Declining by degrees

US professor "Paddington" writes: 

About 20 years ago, our political leaders finally became aware that the well-paid industrial jobs were becoming much more technical, and fewer in number. They looked at the famous statistic that college graduates earn more over a lifetime than non-college-graduates, confused correlation with causation, and pressured the education system to increase the number and percentage of graduates, and the quality of them.

The last is impossible, but it was quite easy to increase the number and percentage of graduates, simply by watering the coursework down.

However, there are disciplines where actual mastery matters, including Nursing and Engineering.

I contend that it is only a matter of time before we separate 'real' degrees from the others.

This leaves the question of how to designate the other degrees. Since B.S. is already taken, I would suggest B.E. (Bachelor's of Equality), B.F. (Bachelor's of Feelgood), or B.N.P. (Bachelor's of Nothing in Particular).

Friday Night Is Music Night: Willie Nelson, by JD

Last month was Willie Nelson's 84th birthday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Nelson

He wrote his first song at the age of seven and started performong at the age of 10 according to Wiki which is why he seems to have been around forever. He is still writing songs and performing. His latest album, released earlier this year, is called "God's Problem Child " Two of the songs are included here including a very whimsical "Still Not Dead" which he wrote in response to internet rumours that he had died in 2015!

He has been a prolific songwriter as can be seen from this list- http://songwritershalloffame.org/songs/detailed/C133

Starting out in Nashville as a clean cut 'all American boy' writing and peforming, his most well known song is 'Crazy' which Patsy Cline turned into a huge hit. Willie then left Nashville and went home to Texas where he grew his hair long and became an 'outlaw' heading off in a different musical direction in a very successful partnership with Waylon Jennings.

He also developed a very distinctive sound and style on his very battered old acoustic guitar explained in a short video here and along the way he has recorded with artists as diverse as Julio Iglesias and Ray Charles.

On with the music!..................

HEALTHCARE USA: a guide to "Obamacare" (the Affordable Care Act)

Sackerson has asked me to write a short piece on the effects of the Affordable Care Act, based on my 39 years of fighting insurance companies in the US.

Since this is primarily for readers in the UK, it helps to understand that many Americans do not consider healthcare to be a right, or even an issue of infrastructure. The fact that it is referred to as the 'healthcare industry' should show that the emphasis is on the money.

There are many different programs for it, including:

·         Veteran's Administration – a completely separate set of doctors, hospitals and testing facilities, paid through the Defense budget, only for those who have served in the Armed Forces. In the past two decades, its funding has been reduced by conservatives. The inevitable problems which have arisen during two wars have been used as justification that the system should be privatized.

·         Medicare – a federal program for the elderly and disabled, paid by payroll taxes. Ever since it was introduced by President Johnson in his Great Society initiative, it has been another target of conservatives.

·         Medicaid – for the poor, paid by a mixture of state funds and payroll taxes. Also introduced in the Great Society and yet another target for anti-government conservatives.

·         Group insurance through employers – lose your job, lose your coverage. Only available if you work enough hours.

·         Group insurance through unions – rapidly going away as the unions do.

·         Group insurance through small business co-ops – typically expensive.

·         Personal purchase – very expensive.

Most of these offer multiple plans, requiring specific doctors and hospitals (or a hefty financial penalty),with assorted co-pays, lifetime maximum benefits and deductibles. I have three degrees in Mathematics, and I still cannot figure out what procedures other than basic office visits will cost, as the bills dribble in, sometimes for a whole year.

That said, here are some of the changes that have taken place:

More people covered

Before: An estimated 31 million or more uninsured.

After: Over 20 million people with affordable insurance.

Insurers' profits capped

Before: Insurance companies kept up to 54% of all premiums.

After: Insurance companies restricted to 20% of premiums.

Fewer health-related bankruptcies

Before: Medical bills were the #1 reason for bankruptcy.

After: Medical bankruptcies down 90% or more.

Less misuse of emergency services

Before: People without coverage used Emergency Rooms for primary care, paid by increased hospital costs for everyone else. Hospitals are required by law to treat critical patients.

After: Much less pressure and cost for many of those hospitals. Better outcomes for those with chronic conditions.

Extended coverage for dependent children

Before: Dependent children age 18+ not in college, or 22+ in college lost coverage on their parents' policies.

After: Coverage for dependent children up to age 26.

Birth control

Before: Many policies did not cover any birth control, although most covered viagra.

After: All policies cover birth control.

Cover for pre-existing conditions

Before: People with pre-existing conditions, from arthritis to cancer and much more, could either be refused coverage for those conditions, refused any coverage, or made to pay for much higher risk and higher cost policies.

After: Pre-existing conditions covered with no penalty.

Benefit caps removed

Before: Most systems had a lifetime maximum benefit, typically around $1 million, which could be exhausted in a couple of months of intensive care.

After: No lifetime maximum.

DRAWBACK: unintended effect on work contracts

Before: Small companies (around 50 people) could offer as many hours to their workers as they wished without offering benefits.

After: Part-time workers with over 30 hours per week must be offered coverage, so many people had their hours cut back.

Sunday Music: The Big Band Era, by Wiggia

Duke Ellington

The big band era had one overwhelming effect on jazz: the sheer popularity of those bands, equivalent today to pop groups, brought the music to a whole new swathe of the population of the USA and later abroad. It also launched the careers of numerous vocalists to international stardom that without the big bands as a vehicle it would be difficult to imagine happening.

Their popularity continued right up to the age of rock when jazz in general not just the big bands suffered from a drop of interest and struggled for recognition and survival all through the seventies and the eighties. Only then did jazz start to come back as a music form that people recognised. The big bands, sadly (mainly because of the sheer cost of keeping them on the road) have largely disappeared; the “Golden Age” for them was indeed over.

Big bands emerged as the popular music in the mid twenties. The difference then as later was that the smaller jazz groups improvised whereas the big bands were highly arranged - even the solos had a tight script with a few noteworthy exceptions - so it was a different kind of jazz and swing was the first name attached to these outfits.

We are talking here of the first bands such as Paul Whiteman and Ted Lewis who “were” popular music up to the swing era, playing to ballroom dance crowds; some embraced it, some disappeared.

Swing itself started in 1930 and took of after ‘35, but a change in the style of big band jazz had already started in the late twenties with more improvisation and better arrangements when Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway started to change the musical make-up.

The popularity of the big bands was further enhanced in the thirties by their appearance and exposure in movies and on radio. This period saw hundreds of bands emerge giving versions of swing from Dixieland to hard and relaxed swing, and the lead instrumentalists and vocalists in many cases became famous household names in their own right as did many of the bandleaders.

These bands dominated popular music to such an extent that small groups faded away and that included the likes of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. It was the young that supported the big bands, dancing to their music, attending their concerts and buying their recordings and swooning over their idols such as Frank Sinatra - no change there, then.

The second world war had several effects on the bands. At first many raised troops' morale by touring and became even more famous like Goodman, and secondly it saw the start of a change in musical tastes. Many of the vocalists struck out as solo performers and many of the bands lost key personnel in the war and found it difficult to start over, and the coup de grace was the recording strike in ‘42 that finished many big bands off.

In the forties be bop emerged and the bands lost further ground to the new music. Be bop was not the end of the big bands, they were less in number, but took on different forms with the likes of Gillespie, Krupa, Rich, Gil Evans and on to Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and others, performing but few touring as of old - only the likes of Ellington , Basie, Herman, Kenton and a few others could continue profitably in that vein.

Most of the bands today with the demise of the founders are either tribute bands or in rare cases those that somehow still survive swimming against the tide. In that respect Jools Holland in this country does a sterling job keeping people employed and music played, it is not an easy way these days to make a living.

In no particular chronological order...

Tommy Dorsey with Sinatra, Connie Haines and the “Pied Pipers” as typical of the era as anything:

Oh Look at me Now



Louis Armstrong in ‘42 “Swinging on Nothing” with Velma Middleton proving size is no barrier to having a good time, go girl !



And here Cab Calloway and Jumpin' Jive with the greatest dance pair of all time, the Nicolas Brothers:



The three above show the swing era at its zenith, huge rhythm and lots of extras. All was soon to change as the former prewar band styles started to disappear or change their styles. Ellington of course simply adapted as time progressed, he never stood still.

This ‘42 version of C Jam Blues:



and how the same number evolved under him here in a live concert in ‘69:



Another who started a bit later than many of his contemporaries but also went with the trends successfully was Woody Herman. His early “Herds” were firmly in the swing era but that never stopped him experimenting, as here with him on soprano sax in “Fanfare for the Common Man” in ‘69:



I am going to stick with the big bands post swing as the obvious candidates including even Basie are well covered in other sections that I have done or are due further exposure in later pieces, so some of the more “progressive” pieces are the last choices.

Stan Kenton was known for the Artistry in Rhythm album as much as anything else, yet he pushed the limits of big band improvisation and arranging endlessly. His album “City of Glass” was not a total success either for the critics or those who followed Kenton, and I who actually purchased the album have never really come to terms with it, but it deserves a hearing as nothing else comes near, and his fans went in the opposite direction when this was played - Schoenberg ?

All the pieces were by Kenton's arranger Bob Graettinger who wrote the piece in ‘47 but it was ‘51 when it was recorded on a 10” LP. His arranger was worth a paragraph on is own but there is not space here. Kenton himself later said this about it, "Well, I tell ya, it was either the greatest music the band ever presented, or the biggest pile of crap we ever played, and I still do not know which."

“Everything Happens to Me”, a more subdued number with June Christy adding some measure of composure:



Charles Mingus was always an innovator, probably as much as anyone from be bop onwards. His music is still performed by the Mingus Big Band and others. This is from that wonderful Ah Um album of ‘59, Fables of Faubus that had a hidden undertone of protest at the Little Rock 9 in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that the nine black school children should be integrated into Little Rock's school system, but Governor Faubus brought in the National Guard to stop them anyways.



Cool jazz extended beyond the West Coast groups and Gil Evans incorporated it in big bands. One of the great arranger-composer band leaders, his work with Miles Davis is legendary. A Canadian by birth, Evans started arranging for Claude Thornhill and then from his NY apartment he started with arrangements with Parker, Mulligan and Davis on scores that went out beyond the current be bop sound and style.

The Davis group was a nonet - the bigger bands had become unviable by then for anything other than the established ones. Capitol Records recorded 12 titles between ‘49 -53 and in ‘57 put them all together for the “Birth of the Cool.” Three other albums under the same record banner with Davis using Evans as arranger followed, all became classics: Milestones, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain.

The score for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess was phenomenally complicated but considered to be as fine as any interpretation of Gershwin's music, if not the best.

Working with Evans also saw Davis extend his music outside of jazz, something that was not wholly successful. After this period he recorded under his name and as time passed moved into what was a kind of fusion of Latin and other forms, using electronic instruments and recording Jimi Hendrix numbers. He was to have actually recorded with Hendrix but the guitarist died a few days before the date.

Here from Birth of the Cool, “Jeru”:



and from Porgy and Bess with Miles Davis on flugelhorn and trumpet, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”:

Granny Farms

The title is borrowed from a story told to me by JD in a discussion on a part of the welfare state that is fast falling into a position where it will be unsustainable and even worse undesirable, inasmuch that it is no longer fit for purpose; in many cases, as events have shown, it already has reached that point.

Two events in my life have given me insight into the workings and the inbuilt problems of elderly care. Not all of this can be blamed on the state, not that it excuses what is in many ways the abandonment of elderly people to their own devices.

The first goes back many years to the late seventies/early eighties when I first started out in building my landscaping business. In the beginning my objective was to be a garden designer and builder It was difficult to get the amount of work needed to put bread on the table when starting from scratch so I entered the world of maintenance as a back up to finances. It was commercial maintenance as that part involved twelve-month contracts and was based on job and finish which is a better system than hourly rates. It served me well for many years until I could slowly drop that side for landscaping and redeploy my staff seamlessly into the other side of the business.

One of my contracts was a nine-home trust of mixed-care residential and nursing homes. Unlike “granny farms” that are for-profit organisations, this was a trust with many working for free and donated properties and bursaries supporting it. It survived well until the properties needed refurbishment and several were listed, making upgrading a costly exercise outside the scope of their means, and it was sold.

I would visit the sites and got to know staff and even patients. As with all things not all was wonderful but in the main the organisation ran well and the majority of the staff at all levels were very good, but one incident remains with me to this day, an incident that is almost a blue print for the thinking of so many today when parents become old. Whilst waiting to see one of the staff a lady came into the hallway area who looked out of place in this home. She came over and said hello and started to talk. She had not been a resident long and obviously did not like being there. Her story is a familiar one: her husband had died earlier and her house was “wanted” by her children, and somehow they had convinced a lady who was quite capable of looking after herself that the house was too big and a care home was a better option; better for whom is all too obvious.

About six months later on another visit I saw and spoke to her again. She was distressed and had had a heart attack and though recovering, was alone and frightened. Other than spend a little time with her what could I do? Her children had made only nominal visits ! At a further visit at the end of the year I discovered the lady had died. a staff member I knew told me it was as much a broken heart as anything else.

What that showed was a prevailing attitude in many families that old people having passed their “use” date should be shunted off somewhere that means conscience won't be pricked and assets can be stripped with impunity. Families, don’t you love ‘em.

My second prod towards writing this is the current situation with an aunt, the last of her generation who at 95 has had a fall and the inevitable hip replacement. She lives alone - her husband died many years ago - and is fiercely independent. She had a very good job in publishing and is not without some means, so as she is not capable of looking after herself the spectre has risen of “accommodation." Her reply is she would rather die than tolerate that; the vision of communal bingo is simply not on her radar.

The problem there is that the home help that she has to have is expensive and she gets no help with that, nor will she if forced into a home. All that she accepts, yet of course she paid very large sums of tax when employed. I am not going into any other areas with my aunt's case as it is private but it explains a situation that affects many.

JD put it quite well with his “granny farm” tale of a man returning to the UK to set one up purely from a business point of view. The problem is not going away and after all those who have something left at the end of their lives have ever increasing amounts taken from them, you have to ask where will it all end.

Many years ago this country had philanthropy as part of its make up and mutuals thrived along with building societies, trusts etc; all now gone or disappearing. The avenues to create other ways to look after elderly people are narrowing to a model very few like the look of, and that's from the outside looking in.

Recent governments put the idea of immigrants as a part solution, a younger working sector paying taxes for the less fortunate in years. Except of course the immigrants from the third world are largely non tax-paying and themselves recipients of welfare and in their case have never paid into the system, plus a larger percentage demographically don’t work at all. All this is paid for by an ever smaller tax-paying percentage of the population, as are most taxes like council tax which makes successive claims seem rather like pushing a very large Ponzi scheme onto the general population.

Eventually as with all these "kick the can down the road"  schemes they will have their day at everyone else's expense. I pray I am not around to be part of it, as it seems (as my football club manager says) “there is no plan B”. The other big change that impacts on the same problem is family: we have changed dramatically as a society since the Second World War. Before then it was almost a given that granny would be cared for by the family, but not any more; hence the “granny farm”.

The “family” still has a big role in the likes of Italian and other Med countries where all live together, maybe not as guaranteed as in the past but it still exists; yet here of all places it exists among many immigrant groups and is still a major part, as it was when I was a kid growing up in a Jewish neighborhood where there was no hesitation about accommodating elderly relatives, they just did it.

So what is the answer? At this juncture there simply isn’t one: there are ever more elderly people and fewer places to accommodate and less choice if any; and poorer care seems the way forward, at ever more cost for less. It is a problem that has been building for decades, yet not one political party has made any attempt to plan for the future. As with most things regarding the welfare state and especially the NHS in all its forms, it would seem untouchable for fear of losing votes, which says all you need to know about the current state of politics in this country - shown to be ongoing, as the current election has already given us claims that can only said to be mendacious at best.

Friday Night Is Music Night: Django, by JD

This week's selection comes from Django Reinhardt-



Just a short clip of Django with Stephane Grappelli performing live (1945) which illustrates how he overcame the disability of losing the use of two of the fingers of his left hand. Listening to and seeing his dexterity you would never know it!













This last one is not Django Rainhardt but it is good and worth including as a 'tribute band' Pop groups spawn tribute bands so why not the best of the jazzers too?

Details: Django Reinhardt NY Festival 2005 At Birdland Dorado Schmitt (he looks like Django), Samson Schmitt (his son, to the right of him), Angelo Debarre (in the back) on guitars, Pierre Blanchard at violin, Brian Torff on double bass, Ludovic Beier accordeon, Ken Peplowski on clarinet (awesome), Joel Frahm (sax), David Langlois (Washboard Percussion), Roger Kellaway (piano), Gordon Lane (brushes).

You can throw money at the problem, but you won't hit it

The issue for our time is not Left vs Right but managerial effectiveness and anti-corruption. Chew on these examples:

1. United Nations relief programmes - from Aidan Hartley in this week's Spectator:

...the aid mandarins … dubbed the ‘Lords of Poverty’ by Graham Hancock… What we should expect when giving to charity is a better performance… The UN agency World Food Programme flies food to seaports, or airdrops bags of grain instead of buying locally or trucking supplies by road.

… refugees did not have cholera back home in their villages — but they find it when they congregate in camps specially established by the UN … Water from boreholes is plentiful… instead, the UN transports water … in 50 trucks every day, dumping the supplies into small plastic tanks that cannot easily be disinfected with chlorine. The reason… is that local UN officials are making money from the water trucks, since they are in control of the lucrative contracts supplying the camps… entirely usual for UN officials... to expect bribes of tens of thousands of dollars in return for a contract.

… In recent years there has been a flurry of stories about impropriety among UN workers, including rampant theft and sexual abuse… UN workers who commit crimes such as fraud and paedophilia enjoy complete impunity thanks to a little-known international law called the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN.

2. Removing anti-personnel mines - or not; from AARSE (an armed services online forum):

Fraud and corruption happened, not with our guys but within the UN and national organisations. We might as well have spent all the money on a massive piss up, because there is **** all to show for it now...  Cambodia should have been largely cleared by now, but it isn't…

In Bosnia the World Bank lost a rumoured 7 million US dollars in demining and I stopped a massive cartel from operating there in 2000. These basket case countries are all the same. Fraudulent!

And the reason it happens is that the international pinko liberal policy is that the recipients of aid have to deal with it themselves, so time after ******* time millions of our taxpayers money gets shovelled into offshore bank accounts belonging to despots and scamsters and nothing ever gets done about it.

In 1999 I was the only person in Bosnia who raised the question of how did Mr. Pusic (head of the demining commission) go from wearing second hand Jesus boots and donated jeans and riding a motorbike to work, to wearing Armani suits and driving a new white Mercedes to work - in 9 months and on a salary of about 1000 use a month…

Some Baroness is at the moment giving DFID a going over and a shake up. Yeah right. I wish I was a manufacturer of white wash with a government contract! The whole Aid industry needs stripping out and re thinking and DFID needs shutting down dismantling and reassembling as a decent transparent department. Which will never happen because DFID is heavily connected with intelligence gathering.

3. Massive featherbedding at American universities (from Coyote Blog):

[One university President] … has 1667 staff and spends over a half billion… just on the office of the President! This is not in any way shape or form the total administrative size of the system - each university has its own administrative staff, for example. This is just her central office… It equates to every student in the system paying over $2500 a year just for the central headquarters staff that they will never see, this is before the first dollar is spent on their individual campus -- or God forbid -- on teaching or academics.

… Time and time again … we find examples where agencies that are supposed to be serving the public are in fact diverting much of their resources to maintain the staffing levels, salaries, and rich benefits and pensions of their employees.

4. "Private" railway companies that exploit public money (from Peter Hitchens' blog):

The most ridiculous is the way our trains – devastated by John Major's mad privatisation scheme – are falling into the hands of foreign state railways…

We might be hiring a foreign state railway to run a service [HS2] we don't even need, while Britain is full of sizeable towns with no railway station, which could be linked to the national system for a tiny part of the cost…

Privatised railways have never been real private companies. Their jaws are clamped firmly to the public teat, and when they fail they can just stroll away from the mess they have made.

…I long for the return of British Rail. Its undoubted arrogance and sloth were as nothing compared with its private successors, and its trains were faster and more comfortable. It looked after its track far better and – given the money – it would never have made the mess its successors are now making of electrifying the Great Western line…

In the 20 years to 2013, state subsidies to the rail sector roughly tripled in real terms, while fares continued to rise. This is a small slice of our national life of which I have direct daily experience. None of it works properly.