Year: 2013

Sharon Rawlette observes that “the real trouble lies in that a writer doesn’t know how she does what she does”:

There is no recipe. No blueprint. No line of stepping stones that will lead one to the creation of a brilliant piece of literature without moments of wandering in the dark. We writers strive to bring into being something bold, original, and heart-stoppingly magnificent. But, as clichéd as it may sound, that stuff only arrives by way of inspiration. Don’t get me wrong. We writers have to work hard. We have to show up. We have to put pen to paper or fingertip to key. We have to cry and sweat and bleed. But there’s no direct link between our suffering and the end result. Our tears, our sweat, our blood get poured out, and then, magically, from somewhere off in left field, the miracle appears. And the end result seems so disconnected from our effort that we wonder why it couldn’t have just shown up earlier, before we had that little visit to hell.

But of course, the work was necessary. The work did get us the result. It just happened somewhere in the depths of the unconscious. We couldn’t see the gears turning, the neurons firing, the gods descending and re-ascending from our little brains. And so, when it’s time to face the next blank page, we still have no clue how we do what we do. And we’re not at all sure that it will ever happen again.

Vladimir Nabokov sounded a similar note during a 1964 interview with Playboy:

What inspires you to record and collect such disconnected impressions and quotations?

All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it. When I remember afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure. After the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of “this is what I’m going to write”—the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase.

I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

Sullum analyzes Colorado’s new marijuana taxes, which passed by an overwhelming margin last night:

[M]arijuana will be one of the most heavily taxed consumer products in Colorado, taxed at a much higher rate than alcohol even without taking local levies into account. That situation is hard to reconcile with Amendment 64′s aim of taxing marijuana “in a manner similar to alcohol,” and it surely makes no sense in light of the two products’ relative hazards, which were a major theme of the legalization campaign. If legislators take full advantage of their new tax authority, marijuana in Denver, the center of the retail cannabis industry, will be hit by a 15 percent excise tax plus sales taxes totaling 38 percent (including standard and special state and local taxes). With taxes that high, the state-licensed outlets may have trouble competing with the black market and with homegrown marijuana. (Colorodans are allowed to grow up to six plants at home and share the produce, one ounce at a time, “without remuneration.”) Legislators may find that if they set taxes too high, the result will be less revenue rather than more.

Pete Guither sees an upside to the taxes:

While those taxes are significant (and significantly higher than alcohol taxes), and I’m concerned that the state do what it can do encourage legal channels at the beginning rather than discouraging them, still I think that smart producers will still be able to achieve a price point that will satisfy purchasers who would like to buy legally. And the taxes will help the political future of legalization.

Finally, Nicole Flatow notes the marijuana news from yesterday’s election:

By a landslide, Portland became the first east coast city to legalize marijuana Tuesday, in a measure that removes all penalties for small-quantity, adult marijuana possession, but does not decriminalize production or sale of pot. And three Michigan cities passed measures to remove criminal punishment for marijuana possession, bringing the number of Michigan localities that have decriminalized marijuana to 14. In some of these localities, marijuana possession is still a civil infraction that typically carries a ticket and/or fine. But Lansing’s initiative, like Portland’s, removed all civil and criminal penalties.

Earlier Dish on marijuana taxes here.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

Ramesh Ponnuru likes how Christie has finessed his social conservatism:

Socially conservative positions on hot-button issues don’t seem to be a deal-breaker even for the much more liberal voters of New Jersey. Christie has vetoed legislation to grant state recognition to same-sex marriage — a judge later ordered it, though Christie briefly appealed — and vetoed bills to fund Planned Parenthood five times.

He does not, however, seem obsessed by social issues: Democrats haven’t gotten much mileage out of ads saying that his priorities are different from those of voters, as they have against Cuccinelli. Christie has also avoided taking unpopular socially conservative stands on issues that aren’t live debates, and taken the occasional opportunity to soften his profile.

Samuel Goldman calls Christie’s strategy “Machiavellian” because Machiavelli thought that “the important thing is to seem to possess the moral virtues, rather than actually to practice them.” He argues that “Chris Christie is a good example of this dynamic” because “Christie knew quite well that his challenge to the gay marriage bill was purely symbolic, since the liberal state supreme court was certain to reinstate the law”:

Christie’s Machiavellian approach isn’t popular with dedicated social conservatives. The National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council have both condemned Christie’s handling of gay marriage. But symbolic conservatism is popular with more moderate voters, who want to express disapproval from gay marriage and abortion, but are uncomfortable with policies that seem intrusive or intolerant.

The lesson of today’s election, then, will not be that social conservatives can compete in moderate and liberal areas if they offer more explicit and articulate defenses of their views. It’s that they can get away with expressing social conservative beliefs so long as they do nothing to suggest that those beliefs are likely to end up enshrined in law.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely reports that “the trans-rights movement has speedily moved to a brand-new battleground: public schools”:

Kids are coming out as trans earlier than ever: A survey of the San Francisco school district found that 1.6 percent of high school students and, incredibly, one percent of middle-school students identified as transgender. Children are packing the few U.S. clinics like [the Center for Transyouth Health and Development], which are at the forefront of a new therapeutic approach, in which children may live as their preferred gender, complete with appropriate clothing, pronouns and often a new name. This so-called affirmative model has found an increasingly warm reception among the worried parents of trans children. And so while most doctors still consider this “social transition” for kids under the age of 10 to be controversial, already these intrepid young pioneers have begun venturing out into the world – including, in rare cases, female-to-male trans kids who undergo “top surgery” as early as age 13. …

Although 623 American colleges and universities have already adopted nondiscrimination policies to cover gender expression, high schools and middle schools are being forced to grapple with the question of how to deal with trans students in their locker rooms, athletic fields and bathrooms. It’s a haphazard fight raging at district, county and state levels; thus far, 2013 has been what appears to be a watershed year.

This past winter, educators in Massachusetts, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, issued guidelines to accommodate trans students, allowing them to use bathrooms and play on sports teams corresponding to the gender with which they identify. But in August, California trumped them all by becoming the first state to pass legislation spelling out that transgender students can choose which bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams they wish, based on their gender identity.

Parker Marie Molloy has more on the Golden State:

[A] firestorm of dissent is building around one section of the bill, stating that transgender students will have the opportunity to play on sports teams and use sex-segregated facilities that correspond with their gender identity, even if this doesn’t match their birth certificate. Opponents of the law, citing privacy concerns, have begun the process of collecting signatures to repeal the law through public referendum. Should these organizations collect the necessary 505,000 signatures required by November 6th, the law’s fate will be voted on by the general public in the 2014 midterm elections.

Previous Dish here on the debate over when a child can be considered transgender.

(Photo by Chas Danner)

A reader reminds me of another good reason to move back to DC:

I have to give high marks to the District of Columbia for their ACA website. It took me two minutes to create an account, and a couple more minutes to get to the list of available plans. For me, there are 31 options, 30 of which have lower monthly premiums than my current plan, which I’ll admit is expensive ($613 a month just for me).

Another:

I am a physician living in Washington, DC.  (We’re excited to have you back!)  I am working 3/4 time by choice, so I am not eligible for group coverage from my employer (a hospital). I am single, 46 years old, and fairly healthy, and I’ve been buying health insurance on the open market.  I have a fairly high deductible policy that covers routine preventive care and dental care and is HSA eligible.  I am not eligible for subsidies under the ACA.  As a physician, I am thrilled with the ACA for my patients. I have plenty who will now be able to obtain insurance, allowing them to see me when needed and allowing me to be paid.

Yesterday I received a letter from my insurance company stating that, due to the ACA, my current policy will be canceled as of 12/31/13.

I have a choice of renewing my plan at “next year’s rate” (which was not specified in the letter) or buying insurance on the exchange from them or another company.  The letter was very clear and did not try to sell me on one of their plans, or tell me I’d “default” to one of their plans if I didn’t do anything.

Bracing myself for a price hike, I called the company today.  To my pleasant surprise, they are renewing my current insurance for a year at an increase of exactly $3.00 per month.  At the end of next year I’ll have to buy insurance on the exchange, but I’m optimistic by that time the DC exchange will have sorted itself out and I will have reasonable options.

So count me among those with a “shrug” for the change to Obamacare.  My impression is that it’s helping a lot of people, hurting a few, and not having a huge effect on the vast majority of the rest of us.

Another:

I had been talking with my neighbor on and off the last several weeks about healthcare. He is somebody who I had anticipated ACA would help a lot because he is a self-employed graphic designer who currently does purchase insurance on the individual market. He was excited about ACA, but when we first talked at the end of October, he had not successfully gotten onto healthcare.gov.

He sent me an update e-mail this afternoon, indicating he had gotten onto the site and saved six possible plans to go over in more detail. There are actually enough options that it does take some thinking about one’s personal situation to know which plan might be best given the different premium versus deductible and other out of pocket expenses. But his final paragraph is important to the whole discussion about cost:

All in all the process went fine but I don’t think I’m going to save any money overall. But this is a big step for self employed people. The fact that I don’t have to worry about pre-existing conditions and being turned down for insurance is a huge change from what it was. Can’t wait to hear how many people have signed up. They should know something next week.

I’m sure encouraged that he was able to get onto the website!

Trende does some rough calculations:

The bottom line is this: If the national exchanges were functioning as well as the best-functioning state exchange — and encountering the same demand — we’d probably be on the low end of the administration’s acceptable enrollment range. If the middle state were representative of the country as a whole, we’d be below it, but not by an overwhelming amount. That’s not much, but it’s probably the best news supporters of the law have received in a while.

But Bob Laszewski passes along some bad news:

Health plans, with the kind of market share that would have to sign-up 100,000 to 200,000 people for the administration to hit its goal of 7 million people, are generally reporting they have enrolled only about 100 – 200 people over the first 35 days via Healthcare.gov.

He also reports that, among insurers “the confidence that this can all get fixed by December 1 is not high.” Allahpundit wonders what happens if healthcare.gov isn’t fixed by the end of this month, the Obama administration’s self-imposed deadline:

What does [Obama] do on December 1st if we’re still stuck in 404 hell? Allow insurers to bring back plans that have been canceled under the new ObamaCare regs? Extend the enrollment deadline next year from March 31st to some later date, which raises the risk of adverse selection problems for insurers? Delay the entire law until HHS gets its act together? Nothing but bad options here as far as the eye can see.

A few readers from our Facebook page react to these videos of pig cruelty:

I am wounded by this to the depths of my soul. I am an omnivore, but this sort of thing makes me question how I justify it. It also makes me question fellow Christians that are so committed to the ” pro-life” movement. This is a creature that is fully conscious of its suffering; how can you consider this to be of less consequence than a fetus that had not developed a fully developed brain?

Another:

I eat meat; the fish I catch or my family catches. I know the farmer who raises the beef I eat. The deer we hunt every fall live good wild lives and then a bullet ends their life; a whole lot better than starving, getting hit by a car or be torn to bits by a pack of dogs/wolves. I do my best to know where my food comes from and how it lived before it came to feed me and my family. Everything dies and becomes food to another living thing, even we humans. I do my utmost to never buy much of anything from Walmart, especially meat, fish or eggs. I support each person’s right to choose what kind of diet best suits their lifestyle and moral choices. Please respect mine, because at the end of the day I know we want the same result: I believe that by consuming only humanely raised animals and sustainable crops I can do more to keep animals safe while supporting the health of my family.

Another responds to my call to contact Dave Warner, the director of communications for the National Pork Producers Council (and his response is below):

Hello Andrew:

I have never in my life written anything like the email below to anyone, on any subject of public attention.  Thank you for getting me off my arse!

Dear Mr. Warner:

I got your email address from Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” blog, where I have been following his recent excellent coverage of the use of ‘gestation crates’ and other factory farming techniques in pig farming.  He has thoughtfully presented the moral issues from a Roman Catholic perspective and in the context of the respect for life and stewardship of nature that form a central part of that faith (which I share).

I am a lifelong lover of bacon, ham, and almost every other pork product!  But in light of what I have now learned about the treatment of pigs in American factory farms I can no longer, in good conscience, continue to consume pork.  While I have no moral objection to the consumption of meat, I will not remain complicit in the unspeakable cruelty apparently routinely inflicted on pigs by American pork producers.

Please convey to your members that I, and many consumers like me, ask that American pork producers discontinue practices like the use of gestation crates and make some concerted effort to provide pigs a life that approximates the natural life an intelligent mammal should be entitled to.  Until that time, I will not purchase any pork product other than those that I can satisfy myself came from farms that treat their animals with dignity and (at a minimum) allow them to move around outside.  I am prepared to pay a premium for such well-sourced meat.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Warner responds to the Dish:

Andrew Sullivan Monday posted a couple of videos from hog farms and wrote about the “brutal impact of keeping pigs in gestation crates.” But the videos’ images and, more importantly, the narrative that accompanied them don’t tell the accurate story of how America’s family hog farmers raise and care for their animals.

Providing humane and compassionate care for their pigs at every stage of life is one of the ethical principles to which America’s family hog famers adhere. They are passionate about caring for animals in a way that protects their well-being. In fact, housing sows in gestation stalls is one of the ways to ensure their well-being. Those individual pens allow farmers to give sows individual food rations and veterinary care; they also protect sows from aggressive sows.

Janeen Salak-Johnson, an associate animal science professor at the University of Illinois, has studied gestating sows in various housing systems, monitoring their stress, environmental physiology and well-being. She has found that individual pens work well for pregnant sows and that, contrary to claims made by opponents of the housing system, they don’t cause health problems for the animals.

The American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Association of Swine Veterinarians (AASV) recognize gestation stalls as appropriate for providing for the well-being of sows during pregnancy. In fact, the key factor that most affects animal well-being is husbandry skills – that is, the care given to each animal. There is no scientific consensus on the best way to house gestating sows because each type of housing system has inherent advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of allowing sows to roam freely, for example, is that they will attack each other, with severe injuries and even death often the result. It’s also harder to ensure proper veterinary and nutritional care to sows in group or open housing systems.

Pork producers didn’t just wake up one day and decide to put sows in individual pens. Individual housing came about after years of working with the animals, observing their behaviors and determining what worked best to provide them the best possible care. Why would hog farmers want to abandon a system that provides that?

One practice (blunt force trauma) shown on one of the videos, while a method accepted by the AASV as a way to euthanize nonviable piglets, is being phased out – research on better methods is on-going – by the pork industry.

Certainly, there have been a few instances of animal abuse on hog farms, and that abuse has been condemned by the pork industry and by the farmers at whose operations the abuse occurred. Workers involved, including the worker in one of the videos posted yesterday, have been fired and, in one case, criminally prosecuted.

But most of the videos offered by animal-rights groups do not show any abuse, and even in the videos that do, the majority of the footage does not show abuse despite the groups’ narratives and claims to the contrary. Just because someone asserts that something is abuse – gestation stalls, for example – doesn’t make it so.

Hog farmers around the country are very concerned about the well-being of their animals, but they’re also concerned that the lies being told about how they raise and care for them could win the day and that, then, the United States would go the way of Europe, with animal well-being suffering, farmers going out of business and food prices skyrocketing.

Warner adds that the following video “(at about 1:50) explains why many hog farmers use gestation stalls, if you want to include it with the post”:

Another reader:

I just sent a polite but direct e-mail to Dave Warner. I told him that from now on my family will stop buying pork products and ordering pork in restaurants unless it is clearly marked as humanely raised.

On a tangential note, my parents lost a dear friend to mad cow disease here in the US earlier this year. You may already know this, but it is still possible for humans to contract mad cow disease in this country due to gaps in inspections and other loopholes. So now we only eat and order beef that is clearly labeled as having been fed grass or vegetarian feed. I swear, this nation’s meat industry is slowly turning me into a vegetarian.

Another:

Because you have such a large readership, I am pleased you are reaching a large audience on this topic – Thank You! I can never watch these videos; I suspect I would cry and be depressed the rest of the day.  My husband, daughter, and I eat very little meat and when we do, it is from humane sources.  As a society, if we reduced our demand for meat by half, our health, the environment, and the lives of animals would improve! Whether it’s “Meatless Mondays” or “Vegan Before 6”, so much good from one small step. Please continue this important topic.

We won’t let go.