Month: February 2013

Mark Linsenmayer gives Groundhog Day a Platonic spin:

[Bill Murray’s character] ends up in a zen-like peace in the midst of his constant activity. He’s figured out what battles he can’t win (saving a dying hobo’s life, actually seducing the one he loves), what difference he can make (even though presumably the damage to a boy falling out a tree would from his cursed vantage be eternally temporary), how to really make everyone around him feel great, and most of all, he’s trained himself to behave morally. Even though he figures out early on how to successfully rob a bank and so be flush with cash for the rest of the day (and likewise, I’m sure there would be more violent and equally effective means to achieve this), this doesn’t become part of his long-term routine, because he’s already got enough.

On a different picture of human nature, he could have become a serial rapist, newly subjugating the town every day, but this, whether or not he explored such dark avenues in his many months of captivity, is not what ends up being satisfying. Given enough time to reflect on it, he (as any of us would, according to Plato’s picture) seeks the good, and given enough acquired knowledge of himself, of social graces, of material circumstances, he’s able to achieve the good unerringly.

So this tale a counter to the “ring of Gyges” example brought up by Glaucon in The Republic. In that case, Glaucon says that man is fundamentally unjust, because if he had a ring of invisibility and could do injustice without consequence, he surely would. Groundhog Day is a demonstration that on the contrary, though someone with such power would try injustice, given the time to really sort himself out, he would turn to justice after all.

Daniel Engber visits the Plastinarium, the permanent home to specimens used in the wildly popular traveling show, Body Worlds:

However else one might describe the Body Worlds exhibits—as science or as flimflam—they have done more than any other modern spectacle to bring the human corpse into view. For the first time in recent memory, tens of millions of people in the developed world have had the chance to see cadavers on parade, to view the lifeless bodies of their fellow beings without the intermediation of fear or shame.

As the architect of this experience, and as its tireless proponent, [Gunther von Hagens] has refigured death for modern sensibilities. A plastinated corpse isn’t pickled, like a body in a casket. It doesn’t stink, like cadavers at the morgue. It doesn’t rot or bloat or molder. To see one doesn’t make you sad or sick; it doesn’t fill you with anxiety. The experience is something else instead—an encounter with a memento mori that’s both dry and durable and can be split and peeled without disgust. It’s death denuded of its most gruesome elements, the body as a finely engineered machine.

(Above: “The Lassoer” from the “Body Worlds Vital” exhibit. Photo from the Greater Louisville Medical Society Flickr.)

Derek Thompson compares the new Bowles-Simpson plan (SB2 above) to the original (SB1):

I always thought that the most admirable element of the first Bowles-Simpson plan — whether or not you consider yourself a deficit hawk — was the brutal honesty that fulfilling our promise to medically insure the poor and old, while protecting the working poor, while building better roads and broadband, while paying for a military, while doing everything else we’ve come to expect from the government would require tax increases beyond the top two percent. This plan all but gives up on the idea that balancing the budget requires a roughly equal mix of tax hikes and spending cuts.

Sargent adds:

Simpson/Bowles were trying to locate a compromise position that is achievable, given political realities. Perhaps that’s understandable; perhaps Dems are even partly to blame for the fact that the “possible” has been pulled so far in the GOP’s direction. But let’s not call this a “middle ground” or “centrist” position. It isn’t one, unless public opinion and the election’s outcome are to be disregarded entirely in the quest to establish it.

Ezra argues along the same lines:

[T]his plan sacrifices the most useful element of the original Simpson-Bowles effort, which was that it created a model — not the only model, of course — for how you might go about reducing the deficit if you weren’t bound by the various promises, interest groups and political constraints of the two parties. This plan, by contrast, is an effort to split the difference between the two parties while amping up the total deficit reduction.

Gleckman is more positive:

It is still early. With a deadline of March 1, the real drama won’t gear up for at least another week. And it isn’t likely many lawmakers will take up the Bowles and Simpson plan yet. But if Congress and Obama ever decide to actually set serious tax and spending priorities, a consensus budget could well end up looking something like what the two men proposed today.

In an interview, Bowles claims that, after the original plan was released, the White House “said we had too much revenue” and that “being far out front of the president on revenues wasn’t something I wanted to do again.”

It’s now official that the federal government will run 26 state healthcare exchanges, mostly in red states:

Sahil Kapur analyzes the situation:

“Now, in an ironic way, some of what progressives wanted is going to happen. The national government will be setting the framework for at least half of the country,” Theda Skocpol, a professor at Harvard University and expert on health care politics and policy, said in an email Tuesday. “State-level experiments and variants will often have a more progressive flavor — in the states doing their own exchanges — and of course those may create models that could later spread. Meanwhile, the feds will at least create some consistency.”

The immediate political upshot for leaders of the Republican states that stonewalled the exchanges is that they’ll avoid the wrath of their conservative flanks. And in the long-run, this decision allows them to more easily blame the federal government if things go wrong.

Suderman wonders whether the exchanges will open on time:

[O]fficials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is heading up the federal exchange efforts, are projecting confidence, promising the exchanges will be open for business this October as called for by the law. But the law’s track record so far does not inspire much faith. Last summer, the American Action Forum found that 47 percent of the law’s implementation deadlines had been missed.

(Map from Kaiser. Interactive version here.)