Dude!

Jack -- he's just this guy, you know? Fourteen months never looked so good.

Couch me no couch

Since Betty's cornered the market on elegance, we'll have to go another direction altogether.


The couch was actually quite nice when we bought if, off craigslist. The red spot was always there, but in those days we could actually use the other side of the cushion. In three years we have utterly destroyed it. "We" being the girls and the cats.

And because everyone who knows me knows I love repeating a good joke, here is one of my favorite pieces from sometime in late 2006 (can't dig up the original right now), written after being laid up sick on the couch.

Sickbed Revisited
(With apologies to Evelyn Waugh and, of course, all of you.)

She talked to herself, because hers was the only voice she could trust, when it assured her that she was still alive; what she said was not for the children, nor for any ears but her own.

"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, across the expanse of the living-room, the fibers of the carpet, faded and grey, where yesterday I was confused and took the floor for a repository of broken toys and stuffed animals. Soon I shall see the tabletops and couch and know where it is that the ants get in.

"Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and talk early. Three is no age. Julia is only two and can remember where her candy is hidden and how much of it I ate, her 'tandy'; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the back-yard where unlettered girls have long memories. You can see where the big weedy shrub used to stand: the corner of the yard where the fence is uneven and half the grounds are waste, nettle and brier in hollows too deep for filling. We dug to the roots to hack it out and lay the foundations for the rose-bed planter. Those were our roots in front of the new house when the men in the orange truck came to cart them away to the dump .

"Julia knows about dumps, toys dumped on the floor, books dumped from the shelf, media scratched and worn from the loving touch of little fingers smeared with grime and orange juice. We were cultured then, purchasing old volumes and new music and bathing in the flickering light of the cinema. They came for the books first; later they scaled the sturdy cases and found the vases, the decanters, the Italian glassware. The family decends in the female line; Julia's son will page through the books his mother tore and mutilated in the days of the small house and the hair-shearing and the wall-patching; my daughter drew on the walls, her sister added the dents. Julia watched me set up the bookshelves and paint the kitchen; the paint was old before it was two months settled. Soon the linoleum will be tattered and pitted till the concrete foundation shows through and the baseboards rot away. Better to-day.

"Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was left on the girls' plates, drunk lukewarm tea, slept with children tangled in my own sheets; I shall go grey soon. I was twenty-two when I was sent to the line for the battle; most women took the epidural, so they said, but my midwife said, "You're a textbook model of delivery." So I was; so I am now, if only I could breathe.

"No air, no wind stirring under the cotton sheers; no one has opened the door since we put the chain on it. When the autumn comes," said Mother, oblivious of the falling leaves and the dying rose-bush and the late heat, "when the autumn comes I shall leave my bed and sit in the open air and breathe more easily. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must a woman stifle to death in her own living-room? Eleanor, Eleanor, turn on the fan."

"The fan is already on, Mommy."

"I know it. I re-built this house. Some days I want to blow it up with gunpowder; bore the foundation, cram it with powder, trace the fuse, crouch under cover round the corner while we touch it off; we'll blast our way to daylight."

Thus, til mid-November, Mother lay dying, prone on the recliner with a box of tissues and a glass of ice water. Since there was no immediate change, Father went to work and the small girls watched videos till their brains ran out of their ears

Life Under Health Care Reform

Time being scarce the last few weeks, I'd originally planned on writing a post of this format about one of the Senate bills, but since the House bill (HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act) is currently the one in the news, I'm focusing on that. The purpose here is to try my best to cut through the hysteria and hype coming from both sides and take a realistic look about what changes we would notice as US citizens if the House health care reform bill becomes law.

The first thing to keep in mind is that nothing much happens until 2013. This could probably called the "keep incumbents from being hurt by this act, especially Obama" provision. Whether the long term effects of the bill are good or bad, change often causes pain and confusion at first, and one of the key ways of getting legislators on board for the bill is to assure them that they're unlikely to be immediately booted out of office by voters upset about their premiums. This kind of cynicism is hardly unique to this one bill or to either party -- it just is what it is. So take the below as a discussion of how thing would be under HR 3962 in the period 5-6 years from now, assuming that is passes and there are no changes made between now and then.

The bill provides several new regulations on insurance companies and on you, which you'll notice quite clearly.

1) You will be legally required to purchase insurance. If you don't (and unless you fit criteria for financial hardship as defined in the bill) you will be fined either 2.5% of you income, or the average cost of the plans in the lowest tier of the health insurance exchange. So, if you make 40k/yr, you would be fined $1000. If you make 60k/yr, you would be fined $1500. If you refuse to pay your fines, you'll be treated exactly like any other tax evader (which means you can potentially be sent to jail.) The Senate bill specifically exempted non-payers from being sent to jail, but the House bill fails to differentiate those who refuse to pay health care fines from those who refuse to pay other taxes, so it is believed that standard tax evasion rules would apply. There will also be penalties placed on employers who do not offer their employees health insurance.

2) Health insurance companies will not be allowed to turn you down for coverage because of any pre-existing conditions you may have, nor will they be allowed to refuse to cover care related to those conditions.

3) Health insurance companies will be required to charge all people the same for the same plan -- not charge people with existing health problems more and vastly limits the amount that insurers can charge more to insure older people.

4) Provides subsidies for most American citizens if they are buying individual health insurance, in order to make complying with the individual mandate more affordable.

So what happens to you? Well, if you've one of the roughly 80% of Americans who currently health insurance through your employer: nothing much. If your employer wasn't providing coverage to some of its employees before, and decides to comply with the employer mandate rather than paying the relevant fines, it may seek to recoup the costs of expanding health coverage by increasing the share of your health benefits you have to pay for. Given that the average employer provided family health care plan currently costs about $13,000/yr, it's likely that there's a lot of room for your employer to push more of that cost in your direction. (And when it comes to cost savings, most of us would prefer that to layoffs.) In Massachusetts, which passed similar health care reform in the past, employer plan premium have been rising at almost twice the national average rate over the last few years. If the cost to you of your employer's insurance plan increases to beyond 12% of your annual income (for example: $400/mo for a family making 40k/yr) you would be eligible for subsidies from the government, but otherwise you would be on your own.

If, on the other hand, you currently do not have health insurance or have individual health insurance, you would be greatly affected by the bill. You would become eligible to buy your insurance through the national insurance exchange (and if you didn't buy coverage, you'd be fined, see above.) Among these plans would be the much discussed "public option", which would essentially be the same as a private health insurance plan except that it would be administered by a government agency. Adoption of the public options plans is not expected to be high, as the CBO estimates that their premiums will be higher than the average of the private plans in the exchange offering the same benefits.

The plans on the exchange are not necessarily cheap, but you will know pretty clearly what level of coverage you are getting as the plans will have to meet government defined levels of coverage. If you feel daunted by researching what an insurance plan does or does not cover, this might be a major benefit. If not, it might reduce flexibility for you. The average "basic" exchange plan for an individual is expected to cost $5,300 per year, the average for a family of four is expected to be $15,000. In addition to these premiums, you could expect to pay about 2,000 a year in co-pays and deductibles as an individual, or $5,500 as a family. (Obviously, if you get very little care, this would be less. My own family has deductibles similar to the exchange levels on our employer-based health care plan, and our total out of pocket last years was under $1000.)

However, you also receive a scaling set of subsidies in order to offset your costs, depending on how much money you make. Here are a few examples (these are directly from the CBO subsidy analysis):

A single person making $20,600 would pay an annual premium of $900 ($75/mo) and would pay no more than $600 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If he didn't buy insurance, he'd pay a fine of $515.

A single person making $38,300 would pay an annual premium of $4,300 ($358/mo) and would pay no more than $1,800 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If he didn't buy insurance, he'd pay a fine of $957.

A family of four making $42,000 would pay an annual premium of $1,900 ($158/mo) and would pay no more than $1,200 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If they didn't buy insurance, they'd pay a fine of $1050.

A family of four making $66,000 would pay an annual premium of $6,300 ($525/mo) and would pay no more than $3,700 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If they didn't buy insurance, they'd pay a fine of $1650.

These subsidies are currently designed to scale according to the enrollee's income, not according to the cost of the plan, so from what I can tell customers would be cushioned initially from any drastic increases in the cost of coverage (such as Maine, Massachusetts and other states passing similar regulations have experienced). However, that might potentially change if the cost of the program spiralled rapidly out of control due to the increased cost of providing insurance under this model.

In this regard, it might almost be a benefit to have the public option in play, as it would make it much harder for people to claim "it's all because of insurance company profiteering" if the public options premiums continue to run higher than private plan premiums as the CBO projects.

A few useful sources, though not everything in this post is derived from them alone:

The CBO analysis of the House bill.

The official summary of the House bill. (This copy of the file is at the Heritage Foundation, but the actual file is the one the House Democrats put out.)

CBO analysis of subsidies.

Where the Japanese Came From

This article is long (I'll admit, though I've had it up in browser a couple days I've still only read half of it) but it's a really fascinating survey of current research into where the Japanese people came from, both historically and linguistically. This is an unusually charged question, as linguistic and archeological questions go, because a great deal of Japanese (and Korean) national self-identity is caught up in the question. And evidence is intriguingly sparse and contradictory. (For instance, linguistics would suggest that the Japanese language split off from Korean -- it's apparent closest cousin linguistically -- at least 4,000 years ago, yet genetically Japanese are very similar to mainlanders, suggesting a fairly recent divergence.)

On a slightly related side-note, one of the things that's always struck me watching Japanese anime is that there seems to be a cultural perception in Japan that Japanese are "the white people of Asia". Japanese characters often look, to American eyes, very nearly European or American, while Korean or Chinese characters have very strongly Asian features. There also seems to be a real fascination with settings (more often fantastic than historical) which are clearly patterned on or explicitly set in turn of the century Europe -- though often Japanese names are mixed in freely with vaguelly Germanic ones.

What Jack Hath Wrought

In case anyone was wondering, "Gosh, why doesn't MrsDarwin post that much anymore?", it's because I live in a house where five minutes of an unattended 14-month-old nets you this:



That would be Jack taking his revenge for the tea party and lunch we had while he was napping, and on the bookcase just for being there. I was in the kitchen the whole time, chopping onions and adding them to soup. The lad is fast.

No wonder he's so worn out.

The Banal Evils of the Police State

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many who lived under the communist regime of East Germany have taken the opportunity to go to the state archives and view the files which the Stasi secret police kept on them. Stasi files were not kept only on spies and political dissenters, but on ordinary people whose "offenses" were almost shockingly mundane, and whose betrayers were often friends or family:

A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution.

Even worse, the family later found out that they had been turned in by a close friend. "She was watering the plants and went through the cupboards to find a Dr. Oetker dessert," Vera Iburg, who has worked with files kept by the East German secret police for the last 20 years, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to the snoop. "What was she doing? She had no business there!"

It's an interesting example of the corrupting power of temptation that the availability of the means to easily hurt those around you by reporting others to the police motivated many to inform merely for the satisfaction of it:

The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

"More often than not, the Stasi did not need to apply pressure at all," he says. "In fact, many often felt snubbed if their information was deemed to be of no interest." The real motivation behind these acts of betrayal was much more humdrum than one might think. "People informed for personal gain, out of loyalty to the East German regime, or simply because they wanted to feel like they had some power," Ziehm says.

Often we think of repressive regimes' primary evil being what they do to the people of a country, yet it's perhaps more important (and more disturbing) to think of how the tools of such a regime corrupt many of the people themselves.

Bobby McFerrin sings Bach