia would defeat the Senate. Also, the Executive only needs the support of 41 Senators to pass a law. Remember: the Senate needs 60 votes to meet cloture. Only then may the Senate try and gin up 51 votes against the new rule.

To summarize: the Senate needs 60 votes to pass a Congressional law. The Executive only needs 41 Senate votes to pass an Executive law. Sorry, rule.

But now we see the new wrinkle: the Pentarchy, that bloc of the U.S. Supreme Court which is the true, independent and sole sovereign power in America, has decided that even the President of the United States cannot change Executive laws without the permission of the Civil Service. The President, as a mere elected official, must meet certain anti-“whim” qualifications before le sacre droit exécutif may be altered in the slightest.

Neither you nor I know what this 1980’s case law is. That should sound familiar: “Who rules the country? People whose names you would not recognize; that is why they run it.”

And the National Review still trips its little dance:

Jonathan Chait’s ill-timed forthcoming book argues that “in the eyes of history, Barack Obama will be viewed as one of America’s best and most accomplished presidents.” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently offered a two-hour special concluding that America failed its president: “It remains unclear if the country was ready for Barack Obama’s vision.” — Jim Geraghty

They can’t both be right. But, of course, they can. Because all the Democrats, or any pro-Statist party, needs to do is wait. Merely wait, and all they could desire will be handed to them by the Senate Forty-one, the Pentarchy of the Court, and the all-powerful Civil Service.

The Mystery Gang and the Spooky Miner ’49’er

The infamous pussy-spelunker of 2008, Andrew Sullivan has emerged to milk another load from the fatuous New York nomenklatura:

upended the two most stable democracies in the world

“Stable” can mean “stagnant.”

a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric.

It’s like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln or FDR never happened.

This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward.

… and Obama?

He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything.

It was a close election, and he owes “we, the people.”

He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him.

… Did we elect Trump or Albert Anastasia?

he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast.

Shocking.

They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart

/facepalms

The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept.

All of them can be kept. Tax rates are one part of America’s problem, another is the Federal Executive’s metastasizing, lawmaking bureaucracy. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme; Chile has a private retirement system that works quite well. We can create jobs.

But hope fades in turn when you realize how absolute and total his support clearly is.

/facepalms

And so there will have to be scapegoats — media institutions, the Fed, the “global conspiracy” of bankers and Davos muckety-mucks

All of whom will do better to cooperate with Trump than not.

his rankly anti-Semitic closing ad

Huh?

doubtless civilians who will be targeted by his ranks of followers

/facepalms

And then there will be a terror attack

QUELLE SURPRISE!!

there will be a clash between police and largely black protestors after another unarmed black man is shot.

(Nostradamus, thou shouldst be living at this hour!) The Dallas police chief said it: “if you’re black, and you want black patrolmen, join us.”

Then he will reinstate Guantánamo and capture prisoners and torture them until the truth he wants is extracted.

A hard line against Islamic jihadi terror is perhaps the best way to secure Muslims in America. Everyone else living here wants to feel secure.

the institutions he will have to destroy to achieve what he wants — an independent Department of Justice

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

our scientific institutions, and what’s left of free thought in our colleges and universities.

Ah, yes, precious little of that Left. Pardon the pun. And what did Eisenhower say about “the scientific-technological elite”? We’re far down that road following Presidents Sullivan boot-licks.

We will need to march peacefully on the streets… nonviolent civil disobedience.

BWAHAHAHAHA!! To do that, you’d really need to destroy the Left!

We must transcend racial and religious division

Whatever you do, don’t call Obama.

we will have to resist partisanship.

Resist partisanship, reverse gravity, push the toothpaste back in the tube. Whatever it takes!

In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president — whose grace feels now almost painful to recall

/facepalms

Someone saw it coming a long time ago:

George Washington did not want us to have political parties. He lived just before the age of a Loyal Opposition. Something the Democrats never quite mastered.

A country designed to resist tyranny has now embraced it.

A country fed up with a worthless, even dangerous, political class has hired the strongest man available, a man with no military experience, whose power is one entirely of personality, to clean its public house. A man with riches, unimaginable in Washington’s day, to return to, who needs no more. Bless him, and all who follow him.

Identity Considered Harmful

An identity is a thing assembled by cops while they look for a perpetrator, and then pin on you in court. The creation of LGBT, thought at the time to be a masterstroke, has metastasized into demisexual/asexual/and the 57 terrible varieties; what was supposed to be booths in a restaurant turned out to be vines covering the floor of a dark forest with too many lost people in it.

We were likely better off before Magnus Hirschfeld, having just People, and then a few who engaged in “perverse” behavior, or sodomy or what have you. Yes, the criminalizing of some kinds of perversity was a giant pain, but we were free of the less concrete, but more widespread and dreadful, terror of identity.

My “identity” is so fragmented that it could never serve me as a key into a community. My identity is purely contingent: a driver’s license here, a job reference there. I’ve never really thought about my identity and that is for the best, I am sure. Milo Yiannopoulos said Feminism is Cancer. So is Identity.

p.s. Do black Americans have an identity? Yes, I think many of them do, and most would be better off without it. Almost all black Americans feel the need to identify (note: verb) with other black Americans for self-defense. This is sensible and patriotic (and sad, for me, but all too understandable), but once children in school denounce studying as “white” you very clearly have An Identity (noun), and identity turns out to be the bullies’ tool. I recommend to my fellow citizens that they maintain their group cohesion but firmly put down any “black identitarianism” among them.)