Does Lady Gaga "Fit the Suit?"

Those who don't study history, it is said, are doomed to repeat it.  This is not a good thing, no matter how "groovy" some of the past may be.

This was brought to mind recently when I saw a FaceBook discussion about the pros and cons of Lady Gaga.  To make a short story even shorter, one party was of the opinion that Lady Gaga is a star more or less in spite of herself, because she has no remarkable talent other than an ability to package and publicise herself.  The other party offered that the ability to package oneself is a kind of 'talent.'

Whilst I have no particular objection to Lady Gaga (I agree her 'singing,' such as it is, does not likely provoke jealousy in Julie Andrews) I do tend to think that she is a bellwether of sorts - that we have almost come full circle from where the music business was in 1962.

Put simply, I wonder if Lady Gaga (and 'Fergie' and American Idol) were not foretold more than 30 years ago?  A lot of people of roughly my age watched countless hours of Brady Bunch repeats, and thus will react with a knowing nod to the name 'Johnny Bravo.'

He Fit the Suit

In this 1973 episode, Greg Brady was selected to be a singing star - not because he was particularly talented, but because "he fit the suit."  Whether he could sing or not was beside the point.

In an age where a person need only sing in the same postal code as the key of the song in order to allow sound engineers with elaborate equipment to work their magic, I think Greg could have had a brilliant career.  That one need only "look the part" is the ultimate triumph of style over substance.

The bad perm, gull wing collars, and mood rings may be gone, but Johnny Bravo is back.

Those who know rudimentary music history of the 1950s and 1960s will recall the struggle between musical acts (e.g., the Beatles) and the record labels and writers (e.g.,  Leiber and Stoller).  With few exceptions (Chuck Berry), prior to Lennon and McCartney, the acts were pretty much puppets; think: the animatronic "children" in Disney's Small World ride.  Lennon and McCartney changed the paradigm, though not without a struggle.  One of the attempts to keep control - the Monkees - gave Don Kirshner one last shot.  The story, ironically, is played out in one of the episodes of The Monkees ('The Devil and Peter Tork').

Who knew that, 40 years later, the ghost of Kirshner would return, and Johnny Bravo would not be saying "Adios."

Randy Jones and Randy Johnson: An Epic in Two Acts

Recently, San Francisco Giants left-hander Randy Johnson announced his retirement, ending a long, successful, peripatetic career.  It seems silly now, but there was a time when he so struggled with his control that he was a guy who was considered a high-risk prospect.  Enough so that he was not the main guy in the trade that brought Mark Langston from Seattle to Montreal (look up Brian Holman).


Johnson now is a guaranteed Hall of Famer; second all-time in strikeouts. More than 300 wins.


In reading about Johnson, one often sees comments about his being a hard-throwing lefty, with frequent comments about the stereotype of left handers being soft-tossers who get by on guile and trickery.  What serious baseball fan is unawares of the phrase "crafty left-hander?"  There has been no shortage of lefties who had long, even successful careers who seemed like their fastballs would not break a window pane.  Randy Jones won the 1976 Cy Young award, for example.  Jesse Orosco pitched until he was 100.  Frank Tanana had a very long career with a fastball that would not bruise a baby's butt.  That's not entirely true of course; Orosco was only 72 when he retired, and a lot of people forget that at the start of his career, Tanana had a good fastball.


Johnson certainly went against the common thinking, which of course, is frequently wrong.


But why does this perception exist?  ARE left hand pitchers more likely to have less than blistering fastballs?


Of course, only a real analysis would reveal the truth, but here is a thought.  There certainly is a tremendous bias in big league scouting for guys who can throw hard.  For the most part, this bias is useful - a pitcher who can only throw 82 mph had better have some extra-ordinary other talent.  All else being equal, the guy who can throw 95 is going to have a much better career than the guy who can only throw 88.


But looking at the distributions I think reveals something.  Demographic and epidemiological data show that in the US, about 11 per cent of the population (one in nine) is left-handed.  If this were to transfer to major league rosters, a standard pitching staff (10 pitchers) would have about one lefty.  This is not the case.  Usually, a roster will have at least one starter, one "left hand specialist," and one other left hand pitcher.  A cursory look at the rosters reveals that left hand pitchers have about a 300 per cent premium to their value versus right handers.  


To see this effect, look also at the roster of outfielders (infield is a biased sample, since there are NO left hand throwers playing any of the positions other than first base for obvious, physical reasons), and compare the percentage of left hand throwing outfielders to left hand pitchers.


What is the implication?


In order to fill the rosters with lefties, teams have to go deeper into the talent pool.  Guys who if they were not left-handed would have quit baseball and taken up work elsewhere are on big league rosters. That means a lot of pitchers with mediocre, or worse, fastballs.


Put simply, pitchers like Randy Johnson seem like exceptions to the rule because there are a lot more guys on rosters like Scott Schoenweis than guys like Doug Jones.

The MG as Metaphor for "Authenticity"

I have a handful of passions in my life; my wife and son, naturally.  Baseball, though this grows more lukewarm as time (and awareness of the more Mondrian aspects of professional sport) erodes the soft sand at the edges of youth's shore.  Mathematics.  And more recently, classic cars.

In a quick historical synopsis, the funds I earned from my first job (refinishing wood floors) I put towards purchasing my first car.  Having grown up in the US, which is to put it mildly, a car-culture, this is a big event for a lot of males in the demographic 16-25 (at the time, I was 20).  The car I *wanted* to buy was a nearly half-century old MG.  It's not a terribly practical car - two seats; no trunk.  Built before Ralph Nader helped squeeze a lot of the joy out of motoring and therefore not equipped with seat belts.  It had the rumoured reliability of a Central American junta.  And thus, unsurprisingly, common sense (in the verbum caro factum of my mother) intervened, and a much more reasonable Datsun Stanza ended up in the driveway.  Over the next 20 years, I often thought of that car, and thus as middle-age-dom settled in, and along with it the means to essentially spend money on some things that propriety and youth made impossible, I acquired the car I had wanted in my youth.

For a visual, think of the film American Beauty, where Kevin Spacey (the anti-hero) says to his wife, "It's the car I always wanted, and now I have it.  I rule."

Because I am not terribly mechanical, when this or that goes wrong, I turn to the internet for help and suggestions on fine tuning, and one of joys of classic car ownership is that there exists a quite interesting brotherhood (and it's mostly, though not exclusively male) of people who share this interest, and are very helpful and keen on helping out one of the bretheren, no matter the level of mechanical skill.

At the site I visit, there recently appeared a discussion about what will become of the objects of our passion when we are gone.  I am on the young end of the spectrum, and the fear is that the younger generations will not have the appreciation or the knowledge to maintain vehicles that will by then be in the range of 75 years of age.  And I got to thinking about these vehicles as a metaphor for the common buzzword one hears, "authentic."

Personally, I find one of the charms of these cars (and there are of course other things that fit this category equally well) is that they are at once elegant and simple.  My day to day car is a PT Cruiser; it has a lot of technical gizmos, including little lights that illuminate when something is wrong.  It even can self-diagnose a problem and display it in the digital odometer.  And yet, if something goes wrong, despite (because of?) all this wizardry, I simply have no hope of fixing the problem.  It's almost a perfect metaphor for the problems of modern medicine - we can diagnose the illness, but not really treat it.  For example, most recently, my PT Cruiser, which was running seemingly perfectly, popped up the check engine light.  A couple of quick turns of the key, and the problem (P-0441) appeared, which is apparently something that the computer detects is wrong with the emissions control.

Contrast that to my MG; it has *no* computers.  The body is attached to its frame with simply, flat-head screws.  There is no fuel injection.  It cannot tell me when something is wrong.  There is not even a fuel gauge to let me know when it is running low.  Knowing that there is a problem requires me to be aware of the idiosyncracies of the car - is the engine making strange noises?  Does it take longer to start?  How far have I driven since I put gasoline in?  I have to pay attention to how the engine looks and how the whole of the thing performs.  In short, I have a much more "real" connection to it.

And if something goes wrong, almost surely it's a problem that even I can delve in to with a simple armamentarium of a rubber hammer, a couple of spanners, and a flat-head screwdriver.

It's a throw-back to a time when machines were simple, not because of faddish, Hollywood-derived ideas of authenticity (think "Slow Food"), but because life itself was simpler.  That is not to say that they were better, necessarily - these cars tended to break down more often.  They could not go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, or cruise at 80 MPH like even the most basic econobox of today.  But they came with the explicit understanding that you, as the driver, would invest something in their day to day use, and that that time could accomplish something.

And I think in that is something charming to these cars, something "real."  To me, from time to time getting your hands dirty is what "authentic" means, and that is why I think that these cars will persevere, even when the brotherhood of current caretakers passes.

Two Roads Diverged in the Woods...What Will We Leave Behind

A couple of items have me thinking today.  The first is a thread on my favourite MG Bulletin Board Site; the second is a song from the "Mary Poppins" soundtrack, now a favourite of my four-year-old son.  Seemingly divergent ideas, but both speak to me in a similar way.

The former, the thread about MG cars, discusses the question of who will take on our passions for antique cars (in my case, a 1952 MG-TD) once we are gone.  The latter is an observation made towards the end of the film, where Mr Banks is ruminating on his apparent, perceived ruin:

A man has dreams of walking with giants

To carve his niche in the edifice of time

Before the mortar of his zeal has a chance to congeal

What I'm thinking about today is the modern view of time, its passage, what we want to leave behind, and indeed, if we ought to leave anything behind at all.  Our ideas of permanence and impermanence have taken different views over time, of course.  As has modernity.  What we value changes.  The Victorians definitely had ideas of grand monuments; Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his epic poem Ozymandias about the folly of such an idea.  Today we claim to value "authenticity," but talk about footprints in not always good terms.

I plan a couple of my own thoughts, but am curious about how others think about what constitutes lasting value, what "lasting" even means, and what we would want to leave behind if we could, Ozymandias be damned.

 

 

 

 

Christmas Time Is Here

Well, it's one week until Christmas. Tree is up. Presents are bought (if not wrapped). Plans made. Much misteltoeing. Kids jingle-belling. Everyone is, indeed, telling you'll be of good cheer.

Here in the Great Garden St, despite the economic mess, people are optimistic. A new regime is going to Trenton in January. Maybe Chris Christie will succeed where Jon Corzine failed.

Why do I sense a bit of grinchiness in the air?

Glad you asked.

On the radio the past couple of days, battling ads are running about a possible vote to "legalise" gay marriage. You see, the lame duck legislature have been debating these past few days whether to extend marriage rights to gay couples. Setting aside that Gov. Corzine has had four years to do this, and that this plainly looks political, I am struck by the general nastiness of the tone of those who putatively are out to "protect" marriage.

Now, I typically tend to lean to the right of Atilla the Hun on most issues, and generally think that the Democratic Party are out to sea - and have been out there for so long that they've long forgotten why the set sail to begin with and the general direction of the land - on virtually everything. My right-wing bona fides are seldom under question. I personally have been called a crypto-fascist by Morton Kondracke, and I assume he does not hand out that badge the way John D. Rockefeller used to hand out dimes.

But on this issue, I think that largely, the conservatives are about as wrong as they possibly could be.

The arguments range from the bizarre and absurd (allowing gay couples to marry will lead to various pairings such as man and goat, or triplings, or others in a smorgasbord of weird permutations) to the sincere and wrong (religious objections).

I honestly do not see how any of these can stand scrutiny.

What is marriage? I don't mean from the sense of playing card games like sixty-six or from a cultural or nostalgic point of view. What I mean is, since this is largely a discussion about government and the laws, what is marriage in the way it is viewed by the State? How it ought to be viewed by the state?

Simply, in my estimation a marriage is a contract between two people that spells out certain privileges and obligations. It's not about love (though a good marriage should have a healthy dose of that). It is a commitment between two parties that they will share debts, legal burdens, be allowed to make certain decisions should the other become incapacitated, who will get what in the inevitable instance that one dies.

That's pretty much it.

The human-goat (thanks Michael Savage for that one) argument is patently absurd, since a contract cannot be entered into by a party that is non compos mentis.

I understand the religious tradition, and even the utilitarian perspective that marriage ought to promote fidelity, stability, and continuity. I've seen the data, and am completely convinced that children are far better off raised in married families. But that's beside the point. Allowing gays to enter into legal contracts will not make unmarried couples less likely to have children out of wedlock, and they can scarcely make the data on illegitimacy or divorce for that matter worse.

From a religious perspective, I go to Mass pretty much every Sunday. My own personal views on morality of homosexuality are irrelevant. What the people living next to me, let alone in California or Maine do has no bearing on my marriage or my views of marriage. Unless one of them is my father in law, I don't really see how they can, and if how other people live their lives somehow undermined the serious regard I have or do not have for the sacrament of marriage then my faith would have to be pretty shallow indeed.

There is a famous passage in the Gospels where Jesus, confronted with the conundrum of whether to pay tax (which the Pharisees viewed as potential blasphemy) or not (which they new was a crime under Roman law), answered by showing a coin and asking whose image was on that coin. When the answer came back Caesar, he famously said that one is to render unto God what is God's, and to render unto Caesar what is Caesar.

From my understanding of the Gospels, he was not saying you should pay your taxes, but rather, that His Kingdom was not of this earth, and things such as money (and by extension, contracts) were of this world. The coin of His realm is the soul, and the wage is how we behave and how we treat one another. Whether you view homosexuality as a sin, He also was quite plain in saying to whom judgment was reserved, and I am pretty sure it's not me.

Frankly, the only real reason I see for anti-gay marriage ads is meanness. I do not know a lot of gay people, but I do know more than one. Some are nice people. Some are obnoxious. Whether or not I think gays are acting according to God's will, I do not see why the government should deny them the basic right to enter into contracts with one another, and to treat those contracts with the same respect as any other.

So this year, at Christmas time, in the time of miracles and of the forgiveness of man (the reason Christ came into the world), instead of puffing ourselves up "defending" marriage and righteousness, let's take a look at how we are living up to one of the few things that He asked when He came to the world.

How are we treating our fellow man?

The answer to that question is far more relevant in my view than any Propositions we sign or lawmakers we call to defend marriage against a threat that just does not exist.

Farming Out the World Series

Tonight the Fall Classic (to be completed in November) begins. Yankees. Phillies. Baseball's all-time winningest franchise (26 titles) versus its all-time losingest (first team to amass 10,000 losses). The Jersey Turnpike Series.

There was an interesting article today at MLB.COM that made the case that money alone does not account for the Phillie-Yankee series; the implication here is that the two teams have more or less gotten to the pinnacle of the baseball world along the same, home-grown model.

In a nut-shell, I wonder what reality the article's author is operating in.

Now, I have great respect for the Yankees' success. The team certainly is a collection of great talents, and winning in New York is not always the easiest thing in the world. The fans are demanding. The Boss is legendary. But friends, the idea that money does not play a role - in fact, an enormous role - is nuts.

I am a mathematician, and in maths, there are two ideas that are complimentary. One is that evidence be necessary; the other that evidence be sufficient. NO ONE is saying that money is sufficient as a criterion for success (c.f., the New York Mets). But it is becoming harder and harder to argue that it is not necessary.

The New York Yankees have the highest payroll, by a wide margin, in professional sport. They also have been in the playoffs in 12 of the past 13 seasons. During that span, the Pittsburgh Pirates, with a payroll that is less than the Yankee infield collects, not only have not made the playoffs, but have not had a winning season since 1993. Ironically, that's also the year that Barry Bonds left Pittsburgh when shown the money by the SF Giants.

The argument in the article is that the Yankee core (Jeter, Petite, Posada, River, Robinson Cano) are home-grown talents.

That much is true.

But the point is, in order to build a winning team, you need more than two or three good players, and those players need to play together to develop. Given the economics of baseball today, to draft three high quality players, you realistically need to get good picks over a period of five years. Those players then need to be "hits" (i.e., they cannot be guys like Mark Lewis or Corey Snider). They cannot get hurt or wash out. And it takes time for them to reach the big leagues, mature, and gel.

There is a reason why New York could keep Jeter and Posada and Rivera, and that the Cleveland Indians could not keep Cliff Lee and C.C. Sabathia. When these players get near their peak value - i.e., when you are in position to build a championship team - they will be going off to New York. Or Boston. Or the Dodgers.

And that ignores the fact that the Yankees are able to add to this "core" with stars like Mark Texeira and Alex Rodriguez when necessary, to fill gaps. Teams like the Yankees sign Johnny Damon. Teams like the Toronto Blue Jays sign guys like Lyle Overbay.

The fact that the Yankees can shop for all-stars is covered to some degree by sports writers. The other side of the coin - that they need not worry about their best players bolting - is not, and I would argue is at least as important a result of the economics of the game today.

2009 World Series by Proxy

Well, it's finally here. The Fall Classic. The Jersey Turnpike Series (Yankees and Phillies) begins tomorrow night (Wednesday the 28th). That's 28th of October, of course, meaning that the games almost surely will be played, by schedule, in November. Who will be the first Mr November (apologies to Reggie Jackson)?

Could not help but notice, the Game One starters are slated to be C.C. Sabathia (Yankees) and Cliff Lee (Phillies), winners of the two previous Cy Young awards...for the Cleveland Indians. The Yankees are a talented team, but looking at the roster, one sees the predilection of Mr. Steinbrenner to collect prize players the way the rest of us collected their cards.

It got me to thinking about the economics of the game as they exist in the early 21st century. My team, the Toronto Blue Jays, also has a prized pitcher (Roy Halladay, himself a prior Cy Young winner) who was the subject of relentless talk this summer about possible trades to the Yankees and Phillies and Boston and a number of other teams. Ultimately, they decided not to cash him in in yet another chapter in the almost criminal incompetence of its now former regime. Due to the economics of the game (a handful of teams - the Yankees, Boston, the Dodgers) have seemingly unlimited financial resources that allow them to plug any perceived gaps, and thus make the playoffs year in and year out (either Boston or the Yankees has been in the post-season every year since 1994). At the other end are teams like Cleveland who from time to time will get in through a bit of luck and development of young talent. Inevitably, they are forced due to the massive chequebooks of the "big market" teams to trade their best talent for a Whitman's Sampler of "prospects" and mediocre veterans.

So, I am very curious at exactly what point the managers and GMs of the talent producers (Cleveland) are going to recognise the reality that it's in their best interests to get as much out of their talent right now, while they still have it, instead of worrying about the mid and late-stages of these guys' careers?

Over the past 30 years or so, the workload of pitchers has been increasingly monitored - first in the number of innings thrown, until now, where each pitch is counted. In 1980, the Oakland Athletics had a staff that averaged 20 complete games per year. This year, Roy Halladay lead the league with nine.

Does that strategy make sense?

Put simply, if you were the GM of the Cleveland Indians, and you had a pitcher of the talent of Cliff Lee or C.C. Sabathia, why would you worry about how many innings the guy throws, when the rent on that is not going to come due until he is in New York, Boston, or Los Angeles? Today, pitchers are kept on more or less strict pitch counts and inning limits, with the recognition that has arisen that a high workload early in a pitcher's career will have an impact when he reaches 30 or so.

But if the future for C.C. Sabathia is in New York, why is that the concern of the Cleveland Indians? If I were the Indians' management, I would want to get 300 innings out of Sabathia every year I had him.

At some point, I fully expect that the small-market teams are going to wise up to the fact that economics and the future are not on their side.

The New New Media

Today got "tweeted" an interesting feed via Twitter (Motto: you cannot spell "Twitter" without "Twit."), from Guy Kawasaki. Normally, I would pass right over anything from a source such as Mr Kawasaki, since he is one of the most infamous of the Apple Cultists.

In this article, Judy Shapiro (a marketing professional for various e-interests) makes a case for salvaging the traditional media (e.g., the NY Times and other print media) in various ways. Not surprisingly, given her job and her expertise, the advice includes the usual bromides about building "communities" of users, making content more "fun," shifting paradigms (maybe Bain and Company have finally triumphed with their cliches and cereal box sophistries), and generally moving away from the expensive and generally old-fashioned, un-hip "push" model for information to the internet model of information "pull" to draw in news "consumers" and ultimately creating not readers, but "affiliates."

I'm willing to set aside the absurd notion that the creation of information for an educated populace of the sort a real democracy needs to function can be created in a sort of ersatz C-Net on Sesame Street, but there is a number of enormous, existential problems here.

What Ms Shapiro and other proponents of the "new" media fail to grasp is that it's not the entertainment value of the 'news' content that makes it vital, but rather, the quality of that information. It's indisputable that the internet revolution, such as it is, has created an enormous quantity of information that can be had for, at most, nominal charge. For those who want to find out what the actual name of the Skipper character on Gilligan's Island was or who played first base for the 1975 Boston Red Sox was, or other such trivia, all are readily available. But this explosion in quantity has not been accompanied by an equal growth in accuracy or wisdom. One need only go to Google, and enter in a search of "Vince Foster" or "Barack Obama Birth Certificate" to confirm that there is a wealth of junk masquerading as news that is equally available. In short, it's the difference between Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Gathering news is serious business, and relies on serious, professional reporters. That does not include Arianna Huffington.

Ms Shapiro goes on to argue that the current model (fee for content) cannot work because, ultimately, there are too many "leaks" in the systems - security and other holes that can be exploited. So, once the Times publish something, it ultimately will escape and be had by people for "free."

That may be true, but what is the end-game of the exercise Ms Shapiro is proposing - where 'news' is gathered by 'communities' or 'affiliates?' Right now, when you or I goes hunting for the news on our favourite blog or link, free of charge of course, chances are pretty damned good that if it is real news, then a paid reporter, working for Reuters or the Times or some other such outfit actually dug the information up, published it, and it was picked up and communicated via the various channels that lead to your browser. But if the reporter is gone, that information is going to be gone as well, and thus you will no longer have access, either.

Ms Shapiro's argument is akin to saying that the because there are too many leaks in distributing food, we ought to do away with farms. But friends, as the bumper sticker says, no farms, no food.

Finally, as to the argument about "push" versus "pull" content, and making the news more likely to attract "communities," I would offer the obvious example. Which news outlet saw, during the past 10 years, its "community" grow the quickest? It's an outlet that has re-designed its news "brand" to be more "fun," given its consumers what they want, pulled viewers, and last month, via hidden cameras in various ACORN offices, turned a couple of its viewers into affiliates.

The end game of Ms Shapiro's 'new' media is in fact, already here, and it's not my idea of a high-quality news organisation.

It's Fox News.

The New Math, 2009

It's election season (again). Funny how one fantasy about people passing out free goodies follows right after another (Hallowe'en). Personally, I think it's more likely that the Great Pumpkin will rise out of a farmer's field than that the current crop of slick stooges will raise the country up out of the muck.

Here in New Jersey, we are currently being treated to the very real possibility that a man who has the following baggage may actually get re-elected:

1) zero charisma

2) arguably the worst performance in the history of the state

3) images of his political pals being frog-marched en masse off to prison for

money laundering

4) track record as head of Goldman Sachs, who recently were called a

"blood sucking vampire squid"

He's basically George W. Bush without the aw-shucks charm.

Given that the state is and has been run by a foul ad-mixture of corruption and incompetence perhaps only exceeded by the circus in California, one would expect his challenger would practically waltz into Trenton.

Think again. This is the Soprano State, where political bosses and public employee unions have power perhaps only matched by Johnny Sack. Add in that his main challenger, Chris Christie, is running perhaps the worst campaign in the history of politics, and it's a horse race.

But what's really galling is the impact of the mathematical sleight of hand of independent candidate Tim Daggett, who has slowly but surely undermined Mr Christie's campaign by simultaneously attacking his plan for tax reform, and proposing tax reform of his own through shifting New Jersey's infamously high property taxes to sales and other use taxes.

It's the same shell game one hears every few years. It has appeared before as the "flat tax," and the "fair tax."

The bottom line here is that no tax "reform" is going to work unless and until solid proposals to cut government spending are made. Put simply, think of a five foot bed sheet that must cover a six foot bed. You can pull it up to cover your neck, but you are going to expose your feet. Unless you get a smaller bed or a bigger sheet, something is going to get cold.

New Jersey has usurious property tax burdens - the highest in the country. The effect is that it is driving people out of the state. But if property taxes are reduced by 20 per cent, without cutting spending an equal mount, will require that the same amount be raised elsewhere. So, you'll save a few thousand a year in property taxes, but pay the same amount in sales tax or car tax, or other tax, is going to result in the same tax burden. And worse, these other taxes are going to be more difficult to itemise and deduct elsewhere.

Our state has a budget gap that is conservatively described as 'yawning.' The problem is because of spending; the liberal media (e.g., the NY Times) endorsed Mr Corzine, pointing out among other things that Mr Christie has no 'concrete' plan to fix this problem and laughably, on a few occasions exceeded the $400 per night hotel travel limit.

Mr Corzine not only has no concrete plan to fix the problem, but in fact has a defined record of exacerbating it; he is a hand puppet of the unions, and pensions, out-sized raises, and patronage (Mr Corzine once dated the head of the unions) alarms me far more than Mr Christie's hotel bills.

It remains to be seen if the people in this state are any better at maths than they are at civics.

Dr Stangelove 2009, or, How I Learnt to Stop Fearing Socialism and Love the Public Option

I have always been sceptical of people who support increased government power explaining why this or that further incursion is “for my own good,” or prop up the action by offering that opposition to it must necessarily be due to lack of clarity, or worse, because of propaganda that has obscured. Now that the Democrats appear to be on the verge of passing some sort of health care bill (really, calling a piece of legislation that is physically larger than the Manhattan yellow pages is a stretch), and Speaker Pelosi has said that it *will* include some sort of ‘public option,’ I’ve decided to set aside my worries about Big Government and embrace the creeping socialism.

Before I get into any further detail, I’d like to start with a few clarifications ahead of time.

I think the Republican Party has contributed in a large way to the mess we are in. I voted for President Obama. I do not believe he is a crypto-Moslem plant, nor was he born in Kenya or an illegitimate president. I don’t watch Glenn Beck or listen to Rush Limbaugh. I think Fox News is tabloid rubbish. I do not own a gun, do not think that the Democrats are trying to disarm us and install a Soviet or Nazi regime. I have never seen black helicopters flying over, and am not particularly concerned about the Masons or that a black man is president.

But I do believe that the “public option,” as is being discussed by the Democrat House leadership, is a kind of soft socialism. Using monies taken by taxation from one group of people to redistribute in the form of services to others who have not paid for those services is almost the definition of socialism.

Accept it, and move on.

So, in that spirit, here is what I propose as a sort of sugar (Splenda, perhaps?) to help the socialism go down.

Let’s have a public option. But let’s make it a real option, not something delivered at the point of a tax policeman’s gun.

Let the federal government set up a true insurance scheme, run and administered by government experts. Put whatever rules into the plan that they think will make it ‘work’ (i.e., it must cover this that or the other procedures, cannot charge higher premiums according to actuarial data, cannot refuse care for pre-existing conditions, etc.). Allow it to negotiate fees, prices, and co-pay rates. Give people the option of buying into this system or opting out. The profit motive presumably would be removed, and the only goal of such a scheme would be the health of its participants.

That is what proponents such as Dennis Kucinich and Bernard Sanders argue is the fundamental problem with private insurance, and hence the motive of pushing a public option.

But this public option must be subject to the same rules as other choices. Doctors and other health care providers can freely look at re-imbursement and other factors, and choose not to take patients who use the public option.

And, most important of all, require that this public option be self-sustaining. Put simply, it cannot use tax money for funding, and must be sustained by the premiums paid in by its participants. The bottom line here is, the word “option” implies that one has choices, and that participation is voluntary, not compulsory. I like the current health insurance I have, and I do not want to see my quality of care go down (which it would with the sort of single payer scheme seen in Canada or the UK) and my costs go up (which I suspect they would given what Speaker Pelosi is pushing – expanding “coverage” to 45 million additional people).

The maths simply do not work – you cannot provide the same level of care to a larger group of people without an increase in total cost. And presumably, since these additional 45 million (or whatever number you choose) currently do not participate in the current system because they cannot afford to, they would use resources without contributing a proportional amount of money.

Put simply, health care reform, with a public option, must not be yet another means by which federal kommisars rob Peter to pay Paul.

I propose we go forward with this reform, inclusive of such a public option, and after a period of years, see how it has worked out.