The Opposite Of Life Is Indifference

The Atlantic once again commissions Megan McArdle to put her mad math skillz, expertise in statistics and methodology, and razor-sharp logic to determine if the lack of health insurance, and therefore health care, results in the deaths of our fellow Americans.

If we lost our [health] insurance, would this gargantuan new entitlement [the health insurance reform bill] really be the only thing standing between us and an early grave?

The obvious answer is yes. If you can't afford health insurance, and therefore can't afford health care, you will be in grave danger of losing your life if you develop a fatal illness or injury. That fact is simply self-evident. Severe accidents don't heal themselves. Fatal illnesses must be treated. If you need a doctor and can't afford to go to one, you might not recover.

It's not easy to deny the obvious, to ignore simple fact. Thinking people don't need to puzzle out if getting medical attention is better than not getting medical attention. It is not even up for debate unless you just don't want to accept reality, for personal or financial reasons. Then you must put on your spangled gown, blare the John Phillip Sousa march, set your baton on fire, and twirl your little heart out.

Outside of the few states where it is illegal to deny coverage based on medical history, I am probably uninsurable. Though I’m in pretty good health, I have several latent conditions, including an autoimmune disease. If I lost the generous insurance that I have through The Atlantic, even the most charitable insurer might hesitate to take me on.

So I took a keen interest when, at the fervid climax of the health-care debate in mid-December, a Washington Post blogger, Ezra Klein, declared that Senator Joseph Lieberman, by refusing to vote for a bill with a public option, was apparently “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands” of uninsured people in order to punish the progressives who had opposed his reelection in 2006.

Her first lie. She doesn't want the the denial of coverage to be reformed despite her illnesses, not because of her illnesses; she specifically said so. From: A Long, Long Post About My Reasons For Opposing National Health Care:

At this juncture in the conversation, someone almost always breaks in and says, "Why don't you tell that to an uninsured person?" I have. Specifically, I told it to me. I was uninsured for more than two years after grad school, with an autoimmune disease and asthma. I was, if anything, even more militant than I am now about government takeover of insurance.

It takes an incredibly sleazy hack to try to manipulate her audience by claiming victim status and trolling for the audience's sympathy. It is the technique of a two-bit con-woman, who sizes up her audience at a glance and insinuates herself by pretending to be like the mark, claiming to have the same interests or occupation or biases. If she has to make two totally contradictory statements to achieve her goal, facts, logic and reality are not even factors in her decision making process. Deceiving the mark is the only reality.

In the ensuing blogstorm, conservatives condemned Klein’s “venomous smear,” while liberals solemnly debated the circumstances under which one may properly accuse one’s opponents of mass murder.

McArdle does not provide any quotes to support her hysterical accusation; it is merely sufficient to make an unprofessional claim that one's opponents debate how to best make false accusations.

But aside from an exchange between Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress and Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, few people addressed the question that mattered most to those of us who cannot buy an individual insurance policy at any price—the question that was arguably the health-care debate’s most important: Was Klein (not to mention other like-minded editorialists who cited similar numbers) right? If we lost our insurance, would this gargantuan new entitlement really be the only thing standing between us and an early grave?

We've seen people make decisions that harm themselves and others countless times as people vote against their personal interests, but most of these people don't have an MBA from the University of Chicago.

McArdle finally introduces her topic: Being unable to afford medical insurance will not harm your health. McArdle is going to be tested to the limits to attempt to pull off this maneuver. First, she lays the groundwork by acknowledging that her statement is moronic. She could hardly do otherwise, although that's never stopped her before.

Perhaps few people were asking, because the question sounds so stupid. Health insurance buys you health care. Health care is supposed to save your life. So if you don’t have someone buying you health care well, you can complete the syllogism.

So, why is this statement not moronic?

Last year’s national debate on health-care legislation tended to dwell on either heart-wrenching anecdotes about costly, unattainable medical treatments, or arcane battles over how many people in the United States lacked insurance.

McArdle is saying that the debate relied on anecdotes or "arcane" information to determine the number of people unable to afford health care because of cost, and the number of uninsured. Arcane means "known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric," so according to McArdle it should be nearly impossible to find any information on the subject. Of course she is utterly wrong, which we will cover later.

Republicans rarely plumbed the connection between insurance and mortality, presumably because they would look foolish and heartless if they expressed any doubt about health insurance’s benefits.

Well, yes, but we know that will not stop people who have repressed any empathy for any other living creature.

It was politically safer to harp on the potential problems of government interventions—or, in extremis, to point out that more than half the uninsured were either affluent, lacking citizenship, or already eligible for government programs in which they hadn’t bothered to enroll.

Oh, McArdle is being daring to make utterly ludicrous and false statements.

Even Democratic politicians made curiously little of the plight of the uninsured.

There will, of course, be no quotes or names to back up this statement.

Instead, they focused on cost control, so much so that you might have thought that covering the uninsured was a happy side effect of really throttling back the rate of growth in Medicare spending. When progressive politicians or journalists did address the disadvantages of being uninsured, they often fell back on the same data Klein had used: a 2008 report from the Urban Institute that estimated that about 20,000 people were dying every year for lack of health insurance.

But when you probe that claim, its accuracy is open to question. Even a rough approximation of how many people die because of lack of health insurance is hard to reach. Quite possibly, lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance.

Now McArdle can settle comfortably into her favorite technique of weakly poking holes until she deems she has done enough damage to sow doubt. She doesn't need to prove anything. She doesn't even need to disprove anything. She just needs to look like she kind of knows what she is talking about, and--most important of all--that you do not.

Part of the trouble with reports like the one from the Urban Institute is that they cannot do the kind of thing we do to test drugs or medical procedures: divide people randomly into groups that do and don’t have health insurance, and see which group fares better. Experimental studies like this would be tremendously expensive, and it’s hard to imagine that they’d attract sufficient volunteers. Moreover, they might well violate the ethical standards of doctors who believed they were condemning the uninsured patients to a life nasty, brutish, and short.

So instead, researchers usually do what are called “observational studies”: they take data sets that include both insured and uninsured people, and compare their health outcomes—usually mortality rates, because these are unequivocal and easy to measure. For a long time, two of the best studies were Sorlie et al. (1994), which used a large sample of census data from 1982 to 1985; and Franks, Clancy, and Gold (1993), which examined a smaller but richer data set from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and its follow-up studies, between 1971 and 1987. The Institute of Medicine used the math behind these two studies to produce a 2002 report on an increase in illness and death from lack of insurance; the Urban Institute, in turn, updated those numbers to produce the figure that became the gold standard during the debate over health-care reform.

The first thing one notices is that the original studies are a trifle elderly. Medicine has changed since 1987; presumably, so has the riskiness of going without health insurance. Moreover, the question of who had insurance is particularly dodgy: the studies counted as “uninsured” anyone who lacked insurance in the initial interview. But of course, not all of those people would have stayed uninsured—a separate study suggests that only about a third of those who reported being uninsured over a two-year time frame lacked coverage for the entire period. Most of the “uninsured” people probably got insurance relatively quickly, while some of the “insured” probably lost theirs. The effect of this churn could bias your results either way; the inability to control for it makes the statistics less accurate.

I have never taken a class on statistics, can barely multiply, and can only figure out percentages because I buy a lot of things on sale, but even I can detect the wafting of bullshit coming off these statements. McArdle does not tell us how medicine has changed since 1987, or how those supposed changes made it less or more risky to be without insurance. We are to take her assumptions as facts, and our facts as assumptions. McArdle doesn't like the number of uninsured, so she says that if you're insured some of the time, you don't count as uninsured any of the time. McArdle doesn't need to research; she simply knows the facts intuitively.

The majority of the uninsured have been without insurance for a long time. Nearly 6 in 10 uninsured adults (59%) have been without insurance for over 2 years. (Chart 4)

Oops.

If McArdle didn't like the Urban Institute Study she could have used recent information from the CDC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported: [pdf]

In 2008, 6.5% (95% confidence interval = 6.17%–6.87%) of the population failed to obtain needed medical care due to cost at some time during the past 12 months, which was higher than the 2007 estimate of 5.8%.

From 1998 to 2008, there was a generally increasing trend in the annual percentage of persons who failed to obtain medical care due to cost (from 4.2% in 1998 to 6.5% in 2008).

Gosh, that was kind of easy to find. Look, here's more from the Commonwealth Fund.

TUESDAY, July 21 (HealthDay News) -- Most people in the United States who try to buy an individual health insurance policy on their own never end up getting coverage, often because the premiums are just too expensive, according to a new study.

A report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on health policy reform, found that roughly three of every four people who tried to buy a policy from the individual health insurance market in the past three years didn't get one. The main reason cited was premium cost. About 57 percent said it was very hard or even impossible to find coverage they could afford.

About 47 percent of the people surveyed said it was difficult or impossible to find a plan with the coverage they needed, and 36 percent reported being charged more or denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition or had the condition excluded from their coverage.

In one of the many amusing posts McArdle has made to defend her lies, she claims The Commonwealth Fund is biased in favor of health insurance reform, so let's see who they are.

The Commonwealth Fund is a charitable foundation established in 1918 by Anna Harkness (wife of one of the original Standard Oil investors, Stephen Harkness). Charged with the mandate to "do something for the welfare of mankind," Ms. Harkness founded the organization with an initial endowment of $10 million dollars. Her son Edward Harkness served as its first president, and through additional gifts and bequests between 1918 and 1959, the Harkness family's total contribution to the Fund's endowment amounted to more than $53 million.

The Fund is one of the major philanthropic foundations in the United States today and one of the few established by a woman. Over the years, it has given support to medical schools and to the building of hospitals and clinics in rural areas. In New York City, the Commonwealth Fund was a major contributor to the building of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University in 1922.

[snip]

The Fund is currently led by president Karen Davis, a nationally recognized economist, with an extensive background in public policy and research. Before joining the Fund, she served as chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she also held an appointment as professor of economics. She served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services from 1977–1980, and was the first woman to head a U.S. Public Health Service agency. Prior to her government career, Ms. Davis was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, and an assistant professor of economics at Rice University. A native of Oklahoma, she received her Ph.D. in economics from Rice University.

The Fund states that it is pro-health care reform, which in McArdle's mind makes it hopelessly biased and untrustworthy. After all, she is biased and untrustworthy, so wouldn't everyone else be the same?

The bigger problem is that the uninsured generally have more health risks than the rest of the population. They are poorer, more likely to smoke, less educated, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be obese, and so forth. All these things are known to increase your risk of dying, independent of your insurance status.

McArdle ignores the financial causes of poor health in favor of causes she prefers, ones that she can blame on the uninsured instead of innocent, suffering insurance companies. For instance:

III. What Difference Does Not Having Health Insurance Make?
• The uninsured are less likely than the insured to have a regular place they go for medical advice. While the majority of the insured and uninsured say they have a regular place to go when they are sick or need medical advice, the insured (91%) are more likely than the uninsured (64%) to have a place to go (Chart 7). When asked where they go when they need medical care, the majority (68%) of the insured say a doctor’s office, compared to 34% of the uninsured who say they go to a doctor’s office.(Chart 8)
• The uninsured are also much less likely than the insured to have received preventive care. The uninsured are much less likely than the insured to have received preventive services in the past year such as mammograms (16% vs. 40%) and pap smears (49%vs. 76%) among women, prostate exams (12% vs. 20%) among men, and routine physical examinations (47% vs. 70%). (Chart 9)
• The uninsured are more likely than the insured to have skipped, postponed, or had problems getting medical care. The uninsured are more likely than the insured to have skipped medical treatments (39% vs. 13%), had problems getting mental health care (13% vs. 4%), or not filled prescriptions (30% vs. 12%) because of the cost. The uninsured are also more likely than the insured to have not received needed care (26% vs. 4%) or to have postponed care (39% vs. 10%) in the past year. Furthermore,the uninsured say that many of the medical problems that they delayed or postponed treatment for were serious problems. The uninsured are more likely than the insured to say they have not received needed care for serious problems (20% vs. 3%) or have
postponed care for serious problems (28% vs. 5%) in the past year. (Charts 10 and 11)
• The uninsured are more likely than the insured to have problems paying medical bills. The uninsured are more likely than the insured to have had problems paying medical bills (39% vs. 18%) and to have ever been contacted by a collection agency for medical care expenses (39% vs. 27%). (Chart 12)
• Many of the uninsured say they would have to give up basic necessities in order to buy health insurance. While half (51%) of the uninsured say that health insurance ranks high as a priority for where they spend their money, 3 in 4 (76%) of the uninsured say they would have to give up things to buy health insurance. Of those who say they would have to give up things to buy health insurance, 53% (40% of all of the uninsured) say they would have to cut back on necessities such as food, rent, and utility bills.(Chart 13)

Having satisfactorily disposed of the facts, McArdle happily moves on to just making shit up.

There are also factors we can’t analyze. It’s widely believed that health improves with social status, a quality that’s hard to measure. Risk-seekers are probably more likely to end up uninsured, and also to end up dying in a car crash—but their predilection for thrills will not end up in our statistics. People who are suspicious of doctors probably don’t pursue either generous health insurance or early treatment. Those who score low on measures of conscientiousness often have trouble keeping jobs with good health insurance—or following complicated treatment protocols. And so on.

The studies relied upon by the Institute of Medicine and the Urban Institute tried to control for some of these factors. But Sorlie et al.—the larger study—lacked data on things like smoking habits and could control for only a few factors, while Franks, Clancy, and Gold, which had better controls but a smaller sample, could not, as an observational study, categorically exclude the possibility that lack of insurance has no effect on mortality at all.

For a proper refutation of McArdle's McFacts, see "Letting Perfect Be The Enemy Of Good?" at The Incidental Economist, who makes up in actual knowledge what he or she lacks in sarcasm.

You're probably exhausted by now, but you have to stick around for the next bit. It's a pisser.

This result is not, perhaps, as shocking as it seems. Health care heals, but it also kills. Someone who lacked insurance over the past few decades might have missed taking their Lipitor, but also their Vioxx or Fen-Phen. According to one estimate, 80,000 people a year are killed just by “nosocomial infections”—infections that arise as a result of medical treatment. The only truly experimental study on health insurance, a randomized study of almost 4,000 subjects done by Rand and concluded in 1982, found that increasing the generosity of people’s health insurance caused them to use more health care, but made almost no difference in their health status.

It's okay if people die for the lack of health insurance, because sometimes doctors kill people! Not that anyone dies for the lack of health insurance, however! Likewise you should never eat, for sometimes people who eat are killed by what you eat!

If gaining insurance has a large effect on people’s health, we should see outcomes improve dramatically between one’s early and late 60s. Yet like the Kronick and Rand studies, analyses of the effect of Medicare, which becomes available to virtually everyone in America at the age of 65, show little benefit. In a recent review of the literature, Helen Levy of the University of Michigan and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago noted that the latest studies of this question “paint a surprisingly consistent picture: Medicare increases consumption of medical care and may modestly improve self-reported health but has no effect on mortality, at least in the short run.”

Of course, that might be an indictment of programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Indeed, given the uncertainties about their impact on mortality rates—uncertainties that the results from Sorlie et al. don’t resolve—it’s possible that, by blocking the proposed expansion of health care through Medicare, Senator Lieberman, rather than committing the industrial-scale slaughter Klein fears, might not have harmed anyone at all. We cannot use one study to “prove” that having government insurance is riskier than having none. But we also cannot use a flawed and conflicting literature to “prove” that Lieberman was willing to risk the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Government insurance should have some effect, but if that effect is not large enough to be unequivocally evident in the data we have, it must be small.

Klein responds to McArdle on Medicare here, pointing out the weakness of her positon and, again, that holding out for the perfect study doesn't work in the real world. (It works great if all you want to do is cast aspersions, however.) Since McArdle habitually confuses Medicare and Medicaid, I'll take Klein's word over McArdle's.

Even if we did agree that insurance rarely confers significant health benefits, that would not necessarily undermine the case for a national health-care program. The academics who question the mass benefits of expanding coverage still think that doing so improves outcomes among certain vulnerable subgroups, like infants and patients with HIV. Besides, a national health program has nonmedical benefits. Leaving tens of millions of Americans without health insurance violates our sense of equity—and leaves those millions exposed to the risk of mind-boggling medical bills.

But we should have had a better handle on the case for expanded coverage—and, more important, the evidence behind it—before we embarked on a year-long debate that divided our house against itself. Certainly, we should have had it before Congress voted on the largest entitlement expansion in 40 years. Unfortunately, most of us forgot to ask a fundamental question, because we were certain we already knew the answer. By the time we got around to challenging our assumptions, it was too late to do anything except scream at each other from the sidelines.

McArdle so dislikes the vituperation of the other side, which meanly and stridently insists on facts over opinion, reality over prejudice, and logic over wishful thinking.

In the mantime, wait. Do nothing. Start over from scratch. There's no hurry; it's not like anyone's dying here.

The League of Extraordinary Bloggers: Goin' Galt At Last

In a Secret Location, a Meeting of Diabolical Minds takes place. It is the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, each a hero (or a heroine or a Coulter) in his (or hers, or Coulter's) own sphere. They are:

Col. Glenn Reynolds—famous defender of guns, wherever they are needed to fight the Brown Menace.

Michelle Malkin—a creature of the night, with an insatiable thirst for blood under her modest, cheerleader-clad façade.

Jonah Goldberg—A barefoot man-boy with cheek, famous for being so lazy he got his research assistant to paint his fence.

Megan McArdle--a woman of mystery, of disguise, of charm, which hides an unscrupulous and greedy heart.

Ann Althouse—A respectable professor who digs deep into the evil aspects of her psyche when she drink an experimental potion know as “Merlot.”

Part I: The Adventure Begins
Part II: A Fresh Face
Part III: And The Band Played On
Part IV: Strange Bedfellows
Part V: The NRO Cruise: Voyage To Nowhere

Part VI: Goin' Galt At Last

Reynolds: Is everyone here? Good God, what a storm. If it weren't for my steampunk snowplow I'd still be stuck in Virginia. How did you get here, Malkin?

Malkin: I flew. It was easy once my eyes started glowing red.

McArdle: We should have been able to just drive here instead of getting a police escort. I blame the government for not taking better care of me when I needed them and when everyone else got to go to the Mediterranean on Spring Break and I had to go visit Aunt Bessie and her pet cow Daisy on the farm. Or was it the cow who was named Aunt Bessie? We pay our hard-earned money on taxes for services and where are the services?

Goldberg: We shouldn't be paying any taxes at all!

All: Yeah!

Althouse: And we shouldn't get any services either! We should all clear our own roads!

McArdle: Not so fast, Ann. I have no problem with privilege. Why should I clean my own house or cook my own meals or research my own columns when I can pay someone else to do it for me or not do it at all? It's a much more efficient allocation of resources. Plus work is hard.

Goldberg: Very well said, Megan. I tell my wife that all the time but she never listens to me just because she has more degrees than me.

Malkin: You upper class twits are helpless.

Goldberg: Not everyone has a stay-at-home husband to cook and clean for them.

Malkin: Your wife seems to-she's the lawyer; you blog in your "home office." Also known as "the den."

Goldberg: I work out of the home and office, I'm not a housewife! I'm writing a book and that proves it! I got a million dollars for my second book!

McArdle: What?

Goldberg: I got a million dollars to write a book about how cliches are stupid.

Malkin: Let me guess--your next book will be about how men who speak Klingon are just little boys who never grew up.

Goldberg: I'm an intellectual now, Malkin, so you better be nicer to me or I'll tell O'Reilly to stop putting you on tv. Oh wait, he already did.

Malkin's fangs pop out.

Althouse: Look out Jonah, she's starting to drool, just like when she almost ate Fluffy.

Goldberg giggles.

McArdle: God, you are so jejean, Jonah.

Reynolds: It's jejune.

McArdle: How the hell do you know, Glenn?

Althouse: Helen says it to him all the time. Then she makes him call her Mother Superior.

Reynolds: Gorram it, Ann, the first rule of Dr. Helen's Pleasure House of Pain is to never talk about Dr. Helen's Pleasure House of Pain. That's it--no more Merlot for you.

Althouse: (tosses her head) Fine, I have my own anyway.

Althouse pulls out a flask and takes a dainty swig.

McArdle: Shut up, Ann, and let Jonah talk. How did you get this book contract anyway, Jonah?

Malkin: His mother is a literary agent.

Goldberg: That had nothing to do with it. My reputation preceded me--

Malkin: (interrupts) Much like your stomach.

Goldberg--and everyone begged me to share my insights with my fellow intellectuals. They're making documentaries about me already.

McArdle: Eww, Peter made me watch that with him. It was stupid. Why couldn't we have watched Hoarders instead? I saw this tv show once where a woman filled a warehouse with her possessions. There were shoes and purses and kitchen appliances and electronic equipment and clothes and oh my God, they were everywhere I looked, heaps and piles and mountains of things that prove the superiority of the American Way of Life and our glorious consumer culture and yummy free markets and--and--.

Malkin slaps her.

McArdle sways and ignores the slap.

McArdle: Is it hot in here or is it just me?

Goldberg: Slap her again, Malkin, that was fun.

Malkin slaps Goldberg.

Goldberg: Why, you--I oughta--.

Malkin pokes him in the eye.

Goldberg: Stop it Malkin! That's not funny!

Malkin: I think it's hilarious. What are you going to do, Goldberg, tell your mommy on me?

Goldberg: Leave my wife out of this.

The women snicker.

Reynolds: Enough, enough, we're not here to beat up Jonah, unfortunately. We have a mission to accomplish.

Malkin: Speak for yourself, Reynolds.

Reynolds: WE ARE HERE to coordinate our response to the Snowpocalypse of the Century. My orders are to--

McArdle: By the way, Glenn, who is giving us orders now that Karl has retired to spend more time with his collection of bastinadas?

Reynolds: That's a secret.

McArdle: Come on, tell us. I won't tell anyone else. I deserve to know if I'm going to lead our nation to a new era of fiscal freedom and consumer-based individualism.

Althouse: I don't understand, Megan.

Malkin: Don't worry, neither does she.

McArdle: I went to the top, most expensive schools in the country, Michelle. Where did you go, a state school?

Malkin: I went to Oberlin, you idiot.

McArdle: Where did you go to school, Glenn?

Reynolds: SHUT UP!

Malkin whispers to McArdle. McArdle giggles.

McArdle: How sweet.

Reynolds reaches for his blaster but Malkin grabs his hand.

Malkin: The mission?

Reynolds: Right. Jonah, your mission is to---okay, what the hell happened to Jonah? He was here a minute ago.

K-lo: Look no further than I, Glennie--I mean Col. Reynolds!

Everyone turns around and sees K-Lo, dressed in a pith helmet, khaki skirt and jacket, and Pink Power Rangers quilted coat, holding a knife to Jonah's throat.

Jonah (croaks) K-Lo, let me go or I'll tell everyone what you begged me to do at the office party.

Malkin: Nobody move! He still owes me fifty bucks!

Reynolds: Calm down, K-Lo. Let H. R. Puffnstuff go.

Goldberg: Oh yeah? At least I'm not Jimmie, the magic flute!

Reynolds: Go ahead and cut his throat, K-Lo.

Althouse: Glenn! How will that look in The New York Times?

K-Lo: You guys, it's my turn to talk now. I hereby demand in the name of Pirate Law that you take this ship to Haiti so we can save the poor Haitites from their heathen gods, who are destroying the island in their wrath.

Malkin: K-Lo, you dolt, we are thirty feet under the ladies' washroom in the Lincoln Monument in Washington D.C. How did you even get here?

K-Lo: I'll have you know I got here entirely on my own, after Nanny dropped me off at the entrance and that nice young soldier walked me to the other entrance. Jonah was just coming out so I grabbed him and now you have to listen to me or I'll torture him, just like in my favorite tv show, "24," starring Kiefer Sutherland. I know how to torture because I practiced on Fluffy.

Althouse: You tortured your adorable little dog? That is so mean! And illegal, I think.

K-Lo: It's okay, Ann, I was just pretending. Fluffy was just yelping because I pinched his leg a little to make it more realistic. Mama took away my teeny little home-made electric brain frying machine.

Goldberg: (weakly) What the hell?

K-Lo: I made it with a lamp, magnets, some wire, and the little clips we use to keep the pretzel bags closed.

Malkin: I'm impressed.

McArdle: I'm not going to Haiti for my honeymoon, K-Lo. Forget it. Go ahead and kill Jonah.

Goldberg: Hey! What about my million dollar advance?

McArdle: It's not mine, is it?

Reynolds: K-Lo, I'm afraid to ask but why do you want to go to Haiti?

K-Lo: We have to rescue the heathen children from eternal damnation. Right now the Haiti-tian government is denying us our religious freedom to kidnap other people's' children when their country is hit by a natural disaster. If God didn't want them to convert, He wouldn't have destroyed their country, would he?

Goldberg: That's not a bad idea.

K-Lo: Oh, Jonah! Do you really think so or are you just saying that?

Goldberg: It would be a perfect time to create a libertarian utopia. No rules, nobody telling you what to do or what to wear, or to sit up straight and do your homework. God, I hate my wife. I mean my life.

K-Lo: Great!

K-Lo releases Jonah, who slowly backs away from her and stands behind Reynolds.

K-Lo: Now all we need is a boat and Nanny and we'll be all set to rescue orphans and establish free market capitalism! Megan, do you want to be in charge of all the money?

McArdle: Why, K-Lo, how magnanimous of you. I was just saying to Jonah that I wanted to be better friends--wait a second.

Reynolds: K-Lo, I just sent a message on my Blackberry to my Secret Boss, who promises to have a ship waiting for you by the time you get to the harbor. Now be a good girl and take charge of your new Pirate Vessel, while we all go home and hug our kids and kiss our wives good-bye.

K-Lo: Sure thing, Glenn. I know how hard it is to leave loved ones behind. I left Mama and Daddy behind in New York when I moved to DC. See you soon, everyone!

K-Lo leaves.

Althouse: I don't want to go to Haiti. I like to take pictures of reflections in mirrors and windows and all the glass in Haiti is broken. If you can't look into a mirror and see yourself, how do you know you're really there? Maybe you're the reflection and the real person is in the mirror. Maybe the person in the mirror is much happier than you are and has sex with famous politicians and gets her picture taken by other people instead of just taking pictures of herself taking pictures of herself taking---.

Reynolds: (interrupts) Go home, Ann. We don't need you for this mission anyway.

Althouse weaves her way to the exit.

McArdle: I don't want to go to Haiti either.

Reynolds: WE ARE NOT GOING TO HAITI!

Goldberg: Jesus, Glenn, you don't have to yell.

Reynolds: Goldberg, you complain that the city didn't fix your lights fast enough. McArdle, you figure out how much money the government wasted by paying people overtime to fix the lights they should have fixed themselves.

McArdle: Figure?

Reynolds: You, know, do the math.

McArdle: Math?

Reynolds: (hopefully) You remember, don't you, Megan? Two times three? The square root of the hypotenuse is something or other?

McArdle: It wasn't fashionable at my school to learn how to do math, Glenn. Everyone knows that.

Malkin: That explains a lot.

Reynolds: Just make something up.

McArdle: Say no more, old chap. I can take it from there.

Reynolds: Malkin, you continue pushing those tea parties. I know by the time you're done with them, they'll be primed to hang the first non-white person they see.

Malkin: Consider it done.

Malkin changes into a bat and flies towards the exit.

Reynolds takes out his cell phone and punches in a number.

Reynolds: They're gone. Send in The Boss.

A glow of unearthly light slowly fills the corridor. A woman's form approaches, radiating in the growing light. She sways slightly as her four-inch high heels slide on the slick floor. The apparition finally steps forward into the room. It is----Sarah Palin!

Reynolds: Sarah!

Reynolds kneels before her. Palin smiles beneficently on Reynolds.

Palin: You betcha!

THE END

Coming Attractions

I'll discuss "Myth Diagnosis" by Miss Megan McArdle over the next day or two.

In the mean time, enjoy this correction from The Center of American Progress:

Thank you for your coverage of Matthew Yglesias in your article titled "Myth Diagnosis" for the March 2010 edition of The Atlantic.

We appreciate and value your press coverage but would like to clarify that the content referenced by Matthew Yglesias is from his blog, Yglesias, is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Center's 501(c)(4) affiliated organization. While the Center and the Action Fund share a mission, the Center is a research and educational institute, while the Action Fund transforms progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, partnership with other organizations, legislative action, and grassroots and political advocacy. We hope you will keep the distinction between these two organizations in mind in the future.

McArdle knows Yglesias very well and tweets with him often. Her lack of professionalism is an inspiration to hacks everywhere. Megan McArdle: leading by example.

The Conservative Elite (And Their Wannabes)

10 Feb 2010 01:36 pm
Shoe, Meet the Other Foot, Part III
I think it's a bit rich for the right to suddenly get all indignant about astroturfing. On the other hand, I doubt any of the lefties who were indignant about astroturfing three months ago will apply their outrage to this particular piece of work. More hilarity for libertarians!

Megan McArdle is a self-avowed libertarian, who sees herself as someone above the liberals and conservatives, neither poor like Democrats nor superstitious like Republicans. We have looked at McArdle's libertarian bona fides before, but let's revisit the topic.

Libertarianism is a term used by a broad spectrum[1] of political philosophies which prioritize individual liberty[2] and seek to minimize or even abolish the state.[3][4] The definition of libertarian in a political sense is a contentious issue and there is no single principle or set of principles on which all libertarians would agree. The proper role of government is described from a number of different metaphysical, epistemological, and moral viewpoints.[5] 'Libertarian' is an antonym of 'authoritarian'.[6]

Libertarians are anti-authoritarian. They don't want the state to exist, and they want absolute freedom for individuals as long as they do no harm to others. The philosophy is impractical in any real sense, since we have created a complex society that requires mutual cooperation, a basic factor in the success of human survival. We need to work together or we will die separately.

Libertarians choose to ignore this and must settle for chipping away at society's social fabric, hoping to rip it to shreds but content with stiffing their waiters. McArdle, however, does not believe in discarding the social fabric. She enjoys the benefits of the social structure and the luxuries of upper-middle class life, and has no desire to eradicate it in the name of self-reliance.

I understand this guilt; I've wrestled with it myself. But it's logically all wrong. Why shouldn't we pay people to clean our houses? I don't get all vaporish because I pay people to cook my food or wash my clothes, two jobs that were the province of the lady of the house-or if she was very lucky, her hired servants-until very recently in human history.

[snip]

Paying a cleaning lady to clean your house is good for the cleaning lady. She wouldn't take the job if it weren't better than her next best alternative. And it's good for you, since presumably you have something to do that you value more highly than the money it costs you to pay her. It's probably also good for your family, since that's one less fight you have to have about whose turn it is to scrub the toilet. That's the awesome beauty of trade: everyone wins.

No, there is a name for the group that seeks to preserve status and privilege, that want society just as it is. McArdle is conservative to her bones, supporting bankers, developers, manufacturers of cheap furniture, sweatshop exploitation, and just enough baksheesh thrown to the natives to get them out of one's face.

Megan McArdle is a conservative who rejects the name while enjoying all its benefits, and seeks to further its domination over her own purported philosophy. The right is currently dominated by the rabble and their puppets and Jesus freaks, and she enjoys laughing at their antics while they provide the hard work and money to get conservative politicians elected. The darling of Wall Street-centered media, she directly benefits from supporting conservative policies yet refuses to call herself a conservative. It's just so--common. When voice-of-the-turtle David Broder is kissing the high heels of Sarah Palin, you know that the populist image is the dominant one, and there's nothing left for an elite conservative to do but pretend she is part of a third party that will restore the conservative elite to social dominance.

Tweet-Tweet

I knew Megan McArdle's twitter would be a gold mine. She's even more arrogant in there than on her blog.

Here she is crowing about her "gotcha":

Internet connection, $30. Blogging software, $49.99. Reveling in the full majesty of editorial hypocrisy: priceless. http://bit.ly/cmZYGi
3:19 PM Feb 8th from TweetDeck

The hypocrisy was The New York Times' rejection of the privatization of Social Security and approval of health insurance reform. See, if the Times rejected unpopular changes in SS, it should have rejected unpopular changes in health insurance reform. Except the latter isn't unpopular. McArdle simply dismissed any poll numbers she didn't agree with.

Prep school education: $252,000 (including junior high--$144,000 for high school only). University education: $100,000. Being unable to think her way out of a wet paper bag: priceless.

Memo to bloggers/blog commenters . . . "fails to agree with me" is not the actual definition of any of these: stupid, ignorant, confused
6:50 PM Feb 8th from TweetDeck

Memo to blogger: Jonah Goldberg called. He wants his schtick of redefining words to make himself feel better about criticism back.

Dad informs me that third snowstorm may be coming towards DC. Organizing house-to-house search. Al Gore must be hiding somewhere in city.

4:10 PM Feb 8th from TweetDeck Okay, Democrats: you promised me global warming. If I don't get it soon, I'm voting GOP in November. #brokencampaignpromises
3:20 PM Feb 8th from TweetDeck

Her sweetie pie is being paid by climate change deniers, you know. Two of Reason Foundation's donors are/have been oil billionaire David H. Koch and Exxon. Reason Foundation's current president worked for Shell.

Wired published an interesting interview with sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard about the psychology of climate change denial.

Wired.com talked to Norgaard about the divide between science and public opinion.

Wired.com: Why don’t people seem to care?

Kari Norgaard: On the one hand, there have been extremely well-organized, well-funded climate-skeptic campaigns. Those are backed by Exxon Mobil in particular, and the same PR firms who helped the tobacco industry (.pdf) deny the link between cancer and smoking are involved with magnifying doubt around climate change.

That’s extremely important, but my work has been in a different area. It’s been about people who believe in science, who aren’t out to question whether science has a place in society.

Wired.com: People who are coming at the issue in good faith, you mean. What’s their response?

Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.

For relatively privileged people like myself, we don’t have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that’s not my life. We have a vast capacity for this.


Wired.com: How is this bubble maintained?

Norgaard: In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.

Wired.com: How does this translate into skepticism about climate change?

Norgaard: It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.

If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

Wired.com: Is that what this comes down to — not wanting to confront our own roles?

Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.

Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.

Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.

That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.

Wired.com: So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?

Norgaard: Yes, but I don’t want to make it seem crass. Sometimes people who are very empathetic are less likely to help in certain situations, because they’re so disturbed by it. The human capacity of empathy is really profound, and that’s part of our weakness. If we were more callous, then we’d approach it in a more straightforward way. It may be a weakness of our capacity as sentient beings to cope with this problem.

Not to mention all that lovely money given out to hacks who will prostitute themselves for the mega corporations.

Libertarian Crises Management

Heh. Megan McArdle tells us why she posted late.

You will probably have noticed that I did not post this morning.

I did indeed. Snowed in, nothing to do outside the house--a perfect time to rattle off a few fact-free, logic-free posts and then amuse yourself with games, blogs, and tv the rest of the day.

That's because sometime before 8 am, I decided that I should get to the grocery store and pick up my lung medicine in the hiatus between snows.

What? You have allergy attacks that have sent you to the emergency room but you don't pick up medicine before a blizzard? And you've read the Little House books, which are filled with harrowing accounts of blizzards that usually last three days?

Four hours later, I returned with a trunk full of whatever could be scavenged from the grocery store shelves.

You knew there was a blizzard coming and you did not prepare? You must really be kicking yourself now.

You have never seen a city as completely incompetent at dealing with snow as Washington DC.

Oh yeah, blame the city.

I mean, two feet of snow is inconvenient anywhere. But in DC, only the main streets have been plowed. And by "plowed", I mean that one meager lane has been cleared, so that even major arteries like New York Avenue frequently narrow to one lane. The side streets have been turned into defacto one-way streets--except that no one knows which way. The result is a lot like driving on a country road in Ireland, where you are apt to come upon someone going the other way, and then spend precious moments staring at each other until one party reluctantly backs up to a wider spot.

This is just an uneducated guess, but you probably aren't supposed to be driving around looking for food right now, instead of leaving the way clear for emergency vehicles on the one-lane road.

The difference is that Irish drivers are somewhat familiar with the conditions. DC today is the province of taxi drivers and SUV owners who seem simultaneously confused and overconfident. As I eased down the street in our little Japanese sedan, I quickly surmised that none of the drivers in the bite-sized tanks surrounding me had ever seen snow before. Three blocks later I revised that opinion: I don't think any of them had ever seen cars before. Certainly not the ones they were operating.

You left your cute little Mini-Cooper at home and took P. Suderman's less cute little Japanese car on the icy, slippery roads instead? Smart!

By the time I finally got to the grocery store, I discovered the scene many of you have already viewed on cable television. There was virtually no meat. There were no eggs--I thought I was missing them, until I realized that the egg section comprised the rows and rows of empty shelves stretching beneath one lonely carton of egg beaters. The frozen pizzas were pretty well decimated. Oddly, all of the shredded cheese and sliced cheese was gone, but there was plenty of the stuff in blocks. And I scored the last three containers of Yoplait Light. Oh, and the last four twelve-packs of regular diet coke. Sorry, Safeway shoppers--but I'm told that Diet Dr. Pepper tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper. More than what, I couldn't say.

I also noticed what Brian Caplan has remarked upon: the store brand frozen foods were pretty much still stocked at normal levels. This, even though Safeway's store brands tend to be private label versions of top premium brands--and more than occasionally, are better than anything else on offer. I helped myself freely to their quite tasty rising crust pizza, but anyone who wanted a slab of Red Baron's tomato-flavored cardboard was out of luck.

Naturally, both the fresh and frozen vegetable sections were still stocked to overflowing. I spent quite a bit of time last night making backup lists of vegetables I might buy, since I naturally expected that the produce would be picked over pretty well by now. Silly Megan. Apparently, when DC gets snowed in, it wants to do so with diet soda, Ritz crackers, six pounds of shredded cheddar, and a lifetime supply of stew meat. Me, I'm making slow cooker spaghetti sauce tomorrow.

When I got to the store, the lines looked reasonable. But by well before 9 am, they were stretching towards the back of the store. God knows what was left for the people who put off their shopping until noon.

Silly fools, not bothering to buy groceries until it was too late. Like eggs.

I understand that it doesn't necessarily make sense for DC to maintain plentiful snow moving equipment, when these types of heavy snowfalls only occur about once every seven years. But it seems to me we could try to maintain some psychological readiness. If this is how we react to a snow storm, what are we going to do when the Russkis invade?

McArdle can speak for herself. When we were getting warnings of an approaching hurricane, I gassed up all the cars, filled the propane tanks, stocked up on groceries and medical supplies, bought wind-up flashlights and charged everything that needed charging, renewed prescriptions that needed renewing, removed or tied down anything light in the back yard, and stocked up on books to read. When the hurricane was almost on us I cooked up all the meat in the freezer and filled the coolers with ice. And I'm not especially competent--not by a long shot.

But I do understand now why our Galt-goers refuse to Go Galt. They'd have to do all the work of survival themselves, instead of complaining that someone else isn't doing it for them.

I Give Up

No posts from Megan McArdle so far; perhaps she's too busy interviewing Ben Bernanke or analyzing stockholder reports.

Or maybe she slept late or went shopping for her wedding.

Either way, our gain.

ADDED: She's finally posted. We are informed that Bush's deficit was fine but Obama's isn't, and if he doesn't do something about it he'll lead us into fiscal crises. As opposed to what we have now, I guess. She also repeats this strange bit:

Listening to [Obama's] defenders reminds me of those people who sit around whining about how their Dad was really distant and critical . . . I mean, fine, you apparently had a rotten childhood, but Dad can't get come and get you off the couch and find you a girlfriend and a better job. Girls and employers get really creeped out if they try.

No, that's not condescending at all.

Here's her first post in that vein:

This is not Bush's fault. And you know what? Even if it were Bush's fault, who cares? It's like those people in their thirties who spend the whole decade in therapy and get into long weepy conversations over bottles of wine about how they can never have a healthy relationship because their father was so cold and distant, and their mother was a perfectionist harpy.

I mean, hey, it sounds like your parents were terrible. But this is not actually very useful information. Dad could get down on his hands and knees and admit that he was the most horrible father in the entire world, and beg for your forgiveness, and guess what? You're still lonely and balding and drinking way too much mid-priced Chardonnay. No matter what Dad did, he can't fix it. You have to be the one to call your girlfriend and say "I love you." If Dad does it, she'll just get all creeped out.

I'm beginning to think her father was cold and distant and her mother was a perfectionist harpy.

You're Still Here?

Onward to Colorado Springs!


Megan McArdle gives us two posts that depend on her erroneous belief that the nation does not want health insurance reform. She can keep this up forever--why not say anything and everything when you can ignore facts and use hypotheticals you created to "prove" your opinion is factual?

We are going to hear a lot more about the eradication of Social Security and Medicare. Our elite might even be able to pull it off this time, telling various tea-baggers, libertarians, and newly poor that the government can't do anything right. It will be a lie, because lies are the only way they will be able to defend the removal of any and all social safety nets. And McArdle will cheer our elite on the entire way, despite the fact that her Masters of the Universe drove the economy into a ditch.

All it will take is a population that is both ignorant and refuses to think. And I wouldn't bet against those odds.

Reading Recommendation

Megan McArdle reprints one of her brain-dead posts at Business Insider, and the commentariat rip her to shreds. Good times for the entire family.

A Birdie Told Me

Speaking of Twitter, little miss I-Called-Myself-Jane-Galt-A-Long-Time-Ago-To-Heckle-Liberals twitters under the name Jane Galt too--according to boy fiance P. Suderman.

Watching "Reds" with @janegalt instead of the Palin speech. (Now if it were an Orszag speech, I'd be all over it. )
about 21 hours ago from Tweetie

Unless he's snuggling with someone else called Jane Galt, and there can't be two such elitist twits in his life, can there?

Die Hard

Brave, brave Jonah Goldberg, who refused to fight when his nation needed him to win the War Of All Wars against The Terror Of All Terrors, faces a blizzard with his usual equanimity.

DC snow finally starting to stick. Getting really pretty. Ugliness comes later.
2:15 PM Feb 5th from web

To prepare him for a tough day, Jonah stoked up on carbs.

Snowbound menu: Martinis. Then: Gnocchi with slow-cooked pork ragu, arugula salad (that's right: Arugula) and a nice red. Life is good.
2:47 PM Feb 5th from web

But before Jonah gets to pick the pork bits out of his teeth, disaster strikes.

[Ooops, it's the next day, so Jonah is stuck in the house without electricity overnight. Thanks for the correction, anonymous.]

Seriously: We're buried. Electricity is out. House getting cold. May evacuate.
5:07 AM Feb 6th from API

So within less than two and a half hours, Jonah is panicking and thinking evacuation. It's a good thing for him that he refuses to live in our area. He'd spend the entire hurricane season fleeing for his life every time it rained.

Sending wife, daughter and brother-in laws to hotel. staying behind with the animals. need to macguyver some coffee. ideas?
6:22 AM Feb 6th from API

After three or four hours twelve endless, tortuous hours of no electricity, our tough pioneers are ready to run away. But although Jonah lives in the Heartland like all conservatives, in his case the Heartland is on the upper West Side of New York City. It must be hard to survive in a high rise with no electricity and with a child. How cold was it, Jonah?

it's now 56 degrees inside the house and dropping.
6:23 AM Feb 6th from API

Dear God, the tragedy! It's time to pull out the emergency sweater ration! What fresh hell will Jonah endure next?

just when I was about to type "All work and no play makes Jonah a dull boy" ten million times, the power came on.
about 23 hours ago from API

No doubt K-Lo would say that it was the Hand Of God that preserved Jonah from Nature's savage devastation.

Sorry for the mistakes; I was sloppy.

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

Gerard Alexander is given space in the "liberal" media to complain that liberals are condescending to conservatives. I'd go over his article pointing out his psychological motive (too insecure to tolerate dissent or accept unpleasant facts), flawed thesis (conservatives' fact-free, illogical arguments are unjustly ignored), and emotional demands for attention and approval, but I would never lower myself that far.

Advice Column

Dear Susan,

I have a problem. My commenters are mean to each other and it's making me look bad. They insult and pick fights with their ideological enemies, ignore evidence and counter-arguments, and insist on inflicting their morality (or lack of morality) on others. It's embarrassing me in front of my family. I tell them to ignore all criticism like I do, but the situation is just getting worse. What do I do?

Helpless Victim

Dear Victim,

You set the tone for your own blog. If you don't like your commenters' behavior, stop insulting and picking fights with your ideological enemies, ignoring evidence and counter-arguments, and inflicting your lack of morality on others.

Or you can continue to ignore all criticism and endure the social disapproval, which is the inevitable consequence of your own actions.

Susan

ADDED: Ha! McArdle adds her rules of blogging behavior. My favorite:

If you're wrong, admit it at once. No one will fault you for being mistaken. Everyone will hate you for refusing to admit it. Andrew Sullivan et al. didn't go after Tapped because they got the numbers wrong, but because they refused to admit the possibility that the numbers were wrong, and wrote snotty posts about anyone who suggested they should check again.

No, wait! This is my favorite!:

If you have to fudge numbers and blur distinctions in order to make a case for your ideas, why do you believe them? If you don't understand the science or math behind an issue, why are you arguing with people who understand it better? Do you hope to convince them with the vast inertial weight of your ignorance? Or are you hoping to get them so frustrated by the difficulty of explaining climatology to someone who dropped out of freshman physics that they spontaneously combust? [unfortunately, this does not work -- ed.] Or do you just enjoy looking like a total idiot in public?

Crying, Over You

Recently Megan McArdle wrote a post saying that mental illnesses should not have parity with other illnesses of the body, that monopolies help the consumer, and teachers are too lazy to improve in their jobs. Then she complained that people were being mean to her.

Note to My Angry Liberal Interlocutors

Before you pop off at me, would you please try to read all the words in the post? In order?

I say this because in the past few weeks, I've had a notable uptick of incidents where someone berates me by saying, "Well how come you don't think we need to help mentally ill people who have jobs!" or "You're completely ignoring the possibility that once a company gets a monopoly, they will jack up prices!", when I have spent a paragraph or so discussing exactly the problem that they are angrily demanding that I address . . . or rather, angrily declaring that my failure to understand this point is evidence of my total hypocrisy/ideological blindness/hatred of the unfortunate.

I have many flaws. There is no need to go fabricating imaginary ones.

There are many issues in this short post that could be disputed. For instance:

The people disagreeing with McArdle are all liberals.
The liberals are very angry at McArdle and pop off at her.
The liberals don't read what she wrote.
Her discussions actually address the counter-arguments.
Her discussions successfully negate the counter-arguments.

But my main question is, who declared that Megan McArdle is immune from criticism? She writes for the public, she appears in the public media, she has comments on her blog, and she states her opinions with unequivocal conviction. Of course she is criticized. Some journalists are proud of being criticized, because it means they are doing their job. But McArdle seems to feel that nobody should disagree with what she writes and that she shouldn't have to put up with dissent.

Perhaps the problem is that she is being forced to defend her principles, ideas and opinions, instead of grandly tossing them off and ignoring their effect on other people's lives. Perhaps the circle of admirers is getting smaller and nuttier. Perhaps having to defend the indefensible is getting just a tiny bit harder.

No matter. This is a great time to advocate for the dissolution of government services and a winner-take-all ethos. McArdle might very well end up the crown princess of Hell.

She Just Doesn't Learn

Some time ago I wrote this:

Dear Megan
Dearest Megan,

If you start pushing school vouchers again I will clean your clock with the facts you are omitting. You will look like the clueless shill that you are, and by the time I'm done you'll be wishing you avoided this conversation. This will take up a tremendous amount of my time to do the research*, and I am not being paid to work 16-hour days like you are. So I will be very cranky.

Hugs and Kisses,

Susan


*Ask your friends what that word means.

P.S. Don't forget that you first got my attention by attacking teachers. How many posts have I written just for that reason? Hundreds. But go ahead, make me angry. Again.
Posted by Susan of Texas at 12:20 PM 5 comments Links to this post

McArdle has decided to attack teachers and unions once again. Basically, McArdle's views on teachers stem from the fact that she thinks teachers are lazy. She dresses up her elitist snobbery and parades it around in borrowed clothes, but that's all it is.

Game on.

MyGodSpace

God, I love K-Lo's twitter. The only thing better than the high school essays she publishes is her unvarnished trivial thoughts.

i have tiny url issues. that vatican social-media link again:...
32 minutes ago from HootSuite

You just know she begged for nun and priest puppets as a child.

Trivial Offering

I thought the Atlantic hired an economics reporter, not a gossip columnist for a business college newspaper. Megan McArdle finally posts today, about a political pissing contest and meaningless controversy. She does not discuss 2010 loan recasts, soaring foreclosure, tightening credit, Bernanke, hearings, state and city budget crises, rising debt ceiling, the blurring line between government and corporate intelligence and spying, and the national budget. McArdle better watch out, she can be replaced by someone who will work harder for less. It's the free market way.

Possibilities

Interesting article on our recent financial history, but I have a question.

Investors Should Prepare for a Bumpy Ride– Capitalism Is In Crisis

Several things have now become very clear. First, as has been argued here many times here, the international monetary system is in dire need of reform. Since the US’s abnegation of fiscal and monetary responsibility in 1971 and its termination of the quasi gold standard Bretton Woods system, the international monetary system has dumped excess liquidity on the world and enabled bubble after bubble.

Second, the fiat international monetary system has allowed numerous countries – China being the latest – to hold down (I would never use a word like “manipulate”!) the value of its currency and export its way to prosperity. This export model has been at the expense of the US worker. Remember the real US unemployment rate, the U6 rate which includes discouraged and part time workers, is 17.3%. The American consumer is in a debt deflation mode. The US oriented export model is dead. Only a massive devaluation of the US dollar against Asian currencies will allow America to compete globally. The US has to become the exporter. If that doesn’t happen, protectionism looms.

Couldn't a massive reduction in wages help America compete globally? If they can reduce us to third world wages, they don't have to worry about third world governments. They've already bought this one. It's not like anyone can afford to hold out for more money.

Except bankers, of course.

Baby Needs A New Pair Of Shoes

01 Feb 2010 09:23 am
Public Service Announcement
My favorite food processor is available at Amazon with a $30 mail-in rebate.
Permalink :: Comments (16) :: TrackBacks (0) ::
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How much is McArdle's cut on a $300.00 item?

The wedding expenses must be adding up.

UPDATE: Question answered.

Anon Y. Mous February 1, 2010 12:05 PM
LOL. Is it also a public service when you collect your commission from Amazon?

Reply

Megan McArdle (Replying to: Anon Y. Mous) February 1, 2010 12:11 PM
The commission that I can expect to earn from Amazon on putting up a link will probably not add up to enough to buy a Venti cappuccino at Starbucks. If I don't genuinely think something is worth owning, I don't link it.

It's okay to shill from The Atlantic because she believes in the product. But something tickles at my memeory....

November 17, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:

Absolutely shameless begging: kitchen edition
As you know, now is the time of year when I engage in an absolutely shameless attempt to encourage you to earn me money from my Amazon.com associates account, under the thin pretense of suggesting things you can buy your loved ones for Christmas. I am poor, and my student loan officer is hungry, and the people at the workhouse will only give me one serving of gruel a day. . . this brazen commercialization of The Birth of Our Lord is the only way that I can afford to buy myself the books with which I enrich my mind so that I can offer you keen insight and witty commentary on a quasi-daily basis.

If you're going to do your Christmas shopping on Amazon this year, just click the handy links provided by me or another of your favourite bloggers (mine's over there at the right, if you scroll down a little!), and at absolutely not cost to yourself, you can send a little commission our way. We get the commission even if you buy something other than the product we linked, though the commission is higher for direct links.

However, even if you don't order through Amazon, all the stuff I'll suggest here is stuff that I genuinely love, so do consider purchasing for yourself or your loved ones offline. And if you do buy something I recommend, please, please, please email me to let me know how it went over.

And if you don't like anything you see here, please feel free to peruse last year's selections, though there is some overlap.

And then there was:

December 09, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm buying myself this Christmas
Well, I just got my hands on A Feast of Crows, by George R. R. Martin. If you haven't read the previous books in this series--A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords--well, I envy you my friend, because you have a rare treat in front of you. I don't read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I'm as fond as the next person of well-written page-turners, which this one is. It's a low-magic version of The War of the Roses, with the Yorks as protagonists. I bought the first one to read on the plane to London, and raced through the next ones as soon as I got home. I've been waiting eagerly for this one ever since, and now I'm holding off on reading it for just a little while so I can savor the anticipation.

Also, I'm finally trying to get my kitchen organized. I invested in a butter boat, which uses water to keep butter cool enough that it doesn't go rancid, but warm enough that you can spread it. I have no idea if this will work, but if it does, I will be extremely excited. I hate hard butter on my toast. I also bought three of these spice racks, which stack into one tower that takes up a lot less space in my tiny apartment. I just assembled it last night and filled it with spices, and it looks surprisingly lovely with all the different colored spices in it. I'm very excited to finally cook with the thing. And I got a tupperware carousel, which is far too small for a family, but is just perfect for a single person. It has cleaned up the perilous tower 'o tupperware that used to lurk in my cupboards.

I finally got Kanye West's College Dropout, Damien Rice's O, and Freedy Johnston's This Perfect World.

I'm toying with the idea of getting one of these, but am worried that it won't do nearly as good a job as a conventional microwave. Reader comments are solicited.

Oh, and I'm investing in the first volume of George Orwell's four-volume collected essays, journalism and letters. If it's good, I'll buy the next three.

If you want to know what sort of things I think are cool, but do not yet own, my wishlist is here . Think of it as a big recommendation list for Christmas presents if you happen to know someone who shares my obsession with financial markets and kitchen gear.

Thanks, all of you who bought through my Amazon account. Y'all are making all this possible. Merry Christmas, everyone.

The View From The Top

In her continuing effort to justify her lack of a soul, Megan McArdle published yet another post saying that the other side must understand her side, since we are all good fellows, and jolly well met. But some foolish, unpleasant people will insist that McArdle listen to them complain and whine about doing without health care. You see, McArdle had just written an exceedingly callous and insulting post about mental health, and then (inevitably) had to publish another post supporting her first when she was criticized. The blogosphere recoiled in disgust but McArdle is accustomed to that, and her second post merely reinforced her lack of feeling. Usually that will be the end of the matter, barring more public criticism and further desperate posts claiming justification. Let's see what she says.

Empathy by Analogy
01 Feb 2010 11:29 am

A friend suggests that the best way for those who opposed the health care reform bill to understand how the other side may be feeling is to read this article.

On the other hand, this suggests that the denouement[*] may actually be ours in the end.

"This article" is an article on how sad sports fans get when their team loses.

It's a game to her. Winners and losers. Rich and poor. You lose, you're poor, too bad, so sad. But you lost because we're better than you. Our money proves that.

When Ross Douthat weeps over The Holy Fetus or David Brooks do his damndest to protect the poor or McArdle pretends to care about any other creature in existence, they are merely rooting for the home team, utterly oblivious of anyone else's concerns. They don't care if we live or die. They say so, quite plainly. They are defending their tribe and obeying their authority and for that they are being richly rewarded. That is all they know, and all they need to know.



*Denouement means the conclusion, or unraveling, of the plot. This is like saying the ending might be hers in the end.

She has an Ivy League English degree, by the way.