The Other McCain has some wisdom for us, if we only have the wit to listen.

We are heirs of a tradition. Each of us is born into circumstances that were created by our parents, by our grandparents, by our ancestors, and by the civilization in which they lived. Human life existed before we born and will continue after our deaths. As children we inherit the past. As parents we create the future. Wisdom requires us to understand ourselves as a single link in an infinite chain of human existence, rather than to imagine ourselves as free-floating atoms unconnected to others.

Popular ideas of “democracy” — the modernistic idolatry that speaks the language of “rights,” “choice” and “equality” — obscure the truth of human existence, trapping us in the present tense, isolating us as rootless individuals removed from the authentic traditions of our inheritance. Children are taught that the past is not merely useless, but actually harmful, because human history is nothing but a catalog of oppression, atrocities and victimhood. Thus, the modern child cannot be allowed to believe that his grandparents were wise or virtuous, that the great achievements of our civilization are worthy of respect.

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Another thumb-sucker from The Atlantic.

When Carthan was a young boy, he says he’d have risked punishment for simply walking past the Jones mansion without a proper reason. “I look at the house now, how beautiful it is and well-built it is. I was told slaves built it,” Carthan said, sitting at his desk in the central hall, surrounded by his political memorabilia. “And I think about how well they lived back then, and how we lived back then. This house is huge. There are five bedrooms. It has three full bathrooms. We didn’t have bathrooms at all.” He pauses to let the contrast sink in. “It’s something to focus on,” he says.

But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor.

And, of course, the question that is never explicitly asked, much less gets answered, is ‘Are these people better off now than they were then?’ Such questions undercut The Narrative, something that a Voice of the Crust like the writers in The Atlantic are conditioned from childhood never to do.

In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.

Well, then, how did that whole ‘civil-rights era’ thing work out for you? Confrontation of injustice is often necessary but equally often reaches the point of diminishing returns, and the people who don’t keep their ultimate objective firmly in mind will almost always lose their way and wind up in a swamp (sometimes literally). There’s an old saying, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’, and like most Old Sayings it contains a lot of truth. The question ‘How can we get white people to treat black people with respect?’ is entirely different from the question ‘How can we make the lives of white people Hell as payback for the Hell they have made of ours?’, and it remains unclear which question the ‘civil-rights’ people are working from — the available evidence is that they consider the two as equivalent, and as long as that is the case, they’re going to be unhappy with the results.

“Businesses don’t want to come to a town like Tchula,” observed Anthony Mansoor, who owns a hardware store downtown. “That bothers me. The people in this town worked so hard to get to where we are today, and in a lot of ways, things are better. But the town is broke. That’s the bottom line.”

Gee, why is that? Nobody seems to know, or want to. Every business in American isn’t run by racist white people, although you’d never know that from reading Voices of the Crust like this one. Why don’t they leave and go somewhere there are jobs? It’s happened before. The real bottom line is that black people in America have been sold a bill of goods by a Crust who need them as a victim class whose problems allow the modern Left to ride into power and whose votes can be bought in order to keep them there. It’s not complicated at all.

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This is NPR, so you have to take all this with a grain of salt. Still, he seems to be asking the right questions.

It’s hard to understand why you get 36 different first-class envelopes with 36 different pieces of paper from the same insurance company on the same day. That tells you something about the efficiency of the health care industry right there. But then, as you open each envelope, they’re as completely unintelligible to me as they are to you, as they are to everyone listening. But better yet, they’re also as unintelligible, apparently, to the people who write them.

I got to do what is probably a reporter’s dream … which is I took one of those explanations of benefits, which said, “Amount billed: zero. Amount insurance company paid: zero.” And the third column said, “Amount you owe: $154.” So it makes no sense.

I’ve had the same experience.

But here’s what I got to do: I had scheduled, as part of the reporting for my book, an interview with the CEO of United Healthcare, the largest health insurance company in the United States — and my health insurance company, as it turns out. I went out to Minnesota to interview him and asked him all kinds of questions about what he thought the impact of the Obama health reform was likely to be. And at the end, I took that explanation of benefits out of my suit pocket and said, “I’m wondering if you could do me a favor, could you explain this to me?” … “How can I owe $154 if nothing was billed?” He looks at it … and looks up at me and says, “I could sit here all day and I couldn’t explain that to you. I have no idea why they sent this to you.”

And that tells you everything that there is to know about American health insurance — although not even close to being what you want to know and perhaps need to know.

The insurance companies are not really the bad actors in this movie. The insurance companies are in many ways like us: They pay health care bills. The culprit here — and the reason that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work is, is not going to work — is that nothing has been done to curb the marketplace of exorbitant bills and exorbitant profiteering on the part of hospitals, medical device makers and obviously the drug companies. The insurance companies are as much the victim of that as we are. Now, they’re terribly managed; again, the CEO of the largest company can’t even explain what his bill means. They’re incompetently managed; they’re not very nice people when you get them on the phone. But they’re sort of stuck in the same ditch we’re in, which is being forced — unlike the payers for health care in any other developed country on the planet — being forced to pay uncontrolled, exorbitant prices and high profits that are generated by nonprofit hospitals and by drug companies and medical device makers. In that sense, I kind of feel sorry for them.

As do I — your tax dollars at work.

In the sense that if you step back the way I did as a reporter and look at the economics of health care in the United States, it’s absurd. That nonprofit hospital makes a lot of profit. The executives are highly compensated. The people who sell all of the equipment that is in operating room have humongous profit margins. The [prescription] drugs that I was given … have humongous profit margins and we have done nothing in this country, unlike every other country in the free world, to control that because we have lived with the illusion that health care can be a free market.

Note the pervasive ‘progressive’ delusion that ‘free market’ means ‘small profit’. In fact, the whole hostility to profit — the larger the profit, the more the hostility — is one of the signature obsessions of the modern Left. The high profit margins for health care is quite simply explained by the fact that there is not, and never has been, a ‘free market’ in health care (or health insurance); it’s one of those ‘basic rights’ (like roads and schools) that people insist government subsidize and the costs of which are therefore grossly inflated.

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If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself.

The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term “paradigm shift” are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment.

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Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from big data sets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of the information to identify a specific person, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.

In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction, amount charged and name of the store.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women & minorities hardest hit.