Recommended: The Revenge of Geography

I have been reading Robert Kaplan's 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. It is a refreshing excursion away from the day-to-day crises toward a much longer-term view of the world.  Kaplan argues that geography shapes history and civilizations today just as it has all through recorded history.  The first two-thirds of the book look back at past empires and civilizations to see how their geography shaped their destiny.  The last third of the book looks at America in that light, and explores what the future might hold for us.

I was particularly struck by his argument that, despite the obsession of the East Coast ruling elite with the Middle East and Asia, it is actually the influence -- good or bad -- of Mexico that ought to concern us most, a point Samuel Huntington made repeatedly in his later years. If we are bordered by an increasingly autonomous, lawless and wealthy narco-state, no longer controlled by Mexico's central government, and driven primarily by the drug markets in our own nation, this ought to be a prime concern to us.

And indeed, one wonders what would have happened if we had put the trillion dollars we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan into helping Mexico overcome its problems.  The result mught have been much more satisfactory.   This is a book worth reading. 
 

Now the other shoe….

President Obama’s now notorious promise was “If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Your Doctor.” Well, the first part turned out not to be true for many people, resulting in the political fuss over the past few weeks.

Now the second shoe is about to drop. Many people will find out that their doctor is not included in the new network they were forced to move to. See this story this morning from Reuters: UnitedHealth drops thousands of doctors from insurance plans.

If we thought there was a lot of fuss over the past two weeks about cancelled health insurance plans, wait until people begin to discover they can no longer go to the doctor they have used for years……

Has anyone noticed….?

We have all watched the incredibly inept launch of the ObamaCare website, and the desperate Democratic reassurances that “everything will be fine…real soon now”.  But has anyone noticed that, as far as I can tell, not a single person has been fired for this incompetence?  Not Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Not Health and Human Services Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman or Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao.

We all heard about the murder of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and four of his staff in Bengazi in 2012.  And we all heard after the fact about the repeated requests his staff made for better protection – requests which were refused and ignored by State Department officials in Washington.  But as near as I can tell no one was ever fired for that oversight and poor judgment.

We all have heard of Edward Snowden, now in Russia, and the damaging leaks he has provided to domestic and foreign newspapers.  And after the fact we have all heard how sloppy communication between security agencies meant that documented concerns about his behavior were never passed on to his new employers. But as near as I can tell, no one ever lost their job over that sloppiness.  Certainly no high-level executive seems to have been disciplined.

I am no fan of President Bush’s administration, but after the incredibly inept FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) response to the Katrina hurricane disaster he did at least replace FEMA director Michael Brown.

I know that in companies I have worked  in – IBM and Lockheed Martin – executive heads would have rolled in response to such disasters. When Apple’s initial 2012 launch of its own map service on the iPhone was so disastrous, the executive in charge, Scott Forstall, was fired. When the 2011 opening of British Airways Heathrow terminal five was a disaster, Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations at BA, and David Noyes, head of customer relations, were both summarily fired.  In the real world, companies do make mistakes and have disasters, but people get fired as a consequence.

Not so, apparently, in Washington. In the Federal Government, apparently, one can be thoroughly incompetent and there are no consequences so long as one is high enough in the food chain.

I wonder how long it will take...

President Obama got into a lot of hot water by promising repeatedly “If you like you current health care plan, you can keep it. Period.” Of course, that was impossible because Health and Human Services wrote a whole bunch of regulations that specified the minimum coverage that could be offered, and a lot of the less expensive plans didn’t meet all the required minimums.

So now, after a lot of uproar, the President has tried to recover politically by promising an administrative fix that allows (but does not require) insurance companies to extend those “sub-standard” plans through 2014.

I wonder how long it will take the Democrats to catch on to the fact that, with the new extension, all those cancellation letters will be going out again just about this time next year, just before the elections? Not too smart!!

The 11 American Nations

Colin Woodard has written a new book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, in which he argues that America is really 11 separate nations.  It is not a new idea; others have pointed out variously that we can be divided into 5 or 7 or 12 different regions, based on political outlook, ethnic balance, history, liberal/conservative balance and the like, but he makes a good case for his view.

Here is his map:

The point being that these regional grouping are so fundamentally different in outlook that contentions issues like gun control will never acquire a consensus.

Until the fat lady sings....

How rapidly the political landscape changes. A month ago Democrats were sure the unwise (actually, stupid) Republican government shutdown had set them up for an easy election cycle next time. Now Democrats are in full panic mode as the ObamaCare mess continues to deepen, and the president's approval ratings have falling to a new low. As they say, a week is a lifetime in politics.

Underneath all of this, the nation is still split almost exactly 50-50 between conservative and liberals, so election results will probably be determined more by local gerrymeandering and local issues than by any of this Congressional posturing. No doubt there are more ObamaCare problems to come, since the government seems incapable of even fielding a relatively simple website one can assume the deeper and more complex issues (like linking all the various agency databases together correctly, and managing the high volumes many were never designed for) will produce yet more discomforting news for Democrats.

On the other hand, Republicans show no sign yet of having learned anything useful from all their various missteps in recent years, so perhaps they will again manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In the famous words of journalist Ralph Carpenter "It ain't over till the fat lady sings..."

Do we really want the government to manage our health care?

Liberals, with a decidedly paternalistic outlook on the nation, would dearly love to have the government run our health care system, the way the British government, for example, runs their health care system. Does anything about the rollout of the heath care websites give any confidence that the government can do this without massively screwing up? Does anything about the British health care system (currently 2.9 million Britains are waiting to get into a hospital) give anyone any confidence our government can run a health care system?