Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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June 22, 2012The answers are so simpleThere was a huge hoo-haa in the Wall Street Journal last week about the drug companies participating in the creation of President Obama's health-care bill two years ago. There was a single giant editorial ("ObamaCare's Secret History") and another article on the op-ed page ("Emails Reveal How the White House Bought Big Pharma"). I would have thought the problem was big business buying the White House, but the Wall Street Journal will spin it the other way. In any case I didn't have to read any of it; it was not a secret to me, nor even news. What the hell did anyone expect?
Meanwhile, also last week, there was an interview in Time magazine with Boris Johnson, the delightful tousle-head who is Mayor of London (and used to be, among other things, editor of The Spectator back when it was worth reading). Time wanted to know: "You're a conservative. Can you explain your support for socialized medicine?" Time should have capitalized "conservative" -- Johnson is a Tory -- but he replied,
Americans always look at our system with disbelief and disapproval, but actually we make it work. Nobody goes untreated, no matter how poor or rich they are. I think that is very reassuring for people. I understand the arguments against it, but it's something that everybody buys into, everybody believes in, and it works. It shows that there is something that really binds us together.
That is what I learned, living for many years in Britain: doesn't matter whether you are talking about health care, education, traffic planning, whatever, any solution will work, if it is what the majority of the people want. But the politicians usually screw it up, especially in the USA nowadays, where most of them in both parties are for sale to the lobbyists.
And one thing you always have to watch out for, in any bureaucracy, company or department, public or private, is the middle managers. I personally know of a magazine publisher not a million miles from my house which has had to clean out an entire level of Monday-morning quarterbacks twice in a dozen years. You hire somebody for an executive position and he starts hiring his cronies and pretty soon they are breeding in the broom cupboards, getting in the way, scheduling meetings, and sucking millions of dollars a year out of somebody's pockets (taxpayers, shareholders, the family, it doesn't matter). Some of them do really well: the Wall Street Journal features housing every week, concentrating of course on multi-million dollar properties, since its core readership is those who hope to be filthy rich someday. Last week the Journal told the stories of two couples in California, one buying an acre lot for $11 million and building a house for $5 million, another selling a 10,000 square-foot house on 35 acres for $20.5 million. All four of these people are retired from the health-care industry.
Middle-managers are a problem in the restructured General Motors. The company is profitable now, thanks to a taxpayer bail-out, but the famously slow bureaucracy is still there, so that the company isn't making as much money as it should be. Operations are slowed down and become more expensive because of middle-managers squabbling: a new Chevrolet is to be built in Korea and sold in Mexico; the finance executive in Korea wants the price kept high so his department will look good; his counterpart in Korea wants the price lower for the same reason. So they schedule meetings.
And of course meanwhile poor Obama can't win for losing. Speaking of the car industry, I remember when General Motors was what they called a blue-chip company, but anybody who was still buying General Motors (or Chrysler) shares in the 21st century deserved to lose their money, and that's what happened. The bankruptcies were handled in such a way that the retirement pensions and health-care benefits of retired car-industry workers were safe-guarded, and this was, according to some pundits, so that the United Auto Workers would continue to support the Democrats. There may also have been an advantage in not throwing these retired workers (how many? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) onto the welfare rolls, Medicare and Medicaid, but this aspect will be ignored by those who want gamblers in the stock market to be protected from losing.
Meanwhile, there is a chart going around the Internet which seems to demonstrate that government spending under Obama is less than it has been under any other President. Hold on, some complain, the chart doesn't include Obama's first year in office. Er, maybe that's because the spending that year had already been mandated by George W. Bush, the biggest spender since World War Two.
And so we limp to the next election.
June 22, 2012Dinesh D'SousaBack in April 2005 Dinesh D'Sousa (Hoover Institution, Stanfard University, yada yada) wrote a perfectly wonderful article about Abraham Lincoln in American History magazine. I probably saw it at Arts & Letters daily, and I liked it so much I saved it. I thought I knew all about Lincoln, as ever American no doubt does, but D'Sousa's eloquent summary of Lincoln's complete honesty and clear-sightedness inspired me to read several books about him.
I had never heard of D'Sousa, but I have heard of him since. His latest book is The Roots of Obama's Rage, which he is making into a TV documentary called 2016. He believes that Barack Obama, who was given that name by his parents when he was born, "took his fataher's name in order to cement his explicit identification with him." Never mind that he only met his father once: he is animated by his father's unrealized ambition to avenge colononialism by destroying the USA. "The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribeman of the 1950s."
There are only two possibilities here. Either D'Sousa is suffering from a degenerative mental illness, while still able to publish books and produce documentary films, or he is capable of writing so well about Lincoln at the same time as subscribing to utterly vicious, insulting, paranoid nonsense about a relatively mild-mannered (perhaps too mild-mannered) President of the United States. Either possibility is disheartening, and perhaps frightening.
June 22, 2012Who?The current issue of the New Yorker devotes 16 pages of almost solid three-column text (including a full-page photograph) to an actor named Ben Stiller. He has made quite a few films, most of which I have never heard of (I did see Empire Of The Sun in 1987, but I don't remember who Dainty was). I wonder who the New Yorker was aiming this at. Usually I can read almost everything in the mag.
June 22, 2012Things Ain't What They Used To beThis year I discovered a second-hand record store in Allentown, called Double Decker. It's basically a punk store, and has a lot of really obscure stock for pop and rock mavens like Nick Hornby's hero in High Fidelity, but it has every kind of music you could be interested in, from Sammartini to Sun Ra.
There is a 50-cent room, a sort of annex next door, where records that nobody wants go to moulder, and there I discovered a trove of classical vinyl: several thousand LPs and boxed sets (50 cents an item, no matter how many in the box), most in mint condition as far as I could see: Nonesuch sets of Leslie Jones's Haydn symphonies, strange and wonderful Musical Heritage Society sets leased from European labels, including entire French operas...
I did not have much time on my last visit, but I vowed to go back and browse through all these riches more thoroughly. Not that I am going to start buying much vinyl again, but just for old times' sake, and to see if I could spot anything that my chums at SymphonyShare might go nuts over. I went there yesterday, and the treasure was gone. The annex was almost empty.
People in the Lehigh Valley have nowhere else to take their unwanted records, but the market for second-hand classical vinyl is so dead that the shop has no choice: they have to get rid of it. Some freelance dealer came by with a truck recently and took away perhaps 9,000 LPs for $120. Somewhere, somehow, there is a market, maybe mail-order, that makes it worth $120 to paw through a truckload of stuff three-quarters of which is trash. But not in Allentown.