Entrusting Health Care To . . . Idiots?

Mitt "Headroom" Romney boasts of his healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

There's a swarm of flies in Mitt's ointment--doctors aren't signing up to treat patients under the plan. Here's why:

In Massachusetts, the state-subsidized plans, collectively called Commonwealth Care, are provided by private insurance companies. Patients can choose from among six options. Residents who make between one and three times the poverty level ($48,000 for a family of three) are now eligible for coverage under the plan. Doctors are reimbursed by insurance providers -- at below-market rates comparable with Medicaid reimbursements.

Imagine that. We could have government-sponsored steak at $ 1.59 per pound, or gasoline at $ 1.00 a gallon, but Exxon and Safeway won't play.

Would you trust your child's health to a doctor who was stupid enough to sign up for such a plan?

Mitt's supposed to have been a successful businessman. He must be lucky, because he sure don't know economics.

HT: Dr. Bob.

Fit for Active Service

Dr. Deb, who runs a mental health blog, retails a report that the Veterans Administration is deliberately misdiagnosing Iraq War vets with post-traumatic stress disorder as having personality disorders (not service-related), to avoid having to treat them.

Sounds plausible, given the way they are treating our veterans.

If true, it's disgusting, and the George Grosz drawing above, a satire on the German Imperial Army, is right on target. So much for "supporting the troops."

Bizarre Life Forms From the Depths of the Sea

Here.

Rest In Peace, Bat Boy

The Weekly World News, supermarket tabloid, is dead.

The website lives on, at least for the moment.

So sad. No other paper revealed that most of the U.S. Senate are aliens. It's the world's "only reliable newspaper."

More here.

Don't worry. American culcha is not maturing. Lindsay Lohan lives.

UPDATE: Another requiem here.

Totten From Baghdad

Michael Totten is an independent blogger-jounalist who goes places I don't care to, and provides photos and factual reports.

He's been in Baghdad recently, embedded, and provides this fascinating stuff.

Doesn't mean we're suddenly winning, but one unit in one neighborhood is doing rather well. I haven't suddenly become an optimist or backslid into interventionism, but the story appears to be accurate as far as it goes, and it's a positive one, worth a read.

Polynesian Follies Yet Again

French Polynesia's politicos are at it again.

It seems the "autonomist" (pro-French) group obtained a few defectors and threw out pro-independence President Oscar Temaru. Part of the deal, however, was that the Ferdinand Marcos of Polynesia, Gaston Flosse, would not be put back in office. Instead, Gaston Tong Sang was made President.

Now there has been a falling-out between the Gastons. Five ministers resigned, and Gaston No. 1 has been meeting with Oscar to strike a deal, to the dismay of many. The deal might provide for an independence referendum some time in the future, say 2028, when Gaston No. 1 and Oscar will either be dead or won't know what country they are living in, anyway.

Gaston No. 1 was a pal of former French President Jacques Chirac, who has problems of his own (a criminal investigation, now that he no longer has immunity). The French have let it be known that the highest level of subsidy might depend upon the return of some degree of political stability.

The French in Polynesia are a distinctly unpleasant bunch, but they do subsidize the place. The independence dilemma is that without the subsidies, even with fewer duties and trade preferences for the métropole, the economic would go to hell in a handbasket. Hence the independence faction is for independence--but not quite yet.

Don't count Gaston-Ferdinand out until he's dead--with a stake through the heart.

In WWII we flattened cities and interned an entire ethny, citizens and all. In the Cold War we banned the entry of communists into our country — and, as a matter of fact, the entry of long-inactive ex-communists and “fellow-travelers,” too.

There is no prospect of our doing such things in the War on Terror. We shall not be interning any Muslim citizens or excluding foreign Muslims or Muslim “fellow-travelers” (what would one of those look like? Karen Armstrong, perhaps), let alone annihilating any cities. It’s just not that big a war.

So far as military operations are concerned, our preferred means is counterinsurgency — the “surgical” winkling-out of jihadis from among civilian populations, with as few collateral casualties as possible. There is a respectable body of thought that argues this is a waste of time founded on illusions, that the only effective counterinsurgency techniques are those employed by the Romans, the Ottomans, and the Nazis.

Whether that is the case or not, these dainty means, with their dainty economic and diplomatic equivalents, are all we shall employ. The grosser means of earlier wars — carpet-bombing, ethnic internment, mass exclusion, government requisition of entire industries — are not appropriate. We all feel that instinctively. Why do we feel it? Because we know that the end — the suppression of a worldwide nuisance — is not really that important, except in the president’s flights of gassy rhetoric.

-- John Derbyshire

Smart guy, Derb. There's no hue and cry for conscription or tax surcharges, or anything like that. It's not World War III, or IV, or n.

Poignant

On a darkening winter afternoon I came to see them in their upstairs bedroom. His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of his bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many. I went out, crushed with sadness; and then Pamela, my wife-to-become, soothed me quietly: ‘They were together for so long; they are together now; in the same room; aware of each other; still alive.’

--John Lukacs of George and Annelise Kennan, quoted by Daniel McCarthy.

Yasser the Sod

Apparently Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

Natan Al Mahdi

Seen objectively, the aggression instigated by our political leaders against Iraq is no less motivated by a utopian, millennialist vision of how-the-world-must-be than the violence perpetrated by those who wish us all to be better off under the benevolence of a world caliphate. Evangelical liberal fundamentalism has led to rather more deaths in the world just recently than its fundamentalist Islamist counterpart: you might conclude that they are two sides of the same coin. This may seem to be an argument for cultural relativism of the worst kind; after all, we cleave to the values of liberal democracy because we know them to be right and thus worth fighting for — and, of course, imposing, at the point of a gun and a bomb, upon other people who may not yet have seen the light. Well, perhaps. But in which case it is difficult on objective grounds to adopt outraged expressions when those other people attempt to impose their equally implacable vision of how-the-world-must-be on us, at the point of a gun.

--Ron Liddle, again, via Larison

Once uttered, this point seems to me compelling. To spread "democracy and freedom" (not the same thing, BTW) at gunpoint (or worse, from pilotless drones) has a certain moral equivalency to spreading Bolshevism or Islam by the same means, or at least may be seen to have it.

This is not to say, lest some Giuliani seek an opening, that American policy, or even 200 years of European colonialism is responsible for 9/11 and its sequelae, merely that the eternal war for democratic freedom, without so much as a by-your-leave from the invaded populace, is in question, and some of what has transpired since is a reaction.

And Natan Sharansky is not the Mahdi.

English Snark Is the Finest

‘Al-Qa’eda brain surgeons fail to blow up large car full of petrol’ has an agreeable ring to it, as a sort of taunt at our enemies and as a comfort blanket while we’re standing in the mile-long queue at Heathrow with a sniffer-dog’s snout in our groins. . . Imagine: you join al-Qa’eda, take your medical exams, get a job in a British provincial hospital and spend years patiently plotting, awaiting the right moment and painstakingly growing your beard. An enormous investment of time, money and effort. And then you fill the car full of gasoline and propane and succeed only in setting yourself alight and incurring a few parking fines. Suicide bombers are, by definition, an evolutionary anomaly, a strictly counter-Darwinian development. Maybe the good gene pool has already been blown to smithereens and only the thickoes remain.

--Ron Liddle

HT--Larison.

Folk Motif Recycled or Real Life?

The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

--Michael Yon

This story is an old "folk motif"--a recurrent pattern found in folk tales and songs. These things are indexed by scholars, this particular one as G61.2--"mother recognizes child's flesh when it is served to be eaten." This motif appears in "The Merchant's Daughter":

Meanwhile, the ghouleh arrived with her guests. "Yee!" she exclaimed. "It looks like my daughter (Allah bless her!) has already slaughtered her and put her on the fire. And here, she's almost done. Allah bless my daughter!"

The food served, they sat down to eat, but the daughter's scalp came into the mother's hand and she recognized it. "Yee!" she screamed. This is her daughter (the distant one!).

I have great respect for Michael Yon, who is merely retailing what he was told, as he says. Whether this story is true or is a contemporary recycling of an old, old tale, I cannot venture to say.