How many art directors, assistant art directors, editors, fact-checkers, internes, and plain native English speakers of all kinds did this go through? Gentlepersons of The Economist, using the archaic -eth verb ending to sound olde-fashioned or biblical is pretty lame already, but using a third-person form with a plural subject just showeth you be as fools, and in 44 point type to boot. If you can’t say makes, you need to find a different silly affectation , and if you haven’t had training, don’t mess with the tools.
Posted: Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at
10:21 pm 4 Comments »
I had wrongly assumed that the initial case — in which a man with serious mental health problems collected and then released a zoo-full of potentially lethal animals — was so improbable that no new policies were needed to prevent a second such incident. Lightning like that doesn’t strike twice, I foolishly supposed.
What changed my mind was being called in to do a forensic mental health examination of a suspect in a similar case. I could not ethically write about it at the time, but now that the matter has been adjudicated, I am going to relate the story (obscuring identifying details) as I believe it is of broad public policy interest.
The case involved a 46-year old man with psychopathology in the schizoid cluster. He shunned most human contact and had a number of nervous tics, disturbing compulsions and strange ideas. He was also, as the only surviving heir of an old money family fortune, wealthy enough to indulge his psychiatric idiosyncracies, one of which was a desire to collect exotic animals. On the large otherwise abandoned family estate he gathered tigers, ostriches, alligators and an array of other outre beasts.
His prize possession was an 800,000 gallon pool with an artificial tide, in which he kept dolphins. Among his deranged ideas was that his dolphins would live forever if they were fed a diet of sea gulls. He secured a large delivery of the birds and walked straight towards the pool, with the intention of giving his dolphins eternal life. Unfortunately for him, another one of his pets — an old, tame lion — was dozing outside of his back door and he stumbled over this king of the beasts. The police arrested him immediately for Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at
6:38 pm 7 Comments »
One obvious way to help people economically is to reduce the prices of the stuff they buy by imposing legal caps. Rent, food, and gasoline all have been targets of such policies. In general they’re a dumb idea, because price controls create shortages and shortages lead to evasion, inefficiency, and unfairness. That’s both textbook intro-to-economics and standard conservative rhetoric against economically illiterate liberalism.
Kevin Drum points out that the centerpiece of Paul Ryan’s latest plan to destroy Medicare is simply a version of the same thing. Insurance companies would compete to sell health insurance to seniors. In lieu of Medicare, seniors would receive vouchers to buy insurance, with the value of the voucher set at the price offered by the second-lowest bidder.
But a different provision of the law – the part that’s supposed to keep federal spending down, which after all is the whole point from Ryan’s perspective – forbids the value of the vouchers from rising any faster than GDP growth plus half a percent a year.
So, Kevin asks, what happens if the second-lowest bid is higher than that? The proposal does nothing to constrain health care costs; the price cap is entirely arbitrary. So why should we believe there will always be two bidders at a sufficiently low price? Looks like just the latest version of Ryan’s magic asterisk: all the hard choices are to be announced later.
Any chance that an actual political reporter, or the moderator at the Vice Presidential debate, will ask this question and be able to insist on a coherent answer?
Posted: Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at
7:13 am 6 Comments »
MS Bellows Jr., writing in the Guardian, proposes a beautifully simple theory to explain Mitt Romney’s reticence about his tax returns: that his 2009 return would have shown him as a resident of La Jolla, CA, when he voted (in the crucial Coakley-Brown special election) as resident of his son’s basement in Belmont, MA.
Here’s hoping some enterprising reporter risks the Wrath of Romney by asking the question.
Posted: Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at
6:44 am 7 Comments »
But it’s worth noting that the publisher was reacting in part to the fact that other “Christian” historians denounced Barton’s work, rather than rallying around their teammate. It’s hard to overstate how much that matters. It means that they and I are – across a wide gulf of disagreement – still engaged in the same basic enterprise, along with the classicists and the microbiologists and the social psychologists: trying to make sense of the world and trying to tell the truth about what we have found. In a world where “Christian” politicians have mostly forsaken the liberating power of the truth and embraced in practice the post-modern notion that – since everything is contestable – there is no actual bedrock of fact and logic on which we can all stand together – it’s good to know that some “Christian” academics are still scholars first.
Footnote I put “Christian” in scare quotes not to challenge the sincerity or the orthodoxy of anyone’s beliefs, but to reject the market-segmentation strategy that would deny the term “Christian” to most of the Christian legacy. According the the current spurious categories, “Christian” books don’t include the works of Augustine or Erasmus or Tillich, and neither Byrd nor Bach wrote “Christian” music.
Posted: Friday, August 17th, 2012 at
2:38 pm 11 Comments »
Francis Bator taught me many valuable things in grad school, along with one priceless principle: the two-soprano rule.
As the judge in a singing contest,
never award the prize to the second soprano
having heard only the first.
Patrick Appel thinks Romney’s continued concealment of his tax returns is “a sign of stupidity.” Of course that’s possible, but Romney is by no means a stupid man in any ordinary sense of that term; one of his B-school classmates described him to me (privately, and without any affection for Romney) as “the smartest guy in the class.” Harvard B-School in 1970 wasn’t exactly the Institute for Advanced Study, but I’d be stunned if Romney had a measured IQ much below 145 135.
Yes, not releasing the tax returns has exposed Romney to endless heckling, and will continue to do so through November. (And Romney hasn’t helped himself by keeping the issue alive; if he’s standing mute, he should stand mute.)
But it would be reckless to jump to the conclusion that Romney is making a stupid mistake. The alternative possibility is that Romney and his handlers took a look at what was actually on the tax returns, pondered the natural follow-up questions, and decided that it was better for Romney to remain silent and be thought a scoundrel than to open your his mouth and remove all doubt.
Posted: Friday, August 17th, 2012 at
11:45 am 22 Comments »
Johann Koehler of Cambridge University is a criminologist, an innovative thinker and a lover of movies. His blog, The Phronetics, is a regular visiting ground for me. Knowing him as a film buff, I asked him to contribute a review of one of his favourites, The Sting. Over to Johann:
Fans of Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s pairing in 1969′s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would have been raring for a cinema ticket in 1973 to see Hollywood’s most bankable leading duo in George Roy Hill’s multiple Academy Award-winning The Sting.
The plot revolves around a desperate revenge story shrouded in fanciful con artist scheme-ery. After the murder of his mentor, Redford’s Johnny Hooker, an impulsive neophyte in the world of confidence schemes, looks to Newman’s Henry Gondorff for instruction and assistance in bringing about the demise of the villainous Doyle Lonnegan (impeccably played by Robert Shaw). Shaw projects the same unpredictable brutality he mastered as Henry VIII in Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 classic A Man for All Seasons and the Newman/Redford team deliver a characteristically heart-warming performance redolent of Butch and Sundance.
While the film has been rebuked for a plot that drags at times, one can’t help feeling eager to find out how the final scene’s con plays out. In truth, the ‘long con’ provides a deeply satisfying ending. In contrast to the ‘short con’, in which the con artist fleeces the mark for all that he has on his person, the ‘long con’ is a much more deliberate and vicious scheme. It requires that the mark be seduced into the con artist’s deception and to participate in the construction of his own demise. In so doing, he ultimately becomes both the perpetrator as well as the victim. Lonnegan thus becomes either the most unsympathetic villain, or the least, depending on your mood while watching the film.
Scott Joplin’s jolly ragtime music, anachronistically written two decades before The Sting is actually set, imbues the film with enough whimsy to conceal the bitterness of the underlying storyline. And for a master-class in comic acting, be sure to look out for Newman’s show-stealing drunken poker scene on the train.
Closing trivia note from Keith: The money that Rick Blaine gives up to a needy couple using number 22 on a rigged roulette wheel finally gets paid back by Johnny Hooker in this movie.
Claiming that gay people molest children is mainstream conservatism and “mainstream Christian advocacy,” so it’s wrong to call a group that uses that accusation to whip up hatred against gays a “hate group.”
If I were a Christian or a conservative, I’d resent that.
Footnote
One one point, Milbank borders on simple dishonesty. He quotes a 1999 FRC remark from the SPLC website, suggesting that SPLC is simply digging up stray decade-old remarks. But he omits this, from the same website, and attributed to the head of the FRC:
“While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. … It is a homosexual problem.”
— FRC President Tony Perkins, FRC website, 2010
“Mainstream”? Really?
Posted: Friday, August 17th, 2012 at
9:44 am 24 Comments »
This post (wonky and long) follows up on my previous one on private insurance options in Medicare. We health policy types have been wonking it out about premium support in Medicare given the selection of Rep. Ryan as Gov. Romney’s running mate. Austin asked via twitter:
The short version is that hospice should be able to work under a private insurance option in Medicare that preserves the option of Seniors remaining in traditional Medicare, though there is a policy oddity regarding hospice and the current Medicare Advantage (MA) program that would have to be changed. Further, there are also some less obvious ways in which our lack of a straightforward long term care financing system will complicate hospice policy for the elderly going forward, especially if you coupled premium support with a block granting of Medicaid that was designed to reduce federal expenditures. This post is an overview, and I will revisit some of these topics in more detail.
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