Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, December 14, 2025, and National Bouillabaisse Day. It is very cold today: 2°F, which is -17°C. Your hands start freezing within 15 seconds of exposure (I forgot my gloves!).
Hanukkah starts tonight at sundown and ends on Monday, December 22. Here’s Gal Gadot and Noa Tishby, two of my heartthrobs, discussing the holiday:
Here’s a bowl of that fish soup from Wikipedia, with the caption, “A version by three-star Lyon chef Paul Bocuse from his restaurant ‘Le Sud’.” You can bet this will cost you some. . .
It’s also National Screwdriver Day (the drink), Monkey Day, Roast Chestnuts Day (where can I find them?), and National Biscuits and Gravy Day, a great indigenous American food.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 14 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Two shootings occurred yesterday: one at Brown University killed two people and injured nine, and at last ten people were killed by snipers on Bondi Beach, Australia, during a Jewish celebration; it appears to be a targeted attack. More in tomorrow’s Nooz. Things are horrible everywhere.
*The government closed because Congress could not agree on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies. Now that Congress is back in session, it’s clear that this doesn’t mean a compromise is in the works. The Senate has rejected both Democratic and Republican plans, guaranteeing that premiums will go up at the end of the month, and presages yet another government closure in 2026.
The Senate rejected dueling health care bills Thursday, all but guaranteeing that Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans will lapse at the end of the year.
Senators voted 51-48 on advancing a GOP health care plan that would have expanded health savings accounts as an alternative to the expiring tax credits. Democrats’ plan to extend the Covid-era enhanced subsidies for three years also received a 51-48 vote. Both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed to vault a key procedural hurdle.
The votes both went largely, but not entirely, along party lines. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose the GOP plan. Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted to advance the Democrats’ health care plan. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who would have voted for the GOP plan, missed the votes.
. . . Thursday’s Senate votes were part of a deal Senate Majority Leader John Thune made with Democrats to end the government shutdown that ended last month. Senators have widely acknowledged for weeks that the votes were aimed more at messaging than forcing through passable bipartisan compromise.
Still, a deal in the Senate was likely Congress’ best shot at preventing the subsidies from lapsing and raising premiums for many Americans who buy their insurance directly through Affordable Care Act exchanges. While the lapse will not completely eliminate the tax credits, they will revert back to pre-pandemic levels and many families could still see their premiums rise by $1,000 a year or more.
If you look at how much people’s healthcare premiums will go up if a bill doesn’t pass, a fair estimate would be a doubling of the monthly rate, but for some people it will be much more—perhaps fourfold. It’s not right to play hob with people’s health for political gain, but it looks as if a compromise is not in the works.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan celebrates “Ten years of marriage equality“: the right of gays to marry which, a great moral advance, Sullivan largely helped to forge. He assesses what the movement gained and what it lost.
And then, of course, we’ve had ten years of nationwide marriage equality since 2015’s Obergefell decision — a cause I imagined, helped kick-start in 1989, and spent a quarter century arguing everywhere I could. It included my own civil marriage and, in true American fashion, my sad but amicable divorce more than a decade later.
“If you live long enough” is a cliché for a reason. And, against the odds, thanks to protease inhibitors, I did live long enough to see these two evolutions in media and society unfold. “Did they do more good than harm?” is a question I’ve found myself pondering in my third trimester of life. The media revolution? A truly mixed bag, I’d say, especially in the iPhone and now AI era. A story for another time.
But gay marriage? Personally, I feel I failed in my own journey, but nonetheless tried hard, and treasure the enduring love and deep friendship I still have with my ex-husband. My marriage helped me mature, grounded me more firmly, taught me what sacrifice and generosity can be. Maybe it will happen again.
And collectively? A much higher grade surely — with the caveat that we’ve only had a decade of evidence. My opponents feared it would destabilize marriage more generally. It didn’t. Marriage rates were 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 and 6.1 today — a decline in line with the previous half-century. Not great, but there’s no sign that gay marriage had any serious impact. Divorce rates? They have actually improved since 2015: from 3.1 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023.One small contributing factor is that divorce rates among gay men are actually lower than that for straight couples. Who predicted that? Certainly not Bill Kristol.
How has marriage affected these gay men and lesbians? It’s been a boon. Married couples have higher household incomes, lower poverty rates, higher levels of employment, better health than unmarried ones, higher home-ownership rates — and report greater social acceptance. Gay men have been thriving in education. . .
. . . . The queer activists, of course, loudly insisted that same-sex couples rejected the institution of marriage and would never join it. But the number of married gay men and lesbians more than doubled from 390,000 in 2015 to 823,000 now; and nearly 60 percent of same-sex cohabiting couples are now married, compared with 40 percent in domestic partnerships.How has this reform been greeted in the country at large? Gallup shows that support has grown from 58 to 69 percent. In 2024, the GOP removed opposition to gay marriage in its platform. A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.
As social reforms go, it’s hard to do better than this. It sure hasn’t been a panacea for marriage as a whole, but it has shored up the thing a bit and broadened its base. And then there are things for which there are no statistics. The young mercifully don’t know much of the immense psychic pain, deep spiritual anguish, emotional trauma, and intense self-hatred that the past contained for so many of us — a pain far worse for the countless generations before.
And the downside, involving the alphabet characterization:
The trouble, of course, is that success breeds its own set of problems. Successful civil rights movements — think of the mid-1960s — can radicalize and curdle. And as most normie gays got on with their lives, queer extremists duly took over the gay infrastructure and institutions, and the era of more general woke madness set in.
The goal was to re-marginalize us as “queer” again, to indoctrinate kids with leftist lies about human biology, and create an entirely fake history of gay and lesbian rights. Dissent was punished, old leaders ousted, and an ever-expanding alphabet of ever-more bizarre and niche identities — often approaching mental illness — replaced any idea of gay and lesbian identity.
They changed the flag and merged its colors with the BLM movement; they pioneered untested medical experiments on pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria, including gay and lesbian kids; they sterilized them and rendered many incapable of orgasm for life; they perverted the English language — “chest-feeding” anyone? — and tried to abolish the whole idea of homosexuality as a distinct human experience, in favor of their generalized, post-modern, intersectional queerness. And they replaced the principles of live-and-let-live by forcing others to take the knee to their radicalism. No-enemies-to-the-left syndrome became a pandemic. Sore winners.
. . . I remain deeply proud of what we did. Nothing will ever take that away. The current madness is based on lies about human nature, and lies always fail in the end. We will emerge from it because it’s built on sand. Meanwhile, you carry on, hoping some kind of moderation will happen, but seeing no sign of it at all. I realize don’t belong in this intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community any more. And it doesn’t want me or any gay men like me. The price of success is always failure, I suppose. But the success was real.’
Well, I apologize for the long excerpt, but Sullivan is an eloquent exponent of the unpredicted attacks on gays by the whole “intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community.” Still, he did well in life. No matter how much I disagree with Sullivan over things (increasingly it’s limited to religion as he moves towards the center), I could never hope to have improved the well-being of society as much as he did by promoting gay marriage. And that will not go away.
*After several years of calling Israel genocidal while keeping silent on Hamas, Amnesty International finally admitted that Hamas committed crimes against humanity (h/t Stephen). It’s a measure of the degree of anti-semitism that this happened only this week. Amnesty International, like Doctors Without Borders (DwB) or even the UN itself, has a horrible record of persistently criticizing Israel and ignoring Hamas, though it did accuse Hamas once of committing “war crimes”, ignoring the humanitarian crimes.
Amnesty International on Thursday accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including extermination, during and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war.
“Palestinian armed groups committed violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity during their attacks in southern Israel that started on 7 October 2023,” the human rights watchdog said in a 173-page report.
The group has previously accused Hamas and others of committing war crimes.
War crimes are serious violations of international law against civilians and combatants during armed conflict. Crimes against humanity can occur in peacetime and include torture, rape and discrimination, be it racial, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender-based. They involve “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”
Amnesty has also accused Israel of genocide, an accusation that Jerusalem vehemently denies. However, Amnesty said any Israeli wrongdoing, or Palestinian groups’ crimes against other Palestinians, were outside the scope of this report.
Amnesty said that the mass killing of civilians in Israel on October 7 amounted “to the crime against humanity of extermination.” Among the other crimes listed were murder, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.
Hamas rejected the report, saying it contained “inaccuracies and contradictions.”
Israel also critiqued the report, noting that it came out more than two years after the attack, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, saying it “falls fa
Crikey! They did not even condemn Hamas for the October 7, 2023 massacre of civilians as well as kidnapping. What has happened to organizations like Amnesty International and DwB? How did they lose their moral compass?
*The NYT reports that the CIA enlisted a team of climbers in 1965 to put a plutonium-generated device on the top of the famous Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, designed to spy on China. There’s a lot of plutonium in it, but it was abandoned and never used. It’s still spewing radioactivity somewhere on the peak:
The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.
A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.
Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.
Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control.
But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout.
From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic.
“Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie.
No response.
“Camp Four, are you there?”
Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static.
“Yes … this … is … Camp … Four.”
“Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said — to save the climbers’ lives.
“Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.
It hasn’t been seen since.
And that was 1965.
Every mountain-lover knows of Nanda Devi, India’s second highest mountain at a height of 7817 m (25,646 ft). It was notoriously hard to climb, and infamous for being the mountain that killed 22-year-old Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of Willi Unsoeld, who conquered Everest via its West Ridge in 1963 and named his daughter after Nanda Devi.
From 1965 to 1968, attempts were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in co-operation with the Intelligence Bureau (IB), to place a nuclear-powered (SNAP-19C RTG) telemetry relay listening device on the summit of Nanda Devi.This device was designed to intercept telemetry signals from missile test launches conducted in the Xinjiang Province, at a time of relative infancy in China’s missile program. The expedition retreated due to dangerous weather conditions, leaving the device near the summit of Nanda Devi. They returned the next spring to search for the device, which ended without success. As a result of this activity by the CIA, the Sanctuary was closed to foreign expeditions throughout much of the 1960s. In 1974 the Sanctuary re-opened.
But now, because Nanda Devi has religious significance, nobody of any stripe is allowed to climb it. If the device ever turns up, it will be inside a glacier, and that is unlikely to be found given the new restrictions.
*Amherst College has to get the prize for the most bizarre student orientation of 2025. Luana sent me this article (yes, from the Washington Free Beacon) of the stuff that transpires when first-year Amherst students are indoctrinated oriented.
Amherst College was founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry. Today, however, the prestigious college has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and “sexual skills” programs, with a focus on “queer” and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory. The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.
Amherst, in central Massachusetts, is one of the country’s most exclusive small liberal arts colleges. The acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 7 percent and annual tuition plus room and board exceeds $93,000, making it the sixth-most expensive college in the country.
Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed “Voices of the Class”—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s “code of conduct” through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.
The event takes place in Johnson Chapel, which Amherst calls its “most important building,” and is used for worship services, convocations, senior assemblies, and other significant gatherings. Johnson Chapel displays 36 portraits of the college’s most notable figures and alumni—including all 19 former presidents of the college, influential trustees, clergymen, civil rights leaders, poet Emily Dickinson, and former U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, who all likely would have looked on in horror if they saw the event on August 31st, 2025.
On the chapel’s chancel, students performed mock sex acts including oral sex, masturbation, and group sex. A young woman bent over while another student pretended to penetrate her from behind. Others pretended to do drugs and shared their “high thoughts.”
Every first-year was urged to attend the performance by their orientation leader. The administration advertises the event as a “lighthearted tradition” to “celebrate the humor, creativity, and individuality of your class.” The school funds the performance, and Amherst administrators work closely with the student performers, offering feedback and approving the script.
. . . . Following the event, the Office of Student Affairs asserted in an email that “Voices of the Class” is “not graphic.”
Um. . . .
Niemi, who’s from Idaho, describes the skits as simulated sex, with students moaning and thrusting under a blanket, and says that the peer educators “showered handfuls of condoms on students like confetti.”
“I thought about leaving 10 minutes in. I’m not someone who breaks rules or skips mandatory events, but it was disgusting enough it almost forced me to leave,” Niemi recalled.
But Amanda Vann, Amherst’s “director of health and wellbeing education,” told the Free Beacon that the skits help students build up their skills when it comes to sex. “The skits are part of our broader commitment to promoting wellbeing and sexual respect on campus,” she said
Right. The script is written by juniors and seniors taking excerpts from admissions essays written by first-year students (or maybe those who didn’t get in as well). Here are two videos of the event:
I don’t consider myself a prude, but I just don’t get this.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are again discussing Andrzej:
Hili: He’s not paying any attention to us at all.
Szaron: All we can do is pretend we don’t care.
In Polish:
Hili: On w ogóle nie zwraca na nas uwagi.
Szaron: Możemy tylko udawać, że nas to nie obchodzi.
*******************
From The Dodo (click to enlarge). DO NOT FEED BEA A MUFFIN! (And read it if you can.)
From Give me a Sign; notice that all ursids are prohibited in the sixth bullet point for having bear feet:
From Stacy; a great wrestling match:
From Masih, another brave Iranian woman, singing without a hijab, breaking two rules. She did this in Iran, I think, and had been arrested for it, but released in the face of national outrage.
The translation:
The virtual concert by Parastoo Ahmadi, which impacted millions of Iranians inside and outside Iran and, despite the danger, prompted many Iranians to visualize and break out of the dictatorship’s bubble. This courageous move by Parastoo is a stand and a fight against the Islamic Republic. Everyone should take a step in their own way and challenge the Islamic Republic until the day all the pieces of the puzzle come together and the Islamic Republic is forever removed from Iran and Iranians. If male singers inside Iran stand alongside brave women like Parastoo, Zara, and the young rappers who are currently fighting for their natural rights these days, they will reduce the cost of the struggle for female singers. #بدون_زنان_هرگز
كنسرت مجازى پرستو احمدى كه ميليونها ايرانى را در داخل و خارج از ايران تحت تاثير قرار داد و با وجود خطر ، افكار بسيارى از ايرانيان را وادار به تصويرسازى و خروج از حباب ديكتاتورى كرد.
اين حركت شجاعانه پرستو، ايستادگی و مبارزه عليه جمهورى اسلامىست. هركس به سهم خود قدمى بردارد و… pic.twitter.com/Vx7Vzhu7i1— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) December 13, 2025
Larry the Cat presents a poor, frustrated kitty:
Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/hRoijzSBWs
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 13, 2025
From Malcolm; I’m sure they don’t make these any more:
The Motocompo: Honda’s 1980s foldable scooter that fits in a city car.pic.twitter.com/o4HMajt8ES
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
From Simon, who asks, “Who even lets them drive?”
GWAS pic.twitter.com/OuDcNbeTdy
— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) December 12, 2025
One from my feed. Crows are not dumb!
Taking the leaves off strawberriespic.twitter.com/HehaSJ1zMn
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 13, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/iRkNe4jCO5
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 14, 2025
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, a headline you don’t see every day:
We don’t do court reports, especially when it comes to violent crime, but there’s always an exception.
— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@apiln.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T14:30:20.280Z
Second, the late ecologist Sir Bob May takes issue with how this famous story is related:
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Looking into a paper about beetles reminds me of Bob May's firm riposte to his account in Nature about God's famous inordinate fondness for beetles.
— Roland Pease (@peaseroland.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T15:35:15.535Z
Republican Andrew Sullivan’s ego knows no bounds and never fails to knock Democrats no matter how trivial. Pete B was Transportation Secretary… yes lower in ranking, but still a cabinet position.
“A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.”
You are so right Mark. The distinction can be made that Mayor Pete is ten steps below Treasury in presidential succession sweepstakes, But interestingly, treasury is a step above the SecDef (or whatever he is called these days).
Secretary of Lethality, Secretary of Histrionics, and Secretary of Philistinism have come to mind lately.
Your observation/complaint noted. I agree with Jerry in terms of Sullivan’s take on the queer alphabet mess. I think he summed it up well.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
In its original literal sense, “moral relativism” is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one’s children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined “relative” as “arbitrary”. -Ellen Jane Willis, writer (14 Dec 1941-2006)
With regard to the terrible murders in Sydney, we again have to ask whether the rhetoric of PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta and the bods at American Atheists contributed to it… /s
That’s probably what they were hoping for.
Last night I read Rachel Aviv’s article on Oliver Sacks. As a general reader, not educated in the sciences and arts of psychiatry or psychology, I was always fascinated to read Oliver Sacks’ trade books, not as peer-reviewed research papers, but simply as a look into a very complex medical field. So I read Ms. Aviv’s article. It appears that she is a writer of science..certainly not a scientist, medical professional, nor does she have formal education in the sciences. It appears that she got access to volumes of Dr. Sacks’ previously private writings and wrote what I thought was a pejorative essay, cherry-picking from those notes. She seemed to be obsessed with his and some of his acquaintances sexual orientation and included aspects of his patients’ behaviors that he had left out of his books.
I read “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” years ago to give me some insight into a world of behaviors, often scary as hell, hidden from the everyday experience of most of us. These books were written by a subject matter expert and introduced me to the incredible breadth of rare but abnormal functioning of the human brain. It was part of my simple effort to be aware of the life sciences broadly construed. After reading Ms. Aviv’s piece, I still feel that Oliver Sacks’ writings are worthwhile for my general knowledge purposes and will continue to read and recommend them to others…unless a reader here who is competent in the field convinces me otherwise…and I request such contrary comments and opinions.
Oh, and according to their menu, that wonderfully rich looking soup at Le Sud is 16.5 euros…a tariff I would gladly pay even if it were my last 16.5 euros.
Interesting comment, Jim. I’m no help but would also be interested in an expert’s opinion.
A friend of WEIT and personal friend of the editor – whom I’ll affectionately call “The PinkMonster”… is all over this story. I’ve yet to delve but the popcorn is ordered. I imagine Prof Pinker chuckling in his attractive Boston downtown lare, stroking a long haired cat with that grin he has when he vanquishes an enemy (recall the sad corpse of Malcolm Gladwell).
🙂
Oliver Sachs-gate is the kind of thing we like here – Dr. Sachs is a hometown hero near me, geographically and intellectually, his old apartment is s/t locals will point out to tourists. And I enjoyed his books.
We’ll see…
D.A.
NYC
I think I’ve read every one of Oliver Sacks’s books.
What did people think was going to happen when government got involved in the first place? When government is involved, it is, by definition, political and subject to the vicisitudes of party politics. Aside from question of whether government is actually competent to do these thing or whether it should, the danger is that people will be so captured by government payments that they want an end to the hurley-burley of politics and, thus, to party politics, i.e., democracy. (One could make an argument that his has happened in France, where the national government is paralyzed by the for and inability to provide entitlement reform.) At the same time, if Obamacare worked, why are things getting more expensive (dramatically it is argued) and why do people need more subsidies? (The subsidies in question are “emergency” COVID subsidies that the Dems themselves created with an expiration date.)
Was FDR’s rural electrification in the 1930s a failure?
You make a good point. Rural electrification had a public goods component — the network effect and start-up costs of planting all those poles and stringing all that wire before anyone’s electric meter started to turn — that make government provision mandatory (because the private sector doesn’t see immediate profit, or because of the Depression, had no capital to invest), even though the electricity consumed by each farm is a private good.
FDR could have framed electrification as an investment that would produce a return: money to electric companies who would not otherwise have had those customers, and more profitable farms that would have generated more income tax (and more food.) Health care is just a continuous spend with no investment component. The insurance companies make investment returns on their premium dollars between collection and payment but the health care itself is just a dead loss.
Goods that the private market can’t provide, such as traditional lighthouses, have to be provided by the state, if we are to have them at all.
Health care, though, is a purely private good, like automobiles and loaves of bread, not like lighthouses or rural electrification. Deciding that no one shall go without medical service (or more accurately, deciding that no doctor shall suffer uncollectable bills) is explicitly a political decision that a private market would not make.
Escalating Obamacare premiums and subsidies sound like entirely predictable adverse selection. The insurance companies must insure people without regard to pre-existing condition but can’t compel healthy people to sign up. (The individual mandate was supposed to address this but the IRS, I understand, decided not to enforce it as a matter of policy.) Because insurance is expensive, healthy people with no assets to protect from bankruptcy have no incentive to buy it. The premium charged to the pool of people who do buy it, eager to get their chronic diseases covered, is then much higher than would be charged if the whole country not enrolled in mandatory workplace plans had to sign up.
But the healthiest and poorest of the people who signed up will be tempted to drop the insurance when it comes up for renewal. This further enriches the surviving pool for ever-more expensive health conditions and requires further premium increases for the shrinking numbers who remain in, more of whom then defect to avoid the higher price. Eventually the insurance companies will leave the market when they can no longer get enough people to pay high enough premiums to fund the promised benefits. These are mostly people of modest means, don’t forget, with therefore higher health care costs and lower tolerance of price increases, than average for the non-Medicaid population under 65. No one will have any individual insurance at all.
Adverse selection is a feature of all private insurance markets where joining is optional. That’s why workplace insurance where all employees have to sign up has been durable, although still expensive because it encourages consumption through progressive medicalization of everyday life and the selection of medical treatments that are most lucrative to doctors.
Where the government comes in is the political decision to subsidize premiums to keep them from rising in the face of adverse selection, and to reduce defection of the healthiest, poorest people from the pool, those most sensitive to premium rises. The problem there is that as premiums rise (due to adverse selection) the government subsidy must rise even faster to protect the market from collapse. In the limit, the scheme becomes just another entitlement program paid for by taxpayers in the highest tax bracket. This, as Dr. B, notes, is inherently and inescapably political because it goes straight to the heart of tax policy.
Single-payer schemes funded out of taxes avoid adverse selection because everyone has to pay taxes — sometimes a lot of taxes! — if they earn enough. Obamacare was an attempt to avoid the political cost of single-payer but as soon as the individual mandate went by the board, it was doomed to be an open-ended entitlement.
Indeed, the ACA sticking plaster did not treat (much less cure) the underlying infection. Climbing a tree is not even a very first small step towards reaching the moon. But some problems just do not have an accessible solution (for structural reasons like those you point out), so the best we can hope for expect is better bandaids.
The Amherst administration “advertises the event as a ‘lighthearted tradition’ to ‘celebrate the humor, creativity, and individuality of your class’.”
Perhaps evidence of the latter three emerges from the longer footage. Pity the proles at lesser schools who seek frivolities like “job skills.” Pardon, I meant career skills. We can leave the other to Amherst.
Amherst helped to elect Trump. My guess is the Trump folks would be inclined to publicly agree. My guess is that the Harris folks would also agree, but only privately. My guess is that the Amherst folks would publicly disagree. T. Piketty would have a lot to say about this.
Sydney. Wow. I love that city and my Dad grew up there.
Some nut (shouting “ALLAH AKBAR!” so naturally “motives a mystery at this time…”) did the shooting but woke and the “resistance” people, the campus chicks I’ve spoken about here, the ones who aren’t doing well emotionally, the Aust.B.C, Beeb, PBS etc…..
….. loaded the brain
…… that loaded the weapon.
D.A.
NYC
As did successive Labor governments in pandering to their ever-reliable, Labor-imported Islamic constituency. The current Labor government broke with their party’s traditional support for Israel only because there are now many times more Muslims in Australia than Jews, thanks to successive Labor immigration policies and enthusiastic backing of any Islamic person’s claim to “asylum” however questionable. In other words, they imported a voting bloc for themselves and are now dealing with the consequences.
The Bondi death toll is at least up to 16. Australia already had a ‘bad’ reputation. In how many places can you actually hear ‘f*&^ the Jews’ chants? In how many places do nurses boast about not treating Israeli patients?
Muslim immigrant mobs make those chants, and Muslim immigrant nurses were the ones bragging about not treating Jews. Don’t blame real Aussies, though there are some of the far leftie persuasion who are on board as useful idiots.
I agree.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m not convinced that the father and son gunmen Naveed and Sajid Akram were avid readers of left wing campus rags, the ABC or as Rich Sanderson (Comment 3) suggested, PZ Myers and the American Atheists.
If pressed, I’d go out on a limb and suggest that they were much more likely to be influenced by certain religious texts and ideas found therein… which is ironically something that left wing campus rags, the ABC and PZ Myers would be aghast to hear said aloud. So who can really say what motivated them? It’s all a mysterious mystery.
The plutonium device on Nanda Devi has created a big worry to people who live in the area where the mountain drains.
How bizarre. I had never heard of it before. It’s not super long lived plutonium (half life is 88 years) but there’s still plenty left.
So many Plutonia to choose from
Pu-238 87.7 years
Pu-239 24,110 years
Pu-240 6,560 years
Pu-241 14.3 years
Pu-242 375,000 years
Pu-244 80 million years
Your élan vital has a half-life of about 7 years! Three-score years and you are done.
It was Plutonium 238 in the device.
Probably not pure PU-238. PU-238 may have predominated. However, I bet other isotopes could be detected.
Yes, indeed.
I initially was surprised at the low half-life of U-238. My ‘gut feeling’ failed me. All praise to Frau Katze 🙂 Interesting, too, is that the half-life figures indicate that all ‘natural’ plutonium had disappeared 1.6 billion years it was formed in supernovae, so if Earth ever had some it was long gone before the 20th century resurrected it.
should read
Plutonium-238 was used in a variety of civilian SNAP generators until more efficient solar panels and long-life lithium batteries superseded them. More efficient micro-electronics helped reduce power requirements, too. There were even nuclear-powered implantable cardiac pacemakers that didn’t require surgical battery changes.
Plutonium-238 (like -239) is an alpha emitter. Solid metal pellets are harmless to people unless swallowed or aerosolized or turned into dust (from machining, say) and inhaled. Softball-sized spheres of Pu-239 such as those used in bombs can be handled with bare hands — they are comfortably warm to the touch — as they were when the President of the University of California literally handed over the one destined for Nagasaki to General Leslie Groves. (The Manhattan Project was carried for secrecy on the books of the U of C, where plutonium had been discovered by Seaborg et al. Yes, the President got a receipt from the Army.*) Criticality accidents have occurred in laboratory handling but only when there is a mass of metal present that can form a critical geometry.
Pu-238 undergoes a much faster rate of decay, which is why the refined metal is hot enough, red-hot, to power a SNAP generator. Not suitable for making fission bombs. Too hot to handle, literally.
The mention that the lost SNAP generator contained a third as much plutonium as what devastated Nagasaki is scare-mongering. It’s not going to undergo fission all by itself. In a few hundred years melting its way to the bottom of a glacier somewhere it will almost all be gone, and no more dangerous to anyone who finds it than it was to the guys who lugged it up the mountainside in 1965.
(* Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)
Thanks for the information.
I believe that’s a raven in the video.
Straight down the hatch – no savouring at all.
Maybe that is why “ravenous” is a word.