So, today is a day for reflecting on the significance of fatherhood. Which I will do by ignoring my kids while I write a blog post. Perhaps I’ve already failed!

The experience has certainly changed me. I don’t think any other experience would have been sufficient to mature me from adolescent into adult. I mean, I was already chronologically an adult well before having children, but my mental space was less serious, less focused, and too self-centered to really be considered adult.

Fatherhood is about sacrifice and leadership: sacrificing your own immediate self-interests for others; and considering their well-being such that you can lead them into a happy life of their own. Of course, long-term, this seems to be more rewarding to my own self-interest than if I had not become a father. (Not least of all because I got a Fry Daddy for Father’s Day!)

Thinking about it, I’d go beyond the family, and suggest that developing these qualities of sacrifice and leadership are beneficial to the health of the community at large. I look around Tippecanoe County and see that it is a thriving community in no small part because of those men I know (women too – but this is Father’s Day) who spend their time, energy, and money on projects that help the community even without being immediately beneficial to the particular individual.

And, again, these efforts have a tendency to provide long term rewards to the individual who finds himself with a fuller and more balanced sense of self coupled with, not incidentally, a better place to live; whether that better place is a vibrant, active household or a vibrant, active community or – ideally – both.

Glenn Greenwald, writing for the Guardian, reported on a FISA court order that Verizon provide the NSA access to all of its telephone call records.

I didn’t much care for this sort of thing in 2005 when the Washington Post reported on the resignation of a FISA court judge who disagreed with President Bush conducting warrantless wiretaps on U.S. Citizens. I was also unimpressed when the House, including our current governor, shut down a hearing on the PATRIOT ACT while witnesses opposed to the act were in the midst of testifying.

I didn’t much care for it in 2006 when the Electronic Frontier Foundation was trying to file a class action pertaining to AT&T’s Room 641A where the NSA was allegedly using AT&T facilities to wiretap and data-mine massive amounts of information passing through there. That suit was dismissed based on the State’s Secret Privilege.

In 2007, I was mad at Hoosier Democrats for voting to increase the government’s wiretapping authority.

However, as the years passed, and few people seemed to care, I have sort of lapsed into apathy. Now I’m supposed to care? If lawmakers shut down this kind of authority for the government, I’m all for it. But, I’m not going to act as if this is some sort of new outrage.

And, in fact, my apathy is also based on a sense of inevitability. I think we’re in the Panopticon now. Maybe the idea of privacy is a relatively short lived concept for humans. In the days of the tribe and the village, I can’t imagine humans had much in the way of privacy. Everybody basically knew everything about everyone. Perhaps that’s where we’re headed again. The real danger comes from lack of parity in information. Maybe it’s less important to restrict the access of the government to data about us and increase our access to data about the government.

So, I’m roaming the country side and have seen some things that confirm my biases. (Imagine that!) Specifically, I’ve long been annoyed by lawmakers who speak as if tax policy is the alpha and omega of economic development. A drive from Rapid City, SD through Wyoming to Boulder, Colorado emphatically demonstrates that isn’t so.

The lightly taxed economic deserts of Wyoming stand in stark contrast to the heavily taxed, booming People’s Republic of Boulder and surrounding areas.

Jobs require people making and doing things for other people. People need things and can make and do things. Taxes influence the people; but first you need to attract the people and otherwise make it some place they want to live.

So, a big tornado ripped through Oklahoma. I still remember the images from 1999 that went through the same area. I can’t imagine living in the path of monsters like that. I know they’re political, and you’re not supposed to mention the political in the wake of tragedies that implicate policy concerns, but some thoughts come to mind:

-It’s good we have a federal government that can channel the resources of the rest of the country to assist people in the various states.

-It feels like big weather events are more common lately which raises concerns about whether any given one is the product of man-made climate change. If so, and if this pattern will get worse, it’s a horrifying prospect.

-However, the feeling of more common weather events might be fueled, in part, by the weather porn industry. The news channels were good at bringing objective information. But, when they start interviewing the victims within hours of the awful event, I can’t continue watching — not because I’m squeamish, but because the media is being ghoulish. (Talking to shell-shocked survivor: “How does it feel to lose everything?”)

-Do you rebuild in this area? If this is a tornado path, does it make sense to, once again, put up structures that might well get crushed by these kinds of town-destroying monsters? If Godzilla rampages through your town once, that’s just bad luck. If he does it again, maybe you think about relocating.

Lee Hamilton has a column in the Evansville Courier Press entitled Battles over bills can go on for years. The former Congressman discusses how passage of major legislation is only the beginning. After that, you have the less transparent business of the rule making process and the courts.

The devil is in the details; and all too frequently, federal legislation does not go that far into the details. Rather, they give a framework and it’s up to the regulatory agencies to adopt rules that flesh out that frame. One problem is that Congress, relatively speaking, operates in the open and under the spotlight; whereas regulatory agencies are much easier to ignore. (There is the old schoolyard put down, “you’re mama’s so broke, she can’t even pay attention!) Even if the the agencies do their business openly, only those with a pretty significant stake in the game have the time and resources to pay attention.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz once famously said, “Nothing ever gets settled in this town.” That is why, as you follow the course of health reform or financial industry reform or any other high-stakes law, it pays to remember that it can take years before it’s really possible to gauge the impact of legislation.

I remember hearing a saying that “freedom of the press belongs to those who are rich enough to own one.” That quote always comes to mind when I hear discussion of a Journalist Shield law or Reporter’s Privilege law.

Of course, now things are a lot murkier than they once were. A lot of citizens are in the reporting business and a lot of reporters are in the entertainment business. So, I’m not sure Indiana’s Journalist Privilege law (linked above) makes much sense in terms of its scope. It applies to:

(1) any person connected with, or any person who has been connected with or employed by (A) a newspaper or other periodical issued at regular intervals and having a general circulation; or (B) a recognized press association or wire service; as a bona fide owner, editorial or reportorial employee, who receives or has received income from legitimate gathering, writing, editing and interpretation of news; and

(2) any person connected with a licensed radio or television station as owner, official, or as an editorial or reportorial employee who receives or has received income from legitimate gathering, writing, editing, interpreting, announcing or broadcasting of news.

Whether the reporter gets paid for what he or she does really doesn’t say much about the value of what’s reported and whether such reporting needs to be protected.

For similar reasons, I can’t get especially riled up just because a Justice Department subpoena happened to be directed at Associated Press records. Either such subpoena power is good policy when directed at any citizen or not. Paid journalists aren’t special little snowflakes.

Dave Bangert, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has a good column entitled An ISTEP rebellion brewing? West Lafayette superintendent contends it’s just a matter of time.

He talks about West Lafayette School Corporation superintendent, Rocky Killion’s criticism of ISTEP testing at a program the other day. We spend a ton of money on ISTEP and don’t get much bang for our buck.

Can you imagine, he asked, what could be done if the state poured testing money into a program along the lines of Read to Succeed?

Can you imagine, he asked, going with an easier way to figure out whether a kid can read by third grade: “How about we ask the teacher?”

But, of course, there is money and political capital to be made by distrusting teachers. Marketing requires that you identify a problem of which the consumers were unaware and sell them a solution. So, the schools are failing – let us sell you some testing and private schools

My school is good, and my kid is doing fine. And, yet, my school and my kid had to waste time on these tests. Furthermore, as a champion test taker, I can tell you that standardized tests aren’t great at capturing what kids need to succeed. I was good at those kind of tests, but I was fundamentally lazy. My sisters were far better at excelling in the day-to-day grind of the class room. I never got the 4.0s they got, but I crushed the tests. Thing is, life is a day-to-day grind. The skills you need to excel in a classroom are far more valuable than those you need for test taking. Now that I’m out of school, about all those testing skills do for me is make me kind of a trash talker when I’m playing bar trivia at BW-3.

Meanwhile, my kid has to waste a good chunk of several school days taking (and an unknown amount of time preparing for) a test that tells me what I already know — he’s pretty sharp and he’s learning a lot in school. I suspect other parents and teachers have a pretty good idea of where their kids stand educationally as well.

But, trusting teachers to tell us the truth is unappealing and there is money to be made by mistrusting them, so we’ll continue to spend our resources on a bunch of tests instead of on education.

Erik Loomis has a brief blog post at Lawyers, Guns & Money on Ag-Gag legislation in other states. Readers may recall that an Ag Gag bill stalled in the Indiana General Assembly this session. It would have, among other things, penalized the surreptitious recording of agricultural operations.

Loomis says:

The agricultural industry and its political hacks in state legislatures have pushed for these laws around the country in response to videos and other reports of massive and disturbing animal cruelty taking place in our food system, both in terms of the general cruelty of the animals’ living conditions, but also terrible acts of individual cruelty against animals.

The recent Planet of the Apes movie (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) shows us that it’s in our own best interest to guard against individual cruelty against animals. Remember, that one zoo keeper was torturing apes to impress the ladies (I guess he couldn’t afford a cool car with a loud muffler) — Caesar gets pissed and storms the Golden Gate Bridge. Now, I’m sure that proponents of these measures would be just fine with an ape-ridden San Francisco because Nancy Pelosi, but Idaho and Utah aren’t really that far away, and before too long, the enraged-intelligent simians will make illegal Mexicans seem like a fond dream.

And those are our cousins from the monkey family. Imagine being under the jack-booted hooves of confined fed cow overlords. As Troy McClure noted in the Meat Council documentary, `Meat and You: Partners in
Freedom’, “Don’t kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about!”

Getting ready for work this morning, I caught the last 10 minutes or so of an Andy Griffith episode. I hadn’t realized what kind of leftist hellscape Mayberry was. The part of the show I caught had to do with two would-be job creators (one of whom, if I’m not mistaken, was Staff Sgt. Charlie Hacker who would go on to be Sam the Butcher), who wanted to sell their goods by the side of the road.

Andy and Barney wanted to impose statist red tape on these honest farmers for the crime of not having their papers in order. Though they had been run off once, undaunted, these entrepreneurs set up shop again. Barney and Andy determine that they will continue their oppression. During the discussion, Barney asks Andy if he is going to take a gun. Refusing to admit that guns equal freedom, Andy says that, no he isn’t going to take his gun. Instead, he is going to rely on his badge, which represents the law of the collective and that should be enough.

No guns.
Government = The People.
Hostility toward commerce and imposition of statist red tape.

Andy Taylor was clearly no Sheriff Mack.

I recall when we were debating health care reform on this blog, the Singapore model was brought up by opponents of universal health care as a successful model featuring private health insurance.

Aaron Carroll has a blog post up that discusses some details of Singapore’s model. It doesn’t sound like something that opponents of Obamacare would embrace:

Singapore’s system is a lot like universal, mid-range deductible Medicare with a mandatory health savings account (HSA) plus Medicaid for the poor. By the way, in Singapore, the government dictates what health services you can and cannot use your HSA funds for.

Joe Flower suggested a couple of reasons why free market competition wasn’t really viable for health care:

Medical demand is wildly random but tends to be absolute. There is little way to predict who, specifically, will need most kinds of medical care. But, when you do need it, you have to have it or you’ll die.

Medicine is usually beyond the layman’s understanding. Consequently, the buyer has to rely on the doctor’s (who is also the seller) representation of what the buyer needs. “So the seller is agent for the buyer, the seller is rewarded for doing more and punished for doing less, and neither the buyer nor the seller can easily tell the difference between what is really necessary and what is optional.”

The pre-Obamacare system was dysfunctional. I don’t expect Obamacare to be great, but I expect it to be somewhat better than what we had. The political costs of change in this market being what they are; we’ll have to make due with this half a loaf solution the best we can.