In exploring the recesses of prog rock, I’ve been unable to get into Soft Machine, a very influential English prog rock band and one of the founders of the Canterbury scene, as I find their music too dissonant for my tastes.
After leaving Soft Machine in 1971, Robert Wyatt formed Matching Mole, who put out two albums, their first in 1972. While much of their music follows in the Soft Machine vein, “O Caroline” is a beautiful ballad, the album’s first track, and a rather out of place one at that, as it’s the only traditionally melodic song on the album. (It is worth noting that this is only song on the album with music not penned by Wyatt, but rather by Dave Sinclair.)
The song is heavily infused with Mellotron sounds over a basic piano chord sequence. And that is almost always a winning combination. The fragility of Wyatt’s plaintive vocals also stand out.
David’s on piano, and I may play on a drum And we’ll try to make the music work, we’ll try to have some fun But I just can’t help thinking that if you were here with me I’d get all my thoughts in focus and play more excitingly I love you still – Caroline I want you still – Caroline I need you still – Caroline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXFp-9zsCQ
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When it comes to healthcare, widely cited as 1/6 of our economy, extraordinary inflationary pressures have become both a public and political crisis. As Milton Friedman correctlynoted, the root cause of the exploding costs of healthcare can be traced back to a single fatal error: the introduction of third-party payment (typically, coverage through employers.) Friedman writes:
Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care. … A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as ‘covered’ by a bureaucrat. … The patient has little … incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. … An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer.
It is also true that, when it comes to the healthcare market, we do not have a free market. We have an uber-bureaucratized market, and a very inefficient one at that.
What are the odds, one might ask, of us ever getting to real free market dynamics here?
A few months ago, Charles Krauthammer predicted the U.S. would go to single-payer in a few years time:
Krauthammer said ObamaCare “failed at every level,” but it did change Americans’ expectations regarding health care.
“I would predict that in less than seven years, we’ll be in a single-payer system,” Krauthammer said, pointing out that Republicans aren’t even arguing for a free market system anymore.
“They have sort of accepted the fact that the electorate sees health care as not just any commodity, like purchasing a steak or a car,” Krauthammer explained. “It’s something now people have a sense the government ought to guarantee.”
He explained that there are only two options for the future of health care in the U.S. – a radically, individualist system where the market rules or single-payer – and the country is not going to ever go back to the former.
“The terms of debate are entirely on the grounds of the liberal argument that everybody ought to have it,” Krauthammer said. “Once that happens, you’re going to end up with a single-payer system.”
Don’t tell anyone, but American conservatives will soon be embracing single-payer healthcare, or some other form of socialized healthcare.
Yes, that’s a bold claim given that a GOP-controlled Congress and President are poised to un-socialize a great deal of healthcare, and may even pull it off. But within five years, plenty of Republicans will be loudly supporting or quietly assenting to universal Medicare.
And that’s a good thing, because socializing healthcare is the only demonstrably effective way to control costs and cover everyone. It results in a healthier country and it saves a ton of money.
That may seem offensively counterintuitive. It’s generally assumed that universal healthcare will by definition cost more.
In fact, in every first-world nation that has socialized medicine–whether it be a heavily regulated multi-insurer system like Germany, single-payer like Canada, or a purely socialized system like the United Kingdom–-it costs less. A lot, lot less, in fact: While healthcare eats up nearly 18 percent of U.S. GDP, for other nations, from Australia and Canada to Germany and Japan, the figure hovers around 11 percent. (It’s no wonder that smarter capitalists like Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway are bemoaning the drag on U.S. firm competitiveness from high healthcare costs.)…
I don’t want to oversell the friction-free smoothness of the GOP’s conversion to socialized healthcare. Our funny country will always have a cohort of InfoWars ooga-boogas, embittered anesthesiologists and Hayekian fundies for whom universal healthcare is a totalitarian jackboot. (But, and not to be a jerk, it’s worth remembering that Hayek himself supported the socialized healthcare of Western Europe in one of his most reasonable passages from the Road to Serfdom.)
From a recent Tucker Carlson show, here is NR’s Reihan Salam arguing for a single-payer heath care system that offers levels of choices:
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Here’s another article ruminating on the idea of a guaranteed basic income:
The idea of a universal basic income — monthly cash payments from the government to every individual, working or not, with no strings attached — is gaining traction, thanks in part to endorsements from Silicon Valley celebs.
Some see it as a way to compensate for the traditional jobs with benefits that will be wiped out by robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, globalization and the gig economy. Others see it as a way to reduce income inequality or to create a more efficient, less stigmatizing safety net than our current mishmash of welfare benefits.
“I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income, I don’t think we are going to have a choice,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February.
In a commencement speech at Harvard University in May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.”…
It enjoyed a wave of U.S. popularity in the 1910s and ’20s and again in the ’60s and ’70s when it was championed by free-market economist Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and, for a while, Richard Nixon.
Basic income has fans across the political spectrum, but for very different reasons. Libertarian backers would replace all or most welfare programs with a monthly cash payment as a way to prevent poverty, reduce government bureaucracy and let people decide for themselves how to use the money…
Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, has proposed a basic income plan that would replace all transfer payments including welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies, the earned income tax credit, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It would also eliminate farm subsidies and “corporate welfare.”
In exchange, each American older than 21 would get a monthly payment totaling $13,000 a year, of which $3,000 would go to health insurance. After $30,000 in earned income, a graduated tax would “reimburse” some of the grant until it dropped to $6,500 at $60,000 in income. However, the grant would never drop below $6,500 to compensate for the loss of Social Security and Medicare.
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Here is the first single from The Darkness’s upcoming album Pinewood Smile, slated to be released in early October. The song is a rocker, an instant Darkness classic.
Posted inMusic|Comments Off on The Darkness – All the Pretty Girls (2017)
From that awful, nationalist, Hitler-like Viktor Orban:
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — European Union leaders and Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros are seeking a “new, mixed, Muslimized Europe,” Hungary’s anti-migration prime minister said Saturday.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban said during a visit to Romania that Hungary’s border fences, supported by other Central European countries, will block the EU-Soros effort to increase Muslim migration into Europe.
While Hungary opposed taking in migrants “who could change the country’s cultural identity,” Orban said under his leadership, Hungary would remain a place where “Western European Christians will always be able to find security.”…
Orban reiterated his charge that Soros-funded NGOs want to weaken Hungary’s security with their advocacy for asylum-seekers and said Hungary had managed to stop the “migrant invasion” with razor-wire fences on its borders with Serbia and Croatia.
In Hungary, they actually encourage (through incentive) indigenous Hungarians to have more children:
Orban said Hungary’s low birth rate made the country an “endangered species,” and that the government was using taxes on multinational companies to fund social policies that would spur families to have more children.
A healthy sense of one’s own race as central to one’s culture, creed, and nation.
In WaPo, Carlos Lozada has a lengthy and representative overview of the work of the late great Samuel Huntington (“Samuel Huntington, a prophet for the Trump era”). While it’s got flourishes of Lozada’s liberalism (this is WaPo, after all), the piece is worth reading:
Huntington’s work, spanning the mid-20th century through the early 21st, reads as a long argument over America’s meaning and purpose, one that explains the tensions of the Trump era as well as anything can. Huntington both chronicles and anticipates America’s fights over its founding premises, fights that Trump’s ascent has aggravated. Huntington foresees — and, frankly, stokes — the rise of white nativism in response to Hispanic immigration. He captures the dissonance between working classes and elites, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, that played out in the 2016 campaign. And he warns how populist demagogues appeal to alienated masses and then break faith with them.
Huntington’s books speak to one another across the decades; you find the origins of one in the unanswered questions of another. But they also reveal deep contradictions. More than a clash of civilizations, a clash of Huntingtons is evident. One Huntington regards Americans as an exceptional people united not by blood but by creed. Another disowns that idea in favor of an America that finds its essence in faith, language, culture and borders. One Huntington views new groups and identities entering the political arena as a revitalization of American democracy. Another considers such identities pernicious, anti-American.
I’ve read Huntington’s excellent “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004), which clearly expresses the latter. Given that Who We Are was the last major work of his career, it is Huntington’s earlier work that expressed the naïve concept of a ‘proposition nation’.
Lozada writes:
Over the subsequent two decades, Huntington lost hope. In his final book, “Who Are We?,” which he emphasizes reflect his views not just as a scholar but also as a patriot, Huntington revises his definitions of America and Americans. Whereas once the creed was paramount, here it is merely a byproduct of the Anglo-Protestant culture — with its English language, Christian faith, work ethic and values of individualism and dissent — that he now says forms the true core of American identity.
Threatening that core, Huntington writes, is the ideology of multiculturalism; the new waves of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico, whom Huntington believes are less able to assimilate than past immigrants; and the threat of the Spanish language, which Huntington treats as a disease infecting the cultural and political integrity of the United States. “There is no Americano dream,” he asserts. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.” …
The principles of the creed are merely “markers of how to organize a society,” Huntington decides. “They do not define the extent, boundaries, or composition of that society.” For that, he contends, you need kin and culture; you must belong. He claims that Latin American immigrants and their offspring do not disperse throughout the country as thoroughly as past immigrants, worries they seek only welfare benefits, and warns they’ll leave behind fewer opportunities for native workers. Huntington also trafficks in stereotypes, even citing Mexico’s supposed “mañana syndrome.”
Then there’s Huntington’s prescience today:
Huntington blames pliant politicians and intellectual elites who uphold diversity as the new prime American value, largely because of their misguided guilt toward victims of alleged oppression. So they encourage multiculturalism over a more traditional American identity, he says, and they embrace free trade and porous borders despite the public’s protectionist preferences. It is an uncanny preview of the battles of 2016. Denouncing multiculturalism as “anti-European civilization,” Huntington calls for a renewed nationalism devoted to preserving and enhancing “those qualities that have defined America since its founding.”
Little wonder that, long before Trump cultivated the alt-right and Hillary Clinton denounced the “deplorables” in our midst, Huntington foresaw a backlash against multiculturalism from white Americans. “One very plausible reaction would be the emergence of exclusivist sociopolitical movements,” he writes, “composed largely but not only of white males, primarily working-class and middle-class, protesting and attempting to stop or reverse these changes and what they believe, accurately or not, to be the diminution of their social and economic status, their loss of jobs to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, the displacement of their language, and the erosion or even evaporation of the historical identity of their country. Such movements would be both racially and culturally inspired and could be anti-Hispanic, anti-black, and anti-immigration.” The more extreme elements in such movements, Huntington notes, fear “the replacement of the white culture that made America great by black or brown cultures that are . . . in their view, intellectually and morally inferior.”
Yes, in 2004, Huntington warned of a racist tide focused on protecting that which makes America great.
Lisa Robinson, a black Evangelical Christians, offers “Some Questions I’m Asking While Off To My White Evangelical Church.” She says that yes, it’s true that white Christians have historically been complicit with injustice against black Christians, and though things have gotten better, there’s still a ways to go with racial reconciliation. But these days, she says, church circles are buzzing with talk of overthrowing “white supremacy” in the church….
Robinson goes on to say that the jargon of this movement — whiteness, white supremacy, oppression, marginalization, colonization — is designed to put you into a hostile mindset, to teach you to start seeing your white fellow churchgoers with suspicion. And if you try to question any of this language, “you will be branded as endorsing whiteness and maybe even treated like an enemy…like them.” She asks what it does to her to start seeing the white people in her church as potential threats instead of fellow believers.
Dreher fails to recognize the implicit whiteness of those Benedictine Options which care about Western Civilization and the traditions thereof. He writes:
A white Evangelical friend of mine dropped out of a racial reconciliation group in his city — a group he joined because he’s serious about it — because it turned into a weekly ritual denunciation of Whiteness… If that’s what the encounter in church between blacks and whites comes down to, then there will never, ever be racial reconciliation. If facing the legacy of racism in the church in a healing way can only be done by whites hating themselves for being white, then all you will get is bitterness and defensiveness…
Christians ought to find this easier than most, given the faith’s teachings about humility and mercy. But we don’t. This is our failing, but this is also our challenge. To bring in the SJW rhetoric and categories into the church, though, is pure poison.
So, is it the whites in church who are being irrational and close-minded on issues of race? Or is it, empirically speaking, the non-whites? If the latter, as I suspect Dreher would reluctantly acknowledge, then what should the rational response be from the majority-white churchgoers? If such a church blindly accepts into its fold non-whites with this ‘irrational’ racialist attitude, then insofar as there is any sort of democratic accountability in the church, over time the demographics-is-destiny rule takes over. (Ah, but the Church isn’t really a democratic institution, is it. It’s more like a monarchy or tradition-based authoritarianism.)
Formerly white nations (e.g., Europe and the U.S.) are just such ‘Churches’. The retreat of whites to whiter areas of the country (an organic process), such as The Villages in Citrus Hills FL, is a secular version of the Benedict Option.
To willingly displace oneself demographically, vis-à-vis an idealized version of pathological altruism, is racial (and cultural) suicide.
As a prime example of his notion of the Benedict Option, Dreher cites the Bruderhof settlements in NY’s Hudson River Valley. These settlements appear to be socially stable and reliable.
What sort of racial demographics do you think we’d find there?
Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in many facets in America, as well as around the world. What is the cause of Jewish nepotism? What makes them stick together so much while derogating other ethnicities?
The evolution of nepotism in Ashkenazi Jewish communities goes back a few thousand years. They constantly got kicked out of nations, 109 times to be exact, so therefore, they needed to be more clannish, which comes with increased genetic similarity. They needed to stick together and always have each other’s backs. This is due to inbreeding, which as noted above leads to increased genetic similarity and therefore, individuals who inbreed closely become more related to one another than non-co-ethnics. When two groups who are so genetically distant live in one society together, strife happens. Which is going on in Europe at the moment. But with Jews, it’s different. They are more in the background, so to speak. They hide in the shadows while giving more favoritism to their own kind, ethnic nepotism.
Ethnic nepotism in the Jewish community evolved due to persecution over the thousands of years by non-Jews on Jews for things such as usury, which is defined as the illegal action of borrowing money at extremely high interest rates. In the middle ages in Europe, the Catholic Church forbade money lending. This is where the Jews came in and became bankers, lending money to the populace of the countries. Abnormal amounts of interest were given to the people in the country. In turn, the Jews got driven out due to preying on the populace of the country and taking advantage of them.
The Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge series just posted a wonderful, 45 min interview with the great Roger Scruton, on the topic of ‘How to Be a Conservative’. From the Hoover Institute description:
In the latest episode from Uncommon Knowledge, Sir Roger Scruton, a formally trained political philosopher, talks about his life and the events he’s witnessed that led him to conservatism. He first embraced conservatism after witnessing the leftist student protests in France in May 1968. During the ensuing riots in Paris, more than three hundred people were injured. Scruton walked away from this event with a change in worldview and a strong leaning toward conservatism. Visits to communist- controlled Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1979 cemented his preference for conservatism and his distaste for the fraud of communism and socialism, initiating a desire to do something about it. From thereon he dedicated himself to helping organize underground seminars for the young people oppressed behind the iron curtain.
Sir Roger examines a brief history of conservatism in the twentieth century of England in regard to Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. Although he appreciates what Margaret Thatcher stood for, he argues that she had many conservative ideals but never used the conservative framework to organize her overall political strategy. Instead she organized around market economics, which was not always effective in the social, cultural, and legal areas. Peter Robinson argues that Winston Churchill did a much better job of organizing around conservative ideals but eventually lost an election because he didn’t have the vocabulary or the focus on free markets. They discuss the tenuous relationship between free markets and conservative ideals that have not mixed well together in British politics.
Robinson and Sir Roger discuss the 2016 political upset of Brexit in the United Kingdom and how the political analysts failed to predict the vote outcome, much like what happened in November 2016 in the United States. They deliberate how the issues around immigration from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom contributed to Brexit, in addition to general dissatisfaction with the European Union. Thus, in the cases of both the United Kingdom and the United States, the media and intellectuals ignored the will of the “indigenous working classes” who made their voices known through their votes.
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