"Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town 'Like a Brick Wall.'"

That's the Headline of the Day for me.

It's in the NYT: 

The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job....

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”...

"Among my friends, getting private healthcare insurance through your company is seen as the best work perk there is. I have paid £70 for a private appointment...."

"Even for the friends who don’t get private healthcare for free through work, paying close to £100 for a private GP appointment is seen as worth it, a small price to pay for peace of mind about health.... As one [friend] says: 'The anxiety of waiting so long to get something fixed just isn’t worth it.... With the NHS, I feel like you have to start with a doctor who is tired, stressed and doesn’t have much time for you.' Another friend tells me she has noticed that private doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics than NHS ones. So when she thinks she has tonsillitis, she goes private to make sure she gets the medicine. Yet another goes private when she has 'big scares,' she says. 'Because of the NHS wait times, if I have something that I’m really worried about and that is affecting my mental health, that’s when I go private.'..."

From "I’m 30 and I avoid the NHS if I can. Here’s why/The latest survey shows that most people my age feel the same, says Georgina Roberts" (London Times).

"We should be facilitators and enablers."

“They had a patient coming in saying, ‘I want to look like Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ ”@LeorSapir spent over 100 hours going through footage of gender conferences.

In the videos obtained exclusively by The Free Press, gender doctors acknowledge they… pic.twitter.com/Jm00RUKFhh

— The Free Press (@TheFP) December 3, 2025

Here's the article: "'We’re All Just Winging It': What the Gender Doctors Say in Private In footage obtained exclusively by The Free Press, gender doctors acknowledge they perform life-altering procedures on vulnerable youth with no supportive evidence—and they are proud of it."

"It didn’t have its spark. It didn’t have its distinctive definition in the lines, in the swirls. It just lost — it just lost its oomph...."

"You take the Twombly. I mean, to some people it just looks like fifth grade scribbles. To me it looks like a symphony orchestra."

Said Ronald Perelman, quoted in "Judge Rejects Ronald Perelman’s Claim That His Art Had Lost Its ‘Oomph’/The collector’s holding companies had sued his insurers for $400 million to cover paintings that they say had been damaged in a fire. The insurers said they had survived untouched" (NYT).

The OED traces "oomph" — "The quality of being exciting, energetic, or sexually attractive; energy, vigour" — back to 1937: "With actors, the 'it' quality has to do with their visual personality—sex appeal, magnetism, or whatever you care to call it. Back of the camera, we refer to the ingredient as 'umphh.'" The etymology is "An imitative or expressive formation." I presume what it is imitative of is sexual intercourse.

Meanwhile, you know Cy Twombly — pencil-scribbly things like this:

If the collector sensed oomph and the oomph is now gone — it's like the spark gone out of a love affair — how can he convey his anguish to the judge? His anguish, if any. Who's to believe it ever existed? How can you insure something so ineffable?

WaPo moderates anti-Trump hysteria with the headline "New FDA coronavirus vaccine rules bring U.S. closer to other countries."

Subheadline: "But confusion over who can get shots and resignations by officials who say the Trump administration is undermining vaccine science have few parallels elsewhere."

Who is sowing this confusion? If the Trump administration is aligned with what other countries are doing, why are "officials" resigning and performing outrage? 

The Presidents go head-to-head in my "For you" feed on X.

Obama, perhaps representing the Democratic Party, sticks to a minimalist position: Republicans might take some of your money. Trump is effusive, lists a lot of things that will benefit some of us, and ends with an exciting but vague and weird attack on Democrats: They've lost control of themselves! They are aimlessly wandering around! They've got no grit! They are warped in the past! They think they're going to bring their insane policies back, but it's never going to happen! Meanwhile, Obama merely wafts anxiety about health insurance coverage. 

"The Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck that a man used to kill at least 14 people Wednesday on Bourbon Street and the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel on the same day..."

"... were both rented through the [Turo] car-sharing platform, which allows owners to list their vehicles to drivers.... Turo touts the unique nature of its vehicles as opposed to traditional rental car fleets; the value of its pricing; and the option for a 'personalized experience' that allows users to coordinate with local hosts and skip a 'cold, impersonal' rental car counter...."

From "What is Turo? Car rental app was used in New Orleans, Vegas incidents/The peer-to-peer car-sharing company said it is 'devastated' and working with law enforcement" (WaPo).

Insurance detail: "Customers get liability insurance when they book on Turo, which covers property damage or physical harm to another person if the driver is responsible...." 

Both men chose a truck, but I hadn't noticed until now that the New Orleans terrorist, like the Las Vegas terrorist/"terrorist," chose an electric truck. That isn't an odd choice for someone seeking to cause maximum damage. The electric truck is much heavier. A gas F-150 weighs 4,021 to 5,540 pounds. An F-150 Lightning weighs between 6,015 to 6,893 pounds. That's an extra ton.

(I wondered whether gasoline, like the battery, adds much weight. The weight of the gasoline in a full tank of an F-150 is 139.68 pounds or 218.63 pounds, depending on whether you have the 23 gallon tank or the 36.)

An electric vehicle may have been chosen because of the potential for fire — not that the EV is more likely to catch fire, but the fire is more difficult to extinguish:

IN THE COMMENTS: Two additional features of the electric truck: 1. It is quieter, giving less warning to the victims to clear out of its way, and 2. It accelerates faster, especially from 0. Thanks to Breezy and Narayanan for immediately raising these points.

"It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer...."

"In my 35 years as a filmmaker, have I said or done anything that has implied I condone murder?... Throughout my adult life, I have repeatedly stated that I’m a pacifist. In fact, I have never struck another human in my life. Not even on the playground...."

Writes Michael Moore, in "A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies/I hereby give you my Oscar-nominated Documentary on the Killer Health Insurance companies like United HealthCare —SICKO — for FREE… and let’s end and replace this so-called 'health care system' NOW" (MichaelMoore.com).

In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it....

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit holds that that state health-care plans must cover transgender surgery.

WaPo reports.

Judge Roger Gregory, writing for the majority, called the restrictions “obviously discriminatory” based on both sex and gender.... 

[The] states insisted that there was no bias in their coverage limitations, only cost concerns; trans patients, they argued, were entitled only to the same health treatments as everyone else but not specialized care....

The court [wrote that] cost-cutting could not justify covering the same treatments for health concerns other than gender dysphoria. For example, the court noted, the contested plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women....

Mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women? Don't they mean mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans men?! The Washington Post is having trouble keeping up, just like the people it looks down on.

ADDED: The article now has a correction: "An earlier version of this story reported that the contested insurance plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women. The plans covered mastectomies for all cancer patients, but did not cover the procedure for trans men who wanted their breasts removed to treat gender dysphoria."

"The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry...."

"Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life. The collapse could drive 'one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,' John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.... The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd.... Britannia... told FT it was 'working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.' Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover...."

From "Here's who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster" (Business Insider).

Despite all that insurance, Joe Biden was quick to say — please tell me why — "It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort."

By the way, isn't it amazing to think of a bridge standing all these years — since 1977 — when a crash into one pier was always capable of bringing the whole structure down? Think of all the ships that passed through without hitting either pier. The bridge was always vulnerable.

At the NYT: "Engineers are raising questions about piers supporting the bridge."

"One of the nation’s top universities is apparently not great about doing its homework."

Said David Lat, quoted in "Blunder in Affirmative Action Case May Cost Harvard $15 Million/A missed insurance notice opened a window onto the cost of litigating challenges to race-conscious admissions programs to be heard this month by the Supreme Court" (NYT).

"But DogsBite.org, a group dedicated to telling the stories of those hurt or killed by dogs, reports that from 2005 to 2020, dogs killed 568 Americans, and that 380 deaths, or 67 percent..."

"... were caused by pit bulls.... Many groups say numbers mean little without also knowing if a dog acted on impulse, was provoked, mistreated or protecting its owner from an assault.... Pit bulls, mastiffs, Rottweilers, King Corsos, Dobermans, German shepherds and Chow Chows are surrendered more frequently, and stay longer, than the poodles and retrievers, the shelter staff said. The breeds’ prevalence in low-income households is a factor, particularly as many dog owners lost jobs during the pandemic. Their reputation as dangerous fighting dogs also makes them less adoptable. 'Unfortunately, these bully mixes aren’t the dogs everyone is looking for because of this myth that they are aggressive. Then, when pet owners need to surrender an animal, we don’t have space,' said Ashley Jeffrey Bouck, chief executive of the shelter, which euthanizes animals only with debilitating and painful medical conditions. 'When people do want to open their homes to our dogs, insurance can be a reason not to.'"

From "Love Your Dog, but Beware of Your Homeowners’ Insurance/Many firms have long refused coverage or charge more for pit bulls and other dogs considered more dangerous, but New York and other states say policies shouldn’t be breed specific" (NYT).

Here's the top-rated comment over there: 

"Nordic larpers... 'are emotional junkies.... Most of us larp because we can feel it and smell it with our bodies.' 'Nordic larps—they’re not for everybody'...."

"Some of them 'can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience.'"

That's just an isolated snippet from "LARPing Goes to Disney World/On a 'Star Wars' spaceship, the company has taken live-action role-play to a lavish extreme. Guests spend days eating, scheming, and assembling lightsabres in character" by Neima Jahromi (The New Yorker).

LARP = live-action role play. 

We're told that in the "Nordic larp scene," they prefer "games with deep emotional involvement and few rules." Nordic designers of LARPs were inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, but they rejected the idea of using actuarial tables to determine who wins and loses a fight. That "didn’t really fit the culture here.... Nordics are way more collaborative than adversarial." 

I'm not at all familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, but it was funny to read that it's based on insurance underwriting. 

Anyway, the article is mostly about a big Disney/"Star Wars" production. I had trouble understanding this. My point of reference was a Renaissance Faire, not that I'd ever attended one, but I've seen that phenomenon discussed and mocked for decades, most recently in episode 5 of "Love on the Spectrum U.S." Isn't this LARPing like going to a Renaissance Faire?

I've been on immersive Disney World rides like "Pirates of the Caribbean," where they load you into a fake boat and pull you though various scenes, but you're still a passive member of an audience. I did that only in the context of amusing my children. I can't imagine wanting further immersion with the pressure of being part of the show. But I will put some effort into trying to understand what other people are finding rewarding. 

And does this mean I'm a standoffish observer in life, missing out on the fun? I'm standoffish about manufactured things that you're supposed to get caught up in. If there's one thing that makes me feel like a separate individual, it's being in the midst of people who are having an emotional group transformation.

"The cannabis industry, designed in part to help communities upended by the war on drugs, is being threatened by theft, racism and a market that is stacked against small operators."

That's the puzzling subheadline for "Oakland Cannabis Sellers, Once Full of Hope, Face a Harsh Reality" (NYT). The "industry" was somehow "designed... to help communities"? And then — who could have imagined? — it didn't turn out to be so helpful.

I haven't read the article yet, but I really wonder who produced this "design" and whether anyone really believed it would "help communities upended by the war on drugs." If there's systemic racism, why would the new design avoid racism?

Okay, now I have read it. Here's my excerpt, cutting all the personal stories and homing in on the stark and utterly predictable problems — robbery, banking, insurance, and taxes:

It's not doing Kamala Harris any favors to go easy on her. She needs to be tested and challenged if she's to be the nominee.

I'm reading "Kamala Harris’s claim that Medicare-for-all ‘doesn’t get rid of all insurance’" from Glenn Kessler, the WaPo "fact checker" who normally has a system of ratings that gives out "Pinocchios." He concludes:

Call us skeptical, but Section 107 looks like a loophole for single-payer supporters to claim that private insurance is not being eliminated, even as the main sponsor says he wants to put health insurance companies out of the business. There is virtually nothing left on the table but a few crumbs. Harris called it “supplemental insurance,” which sounds a lot like Medigap policies, but the reality is likely far different than that.

Given the back-and-forth between Harris and Tapper, we can’t quite award Pinocchios. But her language is slippery. She could more forthrightly admit that the health plan she supports envisions virtually no role for the private insurance now used by nearly 220 million Americans.

Is this special kid-gloves treatment for Kamala Harris? Here's the explanation of the Pinocchio system.

One Pinocchio means: "Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods. (You could view this as 'mostly true.')" She doesn't even get one?

Two means: "Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people. (Similar to 'half true.')" I think the fact check sounds more like a 2 Pinocchio rating.

Three means: "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of 'mostly false.' But it could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading. The line between Two and Three can be bit fuzzy and we do not award half-Pinocchios. So we strive to explain the factors that tipped us toward a Three." If Trump were equally unforthcoming and truth-suppressing, would he not get 3 Pinocchios?

I think Kamala Harris is going to become irrelevant if she isn't confronted and forced to improve. I wonder if she finds the polls mystifying.

"What trips up Kamala Harris is an evident desire to please her audience. She wants no enemies to her left, no identity politics left untouched."

"She can't run as a prosecutor—crime fighting is so 1990s—but she can run as brash, bold, and woke. Her verbal miscues are possible evidence that this latest political fashion doesn't quite fit," writes Matthew Continetti at Free Beacon.

He describes 3 recent incidents. One is something we discussed a few days ago, here, her inability to handle a predictable question about Jussie Smollett. Another, as Continetti sees it, was that on her televised town hall, she didn't seem ready to handle questions about her own health insurance proposals. The third is that joke about legalizing marijuana — "Half my family is from Jamaica, are you kidding me?" — which provoked pompous pushback from her own father...

"My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to their family's name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this controversy." 

I'd been thinking Kamala Harris just isn't practiced or adept enough. She's not comfortably glib, that's for sure. But Continetti detects deceit. He thinks she's trying to look more left-wing than she is.

I'll do a poll. Pick the best of the 4 explanations I'm offering. If you have a better idea, explain it in the comments, but don't tell me the poll is wrong because it doesn't have your idea. The question is phrased to resist that criticism.

Which of these options is the best explanation for this sort of slip-up by Kamala Harris?

She's needs get comfortable with campaigning and will probably improve with practice.

She's not glib at finessing what she hasn't thought through.

She's been over-promoted and her deficits are getting exposed.

She can't pull off the act of seeming as left-wing as she thinks she needs to be.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"But would we have grown this close if we hadn’t experienced the medical emergency that pushed us into marriage? I doubt it."

"Lupus woke me up and forced me to take a leap of faith with Chris. And it taught me this: Being married to someone you love is a lot better than being married to your own cynicism."

The last few lines of a NYT "Modern Love" essay by a woman who considered herself "way too progressive for such a conventional arrangement" but suddenly married her boyfriend when she had an acute health crisis and wanted to get on his insurance. She needed to go straight to the hospital, but they detoured to city hall first and got married.

You might remember that back in July 2008, when I was single and had been single for many years, I did a Bloggingheads in which I talked about having health insurance through work that would cover a spouse, making my pay package less valuable than it would be if I were married. I added, "I've often thought I should just charitably marry someone... I'd just marry them to be nice..."

For the connection between that diavlog and my marriage to Meade (which began in August 2009), read "Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope." Excerpt (quoting Meade):

Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.

But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.

What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels. 

That's a lot of trapped rodents ago.

Key sentence in the NPR article "Forest Bathing: A Retreat To Nature Can Boost Immunity And Mood."

"It's my hope that the health care system will include [forest therapy] into the range of services they reimburse for."

What is the cost to be reimbursed? "Forest bathing" is simply walking peacefully in some natural setting and noticing the sights, smells, and sounds.

There are "certified Forest Therapy guides." They talk to you while you attempt to focus on the forest. That is, to my mind, they interfere with the focus by telling you to focus. But you, you're such an idiot, you can't focus without some certified, reimbursed professional telling you to focus.

"Close your eyes and just breathe, just breathe," Choukas-Bradley intoned. It felt a bit like a meditation retreat.... "When you open your eyes, imagine you're seeing the world for the very first time," Choukas-Bradley told us....

A forest guide "helps you be here, not there," says Amos Clifford, a former wilderness guide with a master's degree in counseling, and the founder of the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy, the organization that certifies the guides.

Clifford's goal is to encourage health care providers to incorporate forest therapy as a stress-reduction strategy. There's no question that stress takes a terrible toll in the United States; a 2015 study found work-related stress accounts for up to $190 billion in health care costs each.

Mm. Yes. So I've heard. Too much money is spent on treating ailments. We wait for people to get sick, and so something like 90% of the money flows to 10% of the people. Never mind that health insurance only works because a lot of people put much more into the pot than they take out. Just insanely imagine that it's unfair that you're not sick, and you're not getting any treatments paid for.

IN THE COMMENTS: tcrosse said:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
They're paid for by my HMO.

"Health care is not like buying anything else. You cannot expect people to be good 'consumers' of health care."

"You're supposed to be vetting doctors and vetting hospitals and knowing what an MRI costs and knowing what a CT scan costs and a cardiac catheterization – how much does that cost? And is the cost different if I have this doctor or this doctor? Health insurance as a for-profit business is immoral... You want to make money off of me. And the reason you [don't want] to go to single-payer is not because you don't believe in it... It's because you know the insurance companies have a powerful lobby and they would decimate you.... I have no value to an insurance company. I can't do anything to their CEO, I can't do anything to their employee. Nothing. I can argue until I'm blue in the face. But a single-payer, run by the government? Yeah, it's got problems, but it's also got elections, and you're going to find that out in 2018."

Said a constituent in hospital scrubs, speaking, to applause, at a town hall held by GOP Congressman Tom MacArthur, reported in a Rolling Stone article titled "Americans Demand Single-Payer Health Care at GOP Town Hall/Tom MacArthur, the Republican responsible for resurrecting the AHCA, was pilloried by constituents Wednesday night."

"The implicit standard in analysis of the health insurance system is that every consumer must have government-selected coverage. But why?"

"This chosen paradigm doesn't take into consideration the most forceful motivation of human behavior, namely, whether a large expenditure of limited resources is in one's economic interest. This standard of 'universal coverage' is as artificial as the government's bloated health care costs. A young person with minimal health expenses is well served not to purchase one of these government-created insurance policies: their yearly medical expenses do not exceed the cost of their premiums and deductibles. With the rate Obamacare costs are skyrocketing, that pool isn't just confined to young people anymore. If an individual or family has to fork out tens of thousands of dollars before seeing health care benefits, what's the point? Why not save that money and when services are needed, pay directly to the care providers?"

Good questions asked by Liz Sheld at PJ Media.

I don't know what the answers are, but I'm suspicious of mainstream media for obscuring these questions, which were also obscured when Obamacare was passed. Healthy young people who'd been choosing not to buy insurance were needed in the pool, paying premiums, to make it possible for companies to be forced to take in and keep customers with pre-existing conditions. The pro-Obamacare propaganda continually presented insurance coverage as an end in itself, as if the individual is better off with insurance. But really the idea was more that the entire system of financing health care with private insurance companies is better off if more people participate — especially more people who don't have high current expenses — that is, the kind of people who, left to their own devices, are most likely to prefer to use their money to buy something other than insurance they don't think they're going to use.

It's a difficult scheme, and to pull it off, it seems that people need to be fooled. The key to the fooling — I think — is to speak in terms of how many people are "covered," not in terms of how many people are better off. Right now, it seems that many of the people who have coverage pay a lot of money for something they can't use. If they are not better off in that position, why are we supposed to feel bad if they get a reprieve from needing to pay a lot of money for something that has no value to them? I think the secret answer is: Because insurance companies need that money to keep paying the bills for the customers who do have expensive conditions, the people who are happy to get to pay premiums because they get back more than they put in.

I wish we could speak clearly and honestly about the real problems. I find the complexity — confused by partisan propaganda — horrible. And I am not dealing with a struggle to pay premiums or any serious health problems. I do not see how most people can be expected to engage with these issues other than to gravitate toward the propaganda of one side or the other and be scared.