Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.

Deterrence and Responses

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Russian President Vladimir Putin can destroy NATO with a simple move, goes the intro. The simple move would be a minor incursion into Poland, perhaps, or seize some Baltic Sea islands, or (my own speculation) enter Lithuania from the Suwalki Corridor in a claimed need to widen it and then watch the NATO nations dither and not respond, which would demonstrate to the world, to Putin, and to those NATO member nations just how worthless and timid and uninterested in defending each other, much less themselves individually, the alliance is. Which is what President Donald Trump (R) has been complaining about and why he’s been prodding, even provoking, those nations to do more for their own defense.

On the other hand, those member nations could promptly and in useful coordination act to defeat the incursion, taking prisoners, inflicting casualties, and driving the remainder back out of the invaded (because that’s what it would be, never minding the timid euphemism that is “incursion”) nation. That would provide a measure of deterrence, but only in a tit-for-tat sort of way. We and our NATO fellows should have learned as long ago as our Vietnam War that tit-for-tat only leaves the door open for another try later on, with greater friendly casualties—and as the present barbarian case in Ukraine is demonstrating, increased civilian casualties.

There is another response, though, that would act to strengthen both deterrence and the durability of deterrence. That move would be simultaneously to defeat the invasion and to attack some key fuel and energy targets, complementary to Ukraine’s extant targeting, inside Russia. And, while that’s in progress, for the governments of the UK, France, and the United States jointly and publicly to point out to Putin that NATO has nuclear weapons, also.

Gerald Baker, in his article at the link, at first considered that with Russia’s military-in-being and economy so badly diminished by the barbarian’s war on Ukraine, a Putin incursion would be unlikely. Baker reported hearing rumors, though, that Putin actually is contemplating such a move.

I don’t think that’s so outlandish, and haven’t thought so from the jump (yeah, yeah, yay me). Putin’s armies don’t have to be up to snuff, neither does his economy. Especially his armies, but also his economy, only have to be better than what NATO has to offer in counter, and NATO’s relative weakness is the current situation. And: Putin has an additional critical advantage here: he has the political will to act; nor NATO nor national leadership has any such will.

That puts a premium on that third response option. And the lack of it would demonstrate the toothless nature of the NATO kitten, even were it to make the second response.

Dispositive Indication of Party’s Extremism

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In an article concerning Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Graham Platner, and whether he should drop out of the fall election contest over an allegation of rape (coming on the heels of a number of women who’ve said he’d been abusive toward them), there is this statement:

Over the last 24 hours, some of Platner’s advisers have been guiding him on what a withdrawal from the race would look like and helping him figure out a way to get a candidate and a selection process he could support, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

[A] candidate and a selection process he [Platner] could support. That’s a pretty definitive statement of the control over the Progressive-Democratic Party that the socialists have, and it demonstrates pretty clearly how socialism has become the center of Party and how Party Establishment has been relegated to Party’s extremist right (even as Party’s Establishment remains plainly Left Wing relative to American politics and voters).

And, just to emphasize that point, which even includes those wanting Platner to drop out, here’s Joseph Geevarghese, who is the Executive Director of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that socialist, but nominally Independent, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) generated:

To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening. Mainers did not vote by an overwhelming margin against Janet Mills and the DSCC’s handpicked candidate just to be handed another status-quo candidate.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that.

Update: In the realization, Platner withdrew.

I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.

As Dana Loesch put it in her newsletter,

As the truth unraveled so did Platner’s polling. A recent NYT poll showed incumbent Susan Collins leading Platner with working class voters by 21 points, expanded more by narrowing it to white working class voters. Women, Hispanics, and other demos began sliding fast. Democrats couldn’t afford Platner hurting them in the midterms, too.

This is Party.

Revolution vs Evolution

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The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.

Celebrities and Champions

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently insists on being both.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on the cover of the most recent issue of Essence magazine[.]

That prompted a Georgia lawyer to complain that

Supreme Court Justices are not celebrities and should not be treated like celebrities[.]

He’s right, but magazine writers are going write and magazine photographers are going to photograph. The real onus is on Supreme Court Justices to not act like celebrities.

On the other hand, Jackson enthusiastically accepts her label as “the people’s champion.”

Judges and especially Supreme Court Justices, though, cannot legitimately be the people’s champions, that’s the exclusive role of our elected officials in Congress and the White House. The role of judges and Justices is to be the champion of our Constitution and of the statutes before them, and apply both without regard to celebrity.