To recap, then: Before, during, and after passage, Americans were promised that Obamacare was going to lower premiums for “everyone” (the goal of merely maintaining premiums being too modest); it was not going to interfere with anybody’s health care or health insurance if they already had it; and it was not going change anybody’s patient-doctor relationship. The message was unmistakable: All the government wanted to do was extend health insurance to people who didn’t have it. This wouldn’t affect you. No need to worry. Period. Move along.
In addition to the totally partisan nature of this thing, one of the other many things that distinguishes it from previous entitlements is the many grandiose lies that were told about it to sell it, going back to the president’s first campaign.
Obama would like the public to think he can’t negotiate and that to do so would be unheard of. But in this, as in so many other things, he’s lying. What is actually going on here is that, in the past, presidents who have had to deal with divided government (as Obama is; the House is in Republican hands) have always known that in such a situation they must negotiate. Whichever party they have been affiliated with, and whether you think they were good presidents or bad ones, they have kept faith with the basic gentleman’s/woman’s agreement on which our government has always run, and that is that if the other side was duly elected to be in control of another branch of government, that group has some legitimate power and must be negotiated with.
Obama is different. He had the brilliant idea that, although Republicans are in control of the House right now, they have no power unless they agree with him, and it is okay for him to defy them because it will have no repercussions on either him or his party (which is largely aligned with him). Therefore he can Just Say No to whatever Republican demands might be, and blame them for the failure to come to any sort of agreement. And the reason he is able to get away with this is a simple one: he knows the media will not call him on it, but will instead support him and amplify his message.
It’s a toxic combination, and that’s what’s “unprecedented”—at least in this country.
OK, call me crazy, and I haven’t looked into this at all. But would anyone be at all surprised if they were selected on how much they filled Democrat campaign coffers rather than track record or competence?
There’s still a long way to go. The fusion reaction will need to release many times more energy than it consumes to be viable on a commercial scale. But this is still worth getting excited about. Figuring out fusion would be a game-changer, and breakthroughs like this one remind us of the dangers of predicting the future based on current technology. The rate of technological change is accelerating, and the only ones who stand to lose are the prophets of doom.
..by keeping calm. Bjorn Lomborg says, once again, cool it:
When you look at these issues properly, the results are surprising. Climate change, for example, has had a net benefit for the world. From 1900 to 2025, it has increased global welfare by up to 1.5 per cent of GDP per year. Why? Because it has mixed effects – and when warming is moderate, the benefits prevail (even if they are unevenly distributed between nations).
Increased levels of atmospheric CO2 have improved agriculture, because the gas works as a fertiliser; we have avoided more deaths from cold than have been caused by extra heat; and we have saved more from lower heating bills than we have lost to an increased need for air conditioning.
But that doesn’t give the socialists the control over our lives that they continue to crave.
Mr. Griffin reminds us that space is a dangerous business. One of his biggest jobs at NASA was to manage the risk in a reasonable way. Risk can never be taken to zero; that would mean humans do nothing. Astronauts have died in space, but to put this in context, people in the aerospace community have also been killed on the highway on their way to work. Transportation, in any form, does not currently have zero risk. Safety is important. An early failure, such as the Apollo Launch pad fire, would be a problem for commercial viability. Design will require a reasonable middle ground with some redundancy, but not to the point of adding massive weight or prohibitive costs. Technology is so much better today and designers have fifty years of operating history to guide them. The physical demands of working in space are so intense that a momentary distraction could prove fatal. However, more is known about human error factors and training could better manage those.
Gee, someone should write a book about that. Yes, I know, Real Soon Now. Had a last-minute glitch, but it’s happening this month.