Camilla Paglia on Alcohol

Camille Paglia is true to form, or as the French would say: égale à elle-même.

Yesterday she took out after the scolds who caused the nation to raise the drinking age from 18 to 24 some thirty years ago.

She writes:

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age-21 rule sets the U.S. apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

It makes perfect sense. Yet, Paglia seems to go a bit too far when she blames a series of aberrant adolescent behaviors on a lowered drinking age. 

She believes that today's young people do not learn how to manage their alcohol consumption, and thus tend to drink more than ever. She adds that young people overcome the ban by indulging all manner of drugs, from club drugs to psychoactive medication.

Surely, the observation is correct. The notion that the higher drinking age caused the problems feels like a stretch.

Correlation, yes; causation, not necessarily.

Paglia argues that when children who start drinking at a younger age have a better chance of learning how to drink responsibly.

It doesn’t seem self-evident to me, but allow Paglia to have her say:

Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in growing up — as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s home-made wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity. Beer was a nourishing food in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and wine was identified with the life force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (in wine, truth). Wine as a sacred symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service. Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

Of course, if one wanted to be churlish, one could note the fate of the civilizations that indulged at bit too much in Dionysian or Bacchic debauchery. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever got drunk on Communion… at least, not in the literal sense of the term.

When pondering ancient Rome and Greece, even ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, “civilized” is not the word that comes to mind.

For Paglia, it’s all about causation. She proposes a list of the ill-effects of the 1984 ban on teenage drinking. Those include an increase in binge drinking on college campuses, which, I don’t need to tell you, produced many more undesirable effects.

Of course, other cultural forces might have contributed. Intellectuals who promoted the glories of Dionysian revelry might have contributed to a culture that saw no ill effects issuing from an over-indulgence in alcohol.

Just saying.

Paglia also argued that the ban on teen age drinking pushed many young people to other forms of drugs:

What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — Ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.

After explaining that binge drinking produces every manner of horror, Paglia sings the praise of alcohol. Of course, she is distinguishing between moderate and excessive consumption, but one wonders how many young people will grasp the subtle distinction.

More tellingly, she compares moderate alcohol consumption, a relatively harmless diversion, with the current mania about taking psychoactive medication.

A country that feels that it is doing God’s work by forbidding young people to drink alcohol has no qualms about stuffing the same young people with Prozac.

In Paglia’s words:

Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas, and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as today’s massively overprescribed anti-depressants, linger in body and brain and may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres. Half of the urban professional class in the U.S. seems doped on meds these days.

One sympathizes with Paglia’s next point. In the old days young people used to get together over a beer. The practice promoted face-to-face communication. Today, it might help to attenuate the adolescent mania over social media and texting.

She writes:

Exhilaration, ecstasy, and communal vision are the gifts of Dionysus, god of wine. Alcohol’s enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today’s technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By undermining the art of conversation, the age 21 law has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing dullness and mediocrity. This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!

As a description of the life of today’s college students, Paglia’s column has merit. I, for one, would like to think that we could solve all of these problems by lowering the drinking age, but I have my doubts.

Still, I endorse Paglia’s idea that it would not be a bad thing to return the drinking age to 18. I stop short of endorsing her idea that marijuana use should be legalized.

Moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages does not seem to have any long lasting negative health effects. When it comes to marijuana, recent studies have suggested that it does. At the least, the jury is still out.

[Addendum: A recent study points out the positive benefits of moderate alcohol consumption for patients who have kidney disease. Via the Daily Mail:

Researchers at the University of Colorado-Denver found that people who drink less than one glass of wine a day have a 37 per cent lower prevalence of chronic kidney disease than those who drink no wine at all.

And, people who have chronic kidney disease are 29 per cent less likely to also have heart disease if they drink a small amount of wine.

The researchers, led by Dr. Tapan Mehta, used 2003 to 2006 data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on 5,852 individuals, 1,031 of whom had chronic kidney disease.

Thomas Manley, director of scientific activities at the National Kidney Foundation, said: ‘Similar to previous studies showing that moderate wine consumption appears to impart some health benefit by lowering the risk of heart disease and diabetes, this study suggests an association between moderate wine consumption (less than one glass per day) and lower rates of chronic kidney disease.’

Moderation is the key for kidney patients when it comes to alcohol consumption, with a few caveats, he added.

And, to top it off, Yahoo! reports on a recent French study suggesting that marijuana might be bad for your cardio-vascular health:

Young adults who smoke marijuana may be at risk for serious or even fatal heart problems, according to a study by French researchers on Wednesday.

The findings in the Journal of the American Heart Association raises new concerns about the safety of marijuana, just as many parts of the world are relaxing laws on its use and medicinal marijuana is gaining popularity for treating certain health conditions.

The risk of heart complications appeared small in the study, which included nearly 2,000 people who sought medical attention for complications related to marijuana from 2006 to 2010.

Of those, two percent, or 35 people, had heart attacks or circulation problems related to arteries in the brain and limbs.

Of greater concern was the high death rate. One in four of the patients with cardiovascular complications died, said the researchers.

The analysis also found that the percentage of reported cardiovascular complications more than tripled from 2006 to 2010.

"The general public thinks marijuana is harmless, but information revealing the potential health dangers of marijuana use needs to be disseminated to the public, policymakers and healthcare providers," said lead author Emilie Jouanjus, a medical faculty member at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse in Toulouse, France.

"There is now compelling evidence on the growing risk of marijuana-associated adverse cardiovascular effects, especially in young people," Jouanjus said.]

America Rests On Its Laurels

Civilizations compete. Sometimes they even clash. They succeed or fail in ways that can be measured.

Successful civilizations often, but not always, inspire imitators.

Civilizations that are falling behind sometimes try to emulate their betters. But, sometimes they try to destroy those who are doing better. They do not aspire to greater success; they want to share the misery.

When the Cold War ended America stood forth as the world’s most successful civilization. Some would envy it. Some would refuse to accept it. Some would try to surpass it.

The question was: why had America succeeded when so many other civilizations had failed? Why did America succeed when Marxist civilizations had produced nothing but misery?

Did America win the Cold War because of liberal democracy? Did we win because we had the most lawyers? Or was it all about free enterprise and capitalism?

Bret Stephens addressed these questions in his column yesterday:

Maybe the West mistook the collapse of communism—just one variant of dictatorship—as a vindication of liberal democracy. Maybe the West forgot that it needed to justify its legitimacy not only in the language of higher democratic morality. It needed to show that the morality yields benefits: higher growth, lower unemployment, better living.

Today, America is retreating from world leadership. It seems to believe that occupying the moral high ground, being too proud to fight, and ensuring that transgender people not suffer discrimination will make it a beacon that the rest of the world will want to emulate.

America’s leaders are pursuing lofty ideals like social justice and inequality… but apparently, that has not translated into greater wealth and prosperity.

The world has taken notice. As its economy sputters along in the weakest recovery in memory, the American model looks less and less attractive to developing nations. Of course, Europe is not inspiring too many imitators either.

Stephens wrote:

A West that prefers debt-subsidized welfarism over economic growth will not offer much in the way of an attractive model for countries in a hurry to modernize. A West that consistently sacrifices efficiency on the altars of regulation, litigation and political consensus will lose the dynamism that makes the risks inherent in free societies seem worthwhile. A West that shrinks from maintaining global order because doing so is difficult or discomfiting will invite challenges from nimble adversaries willing to take geopolitical gambles.

Stephens does not mention the rise of China. While America has been, at best, resting on its laurels, China has been rising. 

Surely, that nation’s ability, through a strange admixture of free market capitalism and political dictatorship, has been producing an enormous amount of wealth. Developing nations have noticed and they seem to prefer the Chinese to the American model.

One consequence is the return of the dictators. Stephens writes:

A quarter-century later, the dictators are back in places where we thought they had been banished. And they're back by popular demand. Egyptian strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sisi will not have to stuff any ballots to get himself elected president next month; he's going to win in a walk. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán presides over the most illiberal government in modern Europe, but he had no trouble winning a third term in elections two weeks ago.

It’s not about our ideals or our principles. It’s about performance:

Has the West been performing well lately? If the average Turk looks to Greece as the nearest example of a Western democracy, does he see much to admire? Did Egyptians have a happy experience of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood? Should a government in Budapest take economic advice from the finance ministry of France? Did ethnic Russians prosper under a succession of Kiev kleptocrats?

Samuel Huntington saw it coming:

Sustained inability to provide welfare, prosperity, equity, justice, domestic order, or external security could over time undermine the legitimacy of even democratic governments. As the memories of authoritarian failures fade, irritation with democratic failures is likely to increase.

We seem to have reached a point that Huntington foresaw:

What would happen if the American model no longer embodied strength and success, no longer seemed to be the winning model?

Back to Benghazi

The story has not made its way into the mainstream media. We owe it to the London Daily Mail.

A new independent commission has issued a report about what happened in Benghazi. I have no way to judge whether it is right or wrong, or how much of it is true.

In the absence of a full Congressional investigation, we are left pondering. As long as no one in power addresses the basic question, we will be reading more and more theories.

Certainly, the Obama administration story about the video has already been discredit. And yet, no one understands why Speaker John Boehner has not empowered a select committee to investigate Benghazi.

The Daily Mail reports:

The group [The Citizens Committee on Benghazi] has called for a Select Congressional Committee to investigate the Benghazi episode. A total of 189 House members have signed on to a bill that would create the committee, which would be bipartisan and have sweeping powers to subpoena the executive branch.

House Speaker John Boehner, Lopez said Tuesday, 'he blocked it. One has to wonder if he and Congress have had some sort of briefing on what happened.'

Who knows what is being covered up? Why knows why Boehner refuses to move forward. The stonewall invites conspiracy theories. The fact that they are conspiracy theories, or, in this case, that they expose foreign policy malfeasance at the highest levels of the Obama administration does not prove them right or wrong.

The commission is suggesting that the Obama administration got itself caught up in the Arab Spring movement to overthrow dictators and armed the enemies of Col. Gaddafi, even though they were al-Qaeda.

According to the Daily Mail:

The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.

'The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,' Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.

She blamed the Obama administration for failing to stop half of a $1 billion United Arab Emirates arms shipment from reaching al-Qaeda-linked militants.

'Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces who were blockading the approaches from air and sea,' Lopez claimed. 'They were permitted to come in. ... [They] knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed..

'The intelligence community was part of that, the Department of State was part of that, and certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress – if they were briefed on this – also knew about this.'

The weapons were intended for Gaddafi but allowed by the U.S. to flow to his Islamist opposition.

As for what happened to Ambassador Stevens, the commission says:

Admiral James 'Ace' Lyons told the group that he believes the raid on the Benghazi compound was intended as a kidnapping exercise, aimed at snatching U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and demanding a prisoner swap for the 'blind sheikh' Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Abdel-Rahman is serving a life sentence in federal prison for planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center garage in New York City. He also masterminded a plan, later foiled, to blow up the United Nations, both the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and a federal building where the FBI had a base of operations.

A senior FBI source, Lyons said Tuesday, 'told me that was the plan.'

Could we have mounted a counterattack? Did we have the resources to attempt a rescue?

The Daily Mail writes:

The attack, history shows, grew in intensity and resulted in the deaths of Stevens and three other U.S. personnel.

Lyons also said U.S. claims that it lacked the resources to mount a counterattack in time to save lives is false.

'I'm going to tell you that's not true,' he said. 'We had a 130-man unit of forces at Sigonella [AFB in Italy]. They were ready to go.'

'The flight time from Sigonella to Benghazi is roughly an hour.'

As I say, I have no way of knowing how much of this report is right and how much of it is wrong. I post it for your interest.

Female Breadwinner Syndrome

To some the concept of a female breadwinner will feel like a contradiction in terms. For others, it will look like a great leap forward, more progress toward gender equity.

And yet, forewarned is forearmed. Couples who believe that the breadwinner’s gender doesn’t matter should examine the evidence before jumping into the feminist dreamworld.

That is the message from Susan Adams, a woman who became her family breadwinner by chance and not by choice. And that is the message from Farnoosh Tornabi, whose new book tries to help women cope with the problems that this role reversal seems inevitably to produce.

To date, the evidence suggests that when a woman becomes the breadwinner conjugal bliss declines markedly. The new gender-neutral lifestyle seems like a formula for permanent misery.

That is to say, it’s a problem that needs to be managed, not a step toward nirvana.

Adams summarizes the downside of female breadwinning:

A 2010 Cornell study found that among 18- 28-year-old married and cohabiting couples who had been together for more than a year, men who were totally dependent on women’s salaries were five times more likely to cheat than men who earned the same as their partners. Other studies show that when women earn more, they wind up taking on more, not less of the housework and childcare. A 2013 study by a professor at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis who collaborated with some Danish colleagues revealed that in relationships where women made slightly more than their spouses, men were 10% more likely to need prescription medication for erectile dysfunction, insomnia and anxiety, and the greater the income gap, the more problems men had with ED. Torabi conducted her own survey of 1,033 professional women and found that the women who made more than their partners reported less relationship satisfaction and more embarrassment about how much they made compared to their spouse than the women who earned less.

The message comes across clearly:  female breadwinners do not intend to unman their husbands… but, the skewed division of labor does just that.

Adams writes:

She quotes a relationship coach named Alison Armstrong who insists that men need to think of themselves as providers, even if they aren’t bringing in money. We emasculate men by criticizing, complaining and taking over tasks they’re capable of doing and we cling to the idea that we can change them. We think that earning money comes with veto power over decisions. “If a woman thinks that the power should follow the money, she’s in deep trouble,” writes Torabi. All very interesting.

Of course, advanced feminist thinkers deride the notion of male pride. Adams and Torabi state clearly that failing to deal with it will cause  more trouble than you imagine.

But, Adams and Torabi are not just trying to warn young women of the perils of gender-bending. They are trying to help women who find themselves in this situation.

They suggest that even when a woman makes all of the income, she would do well to grant her husband decision-making power. She should not make family finance decisions unilaterally.

Come to think of it, it’s not a bad idea for a male breadwinner to include his wife in decision-making that affects family finance.

For these women a lot of it seems to come down to sex. Not so much because they are obsessed with sex, but because they understand that emasculating your husband is not a formula for marital bliss.

Adams writes:

Here Torabi has a more constructive solution: Even if the woman is paying for everything, she shouldn’t feel entitled to make financial decisions alone. “In addition to wounding your man emotionally, it can affect how much you respect him and are even attracted to him (not to mention whether you feel like it’s your duty to take care of his sexual needs as well as his financial ones). She recalls the blunt statement made by one breadwinning woman in New York magazine: “I’m not going to pay the bills and then come home and suck his dick.”

Do Clothes Make the Man?

Mark Twain said it well:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

True enough, but what about adult males, corporate tycoons, who go to work dressed in tee shirts and jeans? Silicon Valley billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs dress like overgrown adolescents.

The same does not apply to successful women in Silicon Valley. You never see Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg or Meg Whitman dressing down, dressing casual.

Society’s leaders set an example. They provide an image that others can emulate. They set standards of good behavior, of decorum and propriety. When they fail to assume the responsibility, the rest of society still follows their lead.

They are not dressing like corporate leaders. At best, they are dressing like artists, like creative geniuses.

There is nothing wrong with an artist dressing like an artist, but artists do not set social standards. They are not role models. Besides, they are very likely to get their hands and their clothes dirty while doing their job.

Normally, when a grown man dresses like an adolescent we think less of him. We treat him with less respect. He commands less authority.

Unless he is Mark Zuckerberg.   

Extremely successful men who dress down are exhibiting arrogance. They dress the way they do because they can get away with it. Anyone else would pay a heavy price.

When the bad habit trickles down to the rest of society, the result is anything but inspiring.

P. J. O’Rourke describes the way men dress for airplane travel:

When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me—when I was an 8-year-old. They’re in shorts and T-shirts. And it’s not just on airplanes. It’s in business offices, teachers’ lounges, and churches.

CNN (via Maggie's Farm) reports on the way people dress to go to church:

If the Rev. John DeBonville could preach a sermon to lift the souls of churchgoers across America, his message would be simple:

Stop dressing so tacky for church.

DeBonville has heard about the “come as you are” approach to dressing down for Sunday service, but he says the Sabbath is getting too sloppy.

When he scans the pews of churches, DeBonville sees rows of people dressed in their Sunday worst. They saunter into church in baggy shorts, flip-flop sandals, tennis shoes and grubby T-shirts. Some even slide into the pews carrying coffee in plastic foam containers as if they’re going to Starbucks.

“It’s like some people decided to stop mowing the lawn and then decided to come to church,” says DeBonville, rector at the Church of the Good Shepard in Massachusetts. “No one dresses up for church anymore.”

Unless you have attained to a celebrity status, unless your face has become iconic, dressing down will work to your detriment.

O’Rourke explains the cost of looking like an overgrown adolescent whose clothes don’t fit:

The kid-who-stayed-40-years-too-long-on-the-playground look doesn’t inspire trust. If dressing up as a third grader is your idea of how to treat yourself, what’s your idea of how to treat me?

And what’s the rest of the world’s idea of how to treat you? When I was growing up, I was told, “The way you dress is the way you’re regarded.” See Dennis the Menace in the funny pages of your local newspaper to discover how you’re regarded.

Another maxim from my youth was, “Don’t dress for the job you have; dress for the job you’d like to get.” Checked the ad listings lately for WANTED: GRADE-SCHOOL-RECESS BULLY?

With the overgrown-brat image, we also shed our adult authority. The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie you’re the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains. When I set my jaw and stare over the top of my tortoiseshell half-glasses, everyone under 50—from waiter to law-firm partner—thinks, “Grounded for life.” This doesn’t work when you’re wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

There’s a lack of seriousness, a lack of a sense of being a responsible adult, a failure to assume the role of leader. But, there is also an abrogation of authority, a sense that you should not be taken seriously, that you do not know more than anyone else, that experience has not taught you anything that you should pass on to the next generation.

At the least, it doesn’t bode well for America’s future.

One True Cause of Inequality

Deep thinkers are agog over Thomas Piketty’s new book on capitalism. Presumably, Piketty has demonstrated that capitalism inevitably generates inequality. He adds that inequality is a very bad thing.

Of course, Piketty lives in France where capitalism is barely on life support. The analysis aside, his policy proposals are recycled versions of the French Socialist platform. Link here.

Since the French Socialist government has just been repudiated by the French electorate, American intellectuals are glomming on to its failed policies. What could be more stimulating than trying out policies that have already failed.

Dare we mention that, by definition, French socialism is not the same as free-market capitalism.

I suspect that the war on capitalism has produced far more inequality than capitalism ever has. Surely, radical Marxist governments-- socialism heavy as opposed to socialism light-- have only excelled in producing mass starvation.

In the United States, the current administration has been creating more and more rules and regulations, the better to restrain capitalism by interfering in the markets. The Obamanauts believe that capitalism is intrinsically corrupt and corrupting, so they have, as much as possible, been trying to rein it in.

In the new Obamified economy producing wealth is less important than buying votes. Besides, the country is now running on funny money. Is the essence of capitalism money printing in the basement of the Federal Reserve?

Or, is Federal Reserve policy an effort to constrain the marketplace?

The result of current policy has been more inequality. If anything, it demonstrates that the more you mess with capitalism the more inequality you produce.

Meantime, this morning’s Wall Street Journal contains an article by Robert Mananto and Michael Crouch where they demonstrate that rising inequality correlates perfectly with the rise of single-family homes. And yes, I do know that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. I also know that correlation does not necessarily imply a lack of causation.

Broken and single-parent homes are the fallout from America’s great cultural revolution. Americans have been liberated from the traditional family structure. You know, the one that contained breadwinner fathers and homemaker mothers. Americans have overcome the nuclear family. Unfortunately, they are less well-off for as much.

Mananto and Crouch write:

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Living in a deconstructed family is bad for your health or your emotional well-being. Presumably this means that children of broken homes are not capable of adding very much value to any enterprise they undertake. They do not have the good character or the intellectual skills to earn a decent wage. More and more they are becoming a permanent underclass, dependent on the government for their subsistence.

Even when opportunities are available, these young people do not have what it takes to profit from them.

Maranto and Crouch write:

In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

They continue:

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.

For the record, the Brookings Institute is a left-of-center think tank.

Those who hate capitalism and blame it for all the world’s evils would be unpersuaded. They are not going to admit that the cultural revolution that they promoted could possibly be responsible for the current social turmoil and the rising inequality.

"Medical Homelessness"

It’s beginning to be felt in California. Many of those who signed up for Obamacare insurance policies on the exchanges have discovered that they cannot get an appointment with a doctor. So they are going back to the free clinics they frequented before Obamacare made a hash of the medical system.

So much for affordable health care.

The CBS affiliate in San Francisco is calling it... medical homelessness:

While open enrollment for coverage under the Affordable Care Act is closed, many of the newly insured are finding they can’t find doctors, landing them into a state described as “medical homelessness.”

Rotacare, a free clinic for the uninsured in Mountain View, is dealing with the problem firsthand.

Mirella Nguyen works at the clinic said staffers dutifully helped uninsured clients sing up for Obamacare so they would no longer need the free clinic.

But months later, the clinic’s former patients are coming back to the clinic begging for help. “They’re coming back to us now and saying I can’t find a doctor, “said Nguyen.

Thinn Ong was thrilled to qualify for a subsidy on the health care exchange.  She is paying $200 a month in premiums. But the single mother of two is asking, what for?

“Yeah, I sign it. I got it. But where’s my doctor? Who’s my doctor? I don’t know,” said a frustrated Ong.

Nguyen said the newly insured patients checked the physicians’ lists they were provided and were told they weren’t accepting new patients or they did not participate in the plan.

An insurance policy is of little use when you cannot get a timely appointment with a physician. 

Also, note well, prior to Obamacare people without health insurance did not have to go to emergency rooms. They were provided with free health care at clinics.

Is this just a glitch in the system or is it the face of things to come?

Those who can’t find a doctor are supposed to lodge a complaint with state regulators, who have been denying the existence of a doctor shortage for months.

Meanwhile, the sick and insured can’t get appointments.

“What good is coverage if you can’t use it?” Nguyen said.

Experts said the magnitude of the problem is growing, and will soon be felt by all Californians. But those on the front lines, like the free clinic, are feeling it first.

More than 3 million Californians are newly insured. At the same time, a third of our primary care doctors are set to retire.

Did you catch that? A third of California’s primary care physicians are going to retire.

I would like to know this: who did Thinn Ong vote for? If she voted for Obamacare, will she continue voting Democratic?