The Rise In Disability

Credit Where Credit Is Due.  Unfit For Work, by Chana Joffe-Walt at NPR. This includes the type of anecdotal reporting that NPR has long specialised in and drives me nuts. Give me numbers, give me trends.  A story may be gripping and tug at out heartstrings, but if it is an atypical case and the typical case is quite different, then it is ultimately misleading. When I read anecdotes, I don't immediately think "This is the real story, because this is a real person."  I think "What are they hiding?" As the human-interest side seems to drive journalism, I am apparently unusual in this.

But this one's got numbers, it's got trends.  It does have a suspicious amount of "Okay, I haven't researched this but here's how it looks to me," writing, but on the whole it is actual reporting. It points out complications in the common narratives, it gives evidence for a different way of looking at things.  And as one who was deeply involved with disability applications for the mentally ill for decades, it's right in my wheelhouse. What does disability even mean? Some psychiatrists would reason "I she can't get her expensive medication she's going to be disabled. So it's a paradox that we apply for disability in order for her to be able to work, but it's a good paradox, because now she's working." True.  Entirely true.  I can still remember specific cases.

But now that she's on disability, the temptation to just not work at all becomes more intense. You have less money than if you worked on one of the part-time programs, but your kids still have food and shelter and you have medical benefits. You have a sense you'd feel better about yourself if you were doing something productive, but it's not strong enough to do anything about it today.  Tomorrow for sure. So what was the right answer?

The medical director took a different approach, but did not insist other psychiatrists follow his lead. "Putting this young man on disability would be the end of his life.  He is still developing, still becoming an adult, still learning to adapt. Going out into the workforce in his condition is going to be hard.  He might fail.  He might just give up.  He might become a criminal or even kill himself. But most of them find some sort of life.  Most of them find a way. He can go on to have some sort of job, some feeling of worth, have a family.  We can't take that from him." He's right, but I'm the one explaining that to his mother who he lives with but can't afford him and is afraid he'll die if she kicks him out.  So what's the right answer?

Look at Harold.  He's just as sick as his cousin but he found himself two part-time jobs and rents that room above the store. Well, sure, but there aren't enough of those jobs and rooms for everyone anymore.  It's musical chairs where he's the last one, but the others have nothing. We don't like for context to be a big factor in disability.  We want things to be a clean slice. But there's no way around it. 

Gaming the System

In 2018, the "evidence" was that the Clinton Foundation was on the up-and-up, despite the accusations. It was (and still is) nearly perfect score rating on charity evaluation sites, and an investigation during Trump's first term, trying to show that it was a pay-to-play scheme to sell access while Hillary was Secretary of State, had been unable to prove anything amiss. There was in fact pressure that an announcement be made to that effect, to punish the evil, politically-driven hit men who had dared besmirch Ms. Clinton. No one has said much about it since.

But this may be because there is not much need to anymore. Since 2001, the Foundation has transformed philanthropy through programs that develop leaders and accelerate solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.  Sounds like a description on your resume of your last job. Develop leaders. Accelerate solutions. The world's most pressing challenges.  Yet that is not the problem. In its heyday up until 2016, while Clinton was SecState, the fund took in $250,000,000 per year in donations. The next year, however, contributions fell off 90%, to $20M/year. I guess those donors were no longer interested in developing leaders and accelerating solutions for some unknown reason. Over half of the private interests Hillary met with while Secretary were foundation donors. 

She has a long history of this, getting the FBI files of her political enemies while in the White House, ostensibly to arrange seating at important dinners, for example. She and Web Hubbell refusing to let the FBI into Vince Foster's office after he turned up dead*. Gaming the primary system to take the nomination away from Bernie Sanders, having an insecure email account to make wedding plans and yoga scheduling. And whenever she had to testify, her supporters loved it, not because she refuted the charges or successfully explained her actions, but because she artfully dodged the questions. Aha! She led them on a merry chase, she did, but they couldn't touch her! As if powerful people not answering questions were a good thing. "I'm sorry, I don't recall," repeated a hundred times. "Wipe, like with a cloth?"

We have seldom had people as good as the Clintons at gaming the system. Obama might have been as good, but he just wasn't on the scene long enough to rack up the career numbers.

Now Trump is doing the same thing, though nowhere near as successfully. Partly that's because he's outnumbered in Washington, but also because his skill was in gaming business transactions, not reputational ones. Also, he ended up on the pro-life side of things, perhaps by default. I don't find evidence he cared much about the issue 20 years ago, and it does not figure prominently for him now except indirectly, because of SCOTUS nominees. But that remains the wine and wafer of Democratic women, and they will forgive any Kennedy, Dodd, Clinton, Sanders, or Edwards any behavior against women up to and including negligent homicide. So someone like Trump, who is boorish, unempathic, and unstylish to boot will just grate on them the wrong way. His gaming the legal system - and he does - arouses fury and amazement. 

I do a mild version of it myself, not in excusing bad behavior if there is no "proof" even when there is, but in just forgetting about it when it's someone I perceive as being on my side of a cultural or political divide. That's not dramatic, but it's not a heckuva lot better. I guess that is also gaming the system, putting my thumb on one side of the balance pan. I don't visibly shrug, for that would give away my hypocrisy, but inside I shrug, forever noting that the other guys are worse.  

And I have proof. Proof, I say.

*Just in case you forgot how long the FBI has been rolling over for Democratic presidents.  

Empathy

Another reason why empathy isn't always a good thing. Sociopaths have a very effective version of it.

Empathy is about co-feeling what you think others feel - and maybe you do!

Compassion is about what you do, regardless of how you feel about it. 

 

Screwtape again: Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Russia Hoax

A liberal friend expressed horror a few months ago that Trump had believed Putin's claim of noninterference in the 2016 election, even when our own intelligence services had reported that it was true! She was further surprised when I nodded and said that while I didn't trust any statement from Putin, it was certainly true that the three-letter agencies were out to get Trump and could not be trusted on the matter either.

The information released by Tulsi explains that the intelligence services did in fact find there was nothing behind it, but the report was spiked by higher-ups, known to the Obama White House and Clinton campaigns, which quickly made an opposite claim.  

I am again no expert, and have to rely on who I think is fighting fair and who is not. But my prediction is that we are now on a course of

The hoax never happened

It happened but was completely different 

It mostly happened like you said, but was unimportant

It happened, but it was good that it happened

Let's move on

 

Dear Wormwood

More of senior demon Uncle Screwtape's Letter 6, advising his nephew about the intersection of politics and Christian obedience.

 Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy

It is easy to pretend to feel affection for someone on the other side of a government program, or indeed, even your own private charity at a distance. In contrast, it is difficult to even pretend to feel affection for your physical neighbor - the person currently before you - if they are the sort which cracks his egg on the wrong end. I don't say a true feeling of affection is impossible in the first case, only that the expressed love for that person is going to look a good deal more like duty than like affection. As I mentioned recently, such affection is directed at what is largely a product of our own imaginations.

Bungalow Bill

“I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because I think of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us,” MacFarlane continued to quiver. “If he didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.” CBS Reporter Scott MacFarlane about being present at the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

The Beatles were on this years ago.

The children asked him if to kill was not a sin

"Not when he looked so fierce" his Mummy butted in

"If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him."

 

In War (or Even Political Argument)

As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals. In his anguish, the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes. But it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats. He has never met these people in real life—they are lay figures modeled on what he gets from newspapers. The results of such fanciful hatred are often most disappointing.  (C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters, Ch 6) (Italics mine)

Now let the names drift by you. 

Trump...Putin...Biden...Khamenei...Zelenskyy...Netanyahu...Starmer...Musk...Harris...

Thompson, blog

I haven't been over to David Thompson's site for months, and the first entry did not disappoint.  He rescued some impressive bits from the archives.

Feeling Puckish

Is quilting an art or a craft?

What do you think the gender breakdown would be on the answer? 

Linear Pottery Culture (LBK)

 

"The LBK might be named after it's pottery, but they'd be better-defined by their buildings."

I had not run into this prehistory channel before, but have liked the other offerings I have tried as well. Dan Davis History. 

The "1939 Project?"

I had not heard of this, not even informally with no name. I have heard rumblings, and throughout my postliberal days have run into anti-Israel conservatives. But this new development is alarming.   

I will make some distinctions right off the bat, because this is an area where people of good will might misunderstand each other, largely because people who are not of good will are shoving them into corners. There is an entirely reasonable point of view that says Israel is one nation among many, whose objectives sometimes coincide with ours and sometimes do not, but American policy favors them more than is strictly necessary for our own interests. My objection to this is not to the idea itself, but to the reality of listening to a large percentage of these people who rapidly reveal that there's something they just don't like about Jews. Whether they are lying to themselves or to me is not something I am going to get into here, I only note that it shows up in surprising places. 

The first clue is they regard those who disagree with them as having been bamboozled by Jewish interests, by Jewish media influence and Jewish propaganda. Whatever facts you counter with, they remain convinced that no rational person could want America to favor Israel's position in the Middle-East unless they had been tricked.  It becomes a circular argument, where every point is dismissed because its source is poisoned, and we know the source is poisoned because their facts are wrong. There are sites on my sidebar that have regular commenters who believe this.

Let me assure you that if your default is to regard me as someone who has been fooled you are going to have to marshal a good deal of evidence on the point, not merely accuse me smugly. There is an evangelical/fundamentalist core of support for Israel that is founded on end-times and prophecy theologies, that Israel is about to become the center of the final conflict and we had best be on the side of God's Chosen.  One can disagree with that theology, but it wasn't given to them by Jews.  In fact, lots of Jews are uncomfortable with it. It is also counterbalanced by an opposing tradition of antisemitism among American evangelicals and fundamentalists.  Think Jimmy Carter.

As for media influence, American Jews have had a lot of intelligent writers.  It's called persuasion. If you think their persuasion is overrepresented in media, then write your own counterpersuasion, don't just accuse me of having been fooled or not seeing the obvious reality. It may just be uncomfortable for you to acknowledge that your arguments just aren't that good.  The pro-Israel Americans assert that they are deserving of our allegiance because they are the most stable, reasonable, and Western nation in the Middle-East. The counter is often that they aren't that great, they are deceptive with us at times, and there are other considerations, such as oil, positioning, territory, and waterways that should influence us to favor other nations at times on a case-by-case basis.

If Israel were in the middle of Europe I would say that is spot on. The French or Italians sometimes deceive us, or each other, and we them. Nations do not always play straight with each other and we balance that in our considerations.  But Israel does not border Switzerland.  It sits among tribal, aggressive low-IQ nations that found oil and have shipping lanes. This is not a tirade against Islam, BTW.  I think that area remains essentially tribal and Islam has had some unifying moral effect. However, there is still too much shame culture that it's not wrong if you don't get caught and loyalty to clan transcends any permanent moral claim. A lot of the 70's evangelicals who became pro-Israel because of Hal Lindsey remained pro-Israel because their basic sense of of decency and fair play was activated when they paid attention. 

I will again say that if you are one who says "But it's gone too far.  Israel does terrible things as well and its enemies have some valid complaints," then we can weigh one thing against another in our discussion of American interests.  You might move me to your point of view and remind me of things I should have remembered.  Make your case. Just be ready for the counter that your own arguments sometimes betray more of your real intent than you are willing to admit. The door swings both ways.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum

The promotional video has only women in the museum, often giggling. It's a serious scientific endeavor, though.

Car Talk

Just for nostalgia. Both these guys went to MIT, and their first business was creating a space with tools where you could come in and work on your own car for a fee. That is very useful in the city.

 

 Is this real, or is this an excellent storyteller?  Either way.

Negotiations

 I still read DeepNewz and prefer it. Every time I go to the page I see more about Trump threatening to do A or B, interspersed with stories that he is now willing to negotiate C and D. The complaints that one day he says this thing and the next day he says that seem to fundamentally misunderstand that this is all part of the negotiation. 

He likes negotiating.  He is sure he is very good at it.  Is he very good at it? We will never know until later. But do not look at this as a strategy on his part so much as something he just likes doing, and so easily talks himself into the idea that he is good at it.  Obama had something similar: he liked getting everyone together so that he could listen to them all and then make a decision.  If people didn't go along, he made them do it anyway, by any means necessary.  In his mind they had their say and now it was his turn - even when other branches of government had a role, he didn't care. But it wasn't a strategy on his part as much as he just liked it. He liked getting everyone together to talk, then going off and doing what he damn well pleased.

George Bush thought he could reason with everyone.  Was he good at it? Meh.  Sometimes. But the point is that he liked trying to solve problems by reasoning with people. You can have a try at every president on this. Reagan liked persuading people with the golden generalisation. Clinton liked giving the person in front of him what they wanted and tricking his way out of the contradictions.  I don't know what Biden liked doing, other than getting up and talking about things and taking credit while other people did the work.  I think he was like that before becoming demented. The dementia just accentuated it. You might have different descriptions of what all of them did, and your assessments might be better than mine.

But today's insight is that these things are strategies primarily because the presidents are comfortable solving things a particular way and feel on weaker ground doing it any other way.  They are going to go back to what they believe is their strong suit.  At this point in their career, whether they succeed or fail at that method doesn't matter to them very much.  They will revert to form. 

Reunions

Brief observation from back-to-back reunions: when people are asked to give a summary of what they have done, it is further schooling, careers, (current) spouses, and number of children, in no particular order. When you speak with them live, it is children, where do you live now, and "do you remember?" Careers were seldom mentioned at one, not at all at the other.