mysteries

[calimac]

1. Where the ice pooling up in the bottom of our freezer is coming from.

2. Why Sam Alito believes that business executives are reduced to second-class citizens if they aren't allowed to impose their religious views on their employees' health care.

3. Why I keep forgetting to take my "must take with food" pills at lunch, and have to have a second small lunch just for them.

4. Why all of a sudden Marion Zimmer Bradley is now a villain when her second husband's unfortunate sexual proclivities, and her willingness to live with that, has been public knowledge for fifty years.

5. How our drive to San Diego is going to go.  (It will go well, I hope.)

6. What makes Americans suddenly so interested in soccer, after decades of neglect.  (My theory is that this has been in the works ever since Brandi Chastain removed her shirt.)

7. Why all the Gilbert and Sullivan societies are now so interested in staging The Grand Duke.

8. How long it's going to take me to clean up all the errors and omissions in the draft version of the latest annual Tolkien bibliography.  (Back to the sweatbox.)

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

4. Because Bradley's daughter recently said that Bradley was physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive to her.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No. That came afterwards, in the middle of the piling on.

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

The timeline, so far as I know, is posted here:

http://deirdre.net/the-importance-of-books-and-the-mzb-timeline/

tl;dr version: it was my snarky June 3rd response to Tor's article of the same day (for her birthday) that seemed to launch the whole thing.

Moira's response came about after I wrote her based on a commenter's pushing on my wording on the June 3rd piece.

So yeah -- a MONTH.

Still -- I got ~2250 hits in 24h on the 6/3 piece and 28,000 in 24h on the 6/10 piece with Moira's revelations. Over the past three weeks, that single post has received about 100k hits.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Good questions all!

Our freezer is a frost free model so this issue doesn't
arise.

'The Grand duke' isn't one of their best although it contains some fun things.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, Bradley's defense of her husband at his trial was news to me.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

100K!? The power of the Interwebz. My first reaction was similar to that of our host kalimac but there are 30+ years of Mists of Avalon fans to whom the whole thing was news.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Have you tried reading the decision? Ann Althouse's legal blog quoted a key passage that I thought was clearly stated:

But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have ae a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

The whole thing is available as a pdf if you want to follow the decision in detail.

Back in the debates over the Bill of Rights, one of the supporters—I think it was James Wilson—said that a finite list of enumerated rights wasn't sufficient, because there were a vast number of other rights that deserved protection but that could not be given as an itemized list (this was an argument for the Ninth Amendment, which is what brought reproductive freedom into American jurisprudence): For example, he said, a man had the right to wear his hat or not. And that does seem like a really trivial right; but his readers would have remembered that Quakers had been imprisoned, or worse, for not taking their hats off to lords or magistrates. Liberties that seem unimportant to one person may seem vital to another, as a reflection of their religious beliefs. (For that matter, I'm sure lots of ancient Romans couldn't understand why those weird Christians wouldn't make a minor offering to the Imperial Genius.)

Of course there are limits to this: If I believed in the ancient Aztec gods I would not be entitled to cut your heart out and offer it to the sun god, to give an example so extreme there's no question about its legal standing. But here the religious liberty being claimed is the liberty to tell women that if they want contraception they have to pay for it out of pocket; they aren't being threatened with imprisonment for using birth control, or forbidden to spend their paychecks on it, or told they'll be fired for it, even. In my view of things, "You can do that if you pay for it" is not a denial of my liberty, but an affirmation of it; Hobby Lobby's position, incomprehensible though I find it, does not take away their employees' liberty in the slightest. Any more than my right to freedom of the press would be taken away if you blocked or deleted this comment, and forced me to post my views on my own blog and not yours.

As to Marion Zimmer Bradley, the thing that has struck me as new in the current controversy is the claim that Bradley herself was a sexual abuser, which, if true, is disturbing. But I haven't tried to trace the whole thing to its sources.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read that part. It's a classic case of "which of these things is not like the others?" A strange redefinition seems to be going on of religious liberty as meaning "the right to dictate your religious policy to other people." This is also what's behind all the "War on Marriage" and "War on Christmas" nonsense, all of which is merely a denial of the right of conservative Christians to continue dictating religious policy to everybody else.

The claim that this is "the liberty to tell women that if they want contraception they have to pay for it out of pocket" is both disingenuous and obnoxious to the American political system. (It may not be objectionable to your view, but pure libertarianism is not the political system we're operating under.) It's disingenuous first, because the whole point of health care insurance is to avoid the undue burden of paying out of pocket. If that weren't an undue burden, there would be no point in requiring insurance. It's disingenuous, second, because "out of pocket" is a false distinction from "employee compensation." The health care package is part of the employee's compensation; it's taken out of your pocket pay in two senses, first, that many health care packages now are built on co-payments and deductibles, and second, in that the actual in-pocket pay is much lower than it would be without the health care package. The employer shouldn't get to pick and choose what parts of the health care package the employee is allowed to use any more than the employer should have the right to dictate what the employee buys with her in-pocket money.

If that sounds like a strained parallel, it's much less so than the parallel Alito tries to draw in the quote. The claim that these contraceptive techniques equal abortion is untrue - Hobby Lobby is entitled to its own moral opinions, but not to its own scientific facts - and, knowing this, many of its defenders are revealingly framing their arguments as shock that employees are claiming the right to have their health care plans include the right to have paid the equipment for consequent-free sex. That objection is policing of morals with a vengeance - nanny-state (or nanny-company) government at its worst. And funny, too, because nobody's objecting to health care plans paying for Viagra.

It's obnoxious to the American political system because, despite the decision's desperate claim that it applies only to this particular case - which, if true, would allow objection to abortion, or contraceptives at all, to trump all other political considerations - this decision "open[s] the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind." That's a quote from the decision which the law now being interpreted by Alito was intended to overturn. So the warning was right; the judge who penned it was Justice Scalia. Scalia was also right the time he warned that the Lawrence decision would open the gates to gay marriage, the only difference being that, that time, the prospect was an appealing one.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The statement that MZB was herself a serial sexual abuser comes from here. So far as I know, there hasn't been any further elaboration on this statement. And that is, as nancylebov pointed out above, a new thing. But the revelation postdated the general denunciation of MZB.

There's more, also, in the extraordinarily long and details testimonies and depositions linked to from here.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

This whole idea that having to pay $25 a month out of pocket (the amount Megan McArdle cites; my own earlier research a year ago had suggested $50 via Planned Parenthood) is an undue burden strikes me as silly. It's a completely predictable expense, and a lot smaller than other completely predictable expenses that I manage to fit into my budget, such as rent and groceries and for that matter Internet access. It's not even the cost of a daily stop at Starbucks before work. Are there really women who want to be sexually active without risk of pregnancy, but who are being deterred from that by finding it impossible to make a small monthly cash payment?

And if you look at the economics of it, there really is no point in requiring insurance for completely predictable monthly expenses. You can pay $25 out of pocket; or your insurance company can pay $25, and then turn around and charge you $25 every month to cover the cost, plus another $5 or so to pay for administrative expenses and return on investment. There's no benefit in it. The only things where medical insurance makes sense are unexpected costs too large to pay out of pocket, out of savings, or with credit resources—just as auto insurance pays for crashes but not for oil changes, or homeowner insurance pays for fires but not for new paint or flea bombing. That's the insurance regime I'm under, or as close as I can get to it under the current restrictions. Having comprehensive health care be part of employee compensation is (a) a historical accident of World War II that (b) has had destructive consequences for the entire health care sector that (c) the Affordable Care Act tries to solve by forcing everybody into the same system, rather than actually addressing its defects or, even harder, increasing the actual supply of health care services.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's an economic argument, not a religious one. If true, it should apply to a lot of other things as well.

And it's also pernicious and obnoxious, as seen by all the rich, well-fed pundits who tell poor people just to economize in their food spending. After all, a pot of rice and beans doesn't cost very much. The point is, you ADD ALL THESE THINGS UP, they come to more than people can afford. (The average Hobby Lobby clerk isn't earning a middle-class salary.)

At this point, the argument then reverts to policing their morals.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't even have accepted your economic premise. The cost of "an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." (R. Ginsberg, in dissent)

Those of us who are better off forget just how much of a hurdle small economic burdens are to the working poor. That, incidentally, is why it's offensive when they're shrugged off as being lazy. Being poor is a lot of work.

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Here's an idea for what might be causing the ice collection, based on what was causing water to collect at the bottom of our refrigerator compartment. Modern fridges are all "frost free". That doesn't mean that frost doesn't build up, it does. It just means that periodically heat is applied to the coils to melt off the frost. The melt water is supposed to run off through a collector funnel and tube into a pan at the bottom of the unit, where it eventually evaporates. In our fridge, the collector and tube got blocked up by ice (we maybe had the refrigerator section set too cold.) So instead of running off to the pan, the melt water ran into the bottom of the fridge. If something similar is happening to you, the melt water is then refreezing.

The solution I applied was to turn off the unit, take everything out and put it in ice coolers, take stuff apart until I could get at the collector and tube, then pour in hot water until the blockage melted. I hung a piece of copper wire from the coils down into the beginning of the drain tube, the idea is to conduct some of the defrost-cycle heat down there to melt a future blockage. Then put it back together, set the refrigerator temperature setting up a bit, turned it back on, and put everything back in.

The copper wire and raising the setting didn't fix it permanently, since I've had to do the whole thing again.

A slower but probably just as effective solution would be to take everything out and turn off the unit for a day or so until everything has a chance to melt.

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

The other thing that annoys me about the "only $25 a month!" bit is that someone on oral contraceptives does need to be periodically monitored for side effects (high blood pressure being the most common, but not the only ones.) I'm sure these folks would object to paying for those appointments and lab work, too. Having people pay for these services individually instead of through the insurance company means they 'd be paying the jacked-up individual fee-for-service amounts instead of the quantity-discount amounts that insurance companies pay.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's very enlightening; thank you. Unfortunately the place I stop following you is at the words "take stuff apart." I'm not going to attempt to take anything of a refrigerator apart. I may try your "turn it off for a day" solution, and if that doesn't work: "Morning has broken / Call the repairman"

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Have you actually purchased medical services out of pocket? I have, a number of times, over the past decade, since for most of it I couldn't afford medical insurance. Over and over, when I was going for something high-priced like a thyroid biopsy, I got discounts for paying cash.

There is also the proposal to make oral contraceptives available over the counter. That would significantly lower the price. Megan McArdle and Glenn Reynolds, among others, have blogged about it as an option.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A little poking around suggests that the cost for a thyroid biopsy could run between $1300 and $3500. Even at the low end, most of the working poor don't have that kind of unallocated cash sitting around. That's why paying cash is not considered when discussing the medical costs of the poor.

Then what happens if surgery or elaborate drug treatments are indicated? That could run thousands. Why spend money on the biopsy, even if you could fford it, if you know you couldn't afford the treatment?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, in the first place, it was always possible there might be some treatment that I could pay for out of my savings. In the second place, if I had something that was going to kill me in months or years, I would need to make plans based on that knowledge. And in the third place, I had already been told that the previous ultrasound made it look unlikely that I had anything fatal, but the biopsy confirmed that, and being freed of lingering worry had value for me.

In any case, I'm not arguing against the value of health insurance as such; I would really have liked to be able to afford the kind of catastrophic covered that might help with that kind of situation. For that matter, back when Obama was running the first time, I thought the way he was headed was toward having the federal government act as a guarantor of catastrophic expenses, and while that's not the option I prefer, I thought it was something that could be endured; it's one of the functions of Medicare, after all. What I'm arguing is that running your entire medical expenses through an insurance company is economically and administratively irrational, and it's bad policy to have that arrangement subsidized by tax breaks. It's been a great deal for the insurance companies, but their management has helped give us the ruinously costly system we have now. And the ACA doesn't really seem to have displaced that system; it's mostly just made the industry less competitive.

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you don't know how your cash discount compares to what the insurance company paid, because that's secret. I'm quite sure that the insurance company knows what discount you got, though, and uses that in its negotiations.

Making oral contraceptives OTC would just have people skip the monitoring, just hand-waving away the actual risks. Which are, you know. actual. Perhaps some careful analysis would show that the side-effect risks are less than the risks of getting pregnant, but that's a false dichotomy. (And "careful analysis" is rarely found when McArdle and Reynolds are involved. Particularly annoying in the case of Glenn, who was worth reading a decade ago.)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I agree that Reynolds is fairly casual, but I tend to find McArdle's analyses informative and clearly reasoned, even when I disagree with them. And in any event she footnotes quite a lot.