This is the kind of news that makes a local guy happy. The Associated Press is announcing:

Subaru said Wednesday it is investing $400 million to expand its Indiana factory and will add 900 workers to build the Impreza small car there in 2016.
. . .

Subaru, also known as Fuji Heavy Industries, said it will boost capacity at one of two assembly lines at the plant — the one that is now being used to build the Camry — from 100,000 vehicles to 200,000 vehicles.

It had already announced it would boost production capacity at the other line from the current 170,000 vehicles to 200,000.

Behind Purdue, I would say Subaru is the second most important employer to Tippecanoe County. This kind of investment can’t do anything but help the economic health of the community. Comparing the current state of my county to the lot of most other counties in the state reminds me of the quote from Matthew 13:12:

For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.

Doc Bowen, governor of Indiana from 1973 – 1981, died on Saturday. Tom Davies, writing for the Associated Press has a good write up. His tenure was before my time, so I don’t have much to say about his tenure. According to his Wikipedia entry, he got his undergrad degree from IU in 1939 and his medical degree in 1942. He started his medical career with the Army during WWII and then practiced in Bremen until 1972. He served in the Indiana House of Representatives from 1956 – 1972 with a hiatus from 1958-1960. He lost a run for Governor in 1968 but won in 1972 and 1976. The 1976 win followed a change in the Indiana Constitution which permitted consecutive terms. He also served as the Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1985 – 1989.

Not sure the metrics on such a thing are every going to be reliable; but I read somewhere a rant about how the hallmark of masculinity was producing more than you consume. The duty of a father and a husband, honorable and rewarding, was to be a provider.

Other than custom, I don’t know that there is anything gender specific about this dynamic. And, the rumor mill suggests that there are plenty of fathers and husbands who are lazy sacks of shit, soaking up more resources than they contribute.

Still, man or woman, I expect anyone holds up their head a little bit higher when they feel like they are a net contributor to their family and their community. And, it’s altogether right that any of us should contribute when we’re able. After all, there was a time for all of us when we required more care than we could give. And that time will likely come again for most of us at some point. Circle of life.

The Journal & Courier has an article entitled Woman’s lawsuit claims Frankfort police botched rape case. According to the article, the woman alleges that she was raped by three men while at a friend’s house. The claim against the Frankfort police alleges that, after she reported the crime, they didn’t send the rape kit to the state lab for five weeks because the detectives were friends with the suspects. She is suing the police department and the alleged rapists.

The claim against the rapists would be fairly straight forward. If they did what she said, she should get a judgment for her damages. With a disclaimer that I haven’t seen the actual complaint, but only the news stories, the claim against the city and the city police department is likely to be problematic. I am skeptical about whether a victim has a personal right of action based on prosecution or failing to prosecute a crime and handling of the state’s evidence against potential criminal defendants. Under state law, units of government are immune from claims that they improperly enforced a law or failed to enforce a law. I imagine the federal claim is based on the U.S. Constitution, and so the state law immunities would not apply directly. But, to make, for example, a due process claim; she would have to establish that she was entitled to some sort of process — and if rape is a state law crime and if the government is immune from claims that it improperly enforced that law, it’s not clear that the victim here had a due process interest in the first place that could form the basis of a Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment due process claim.

But, who knows; maybe her lawyer(s) are more clever than I am and have a better idea of what Constitutional rights are implicated in screwing up a police investigation.

I have heard mutterings that the Boston marathon bomber should be treated as an “enemy combatant” or that his rights should be curtailed in other ways. Due process is not a gift we give to the accused; it’s a gift we give to ourselves. Once again, Robert Boalt’s, “A Man for All Seasons”:

More: There is no law against that.

Roper: There is! God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Roper: Sophistication upon sophistication.

More: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.

Roper: Then you set man’s law above God’s!

More: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact – I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forrester. I doubt if there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God….

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Aaron Carroll has an interesting post at The Incidental Economist entitled “How we tolerate risk,” which looks at a recent study suggesting that light drinking of alcohol during pregnancy is not associated with developmental problems in mid-childhood. They looked at 10,534 seven year olds and found no difference in developmental problems between kids with mothers who drank light amounts versus those who did not drink at all.

Carroll looks at this and sees issues with how we evaluate risks in this country. (He notes the shutting down of Boston to catch two guys.) He’s not wrong, but in this particular case, I see our culture’s desire to advance its moral sensibilities under whatever pretext is handy.

Because the issue is drinking and because we have a strong temperance streak in our culture, the fact that there is some minimal, but poorly understood, link between light drinking and developmental challenges, pregnant women are told “no drinking, ever, while you’re pregnant.”

Today is the 71st anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (named after the mission commander, Lt. Col. James Doolittle). I heard a story on NPR about how the surviving Raiders get together each year on the anniversary of the raid. There are four who currently survive, three of whom could make it to the reunion. And this will be the last reunion.

The raid was more symbolic than practical. But symbols matter. It showed Americans that we could fight back, and it showed the Japanese that their acts of aggression would have negative consequences.

The raid caused negligible material damage to Japan only hitting non-military targets or missing completely, but it succeeded in its goal of helping American morale and casting doubt in Japan on the ability of the Japanese military leaders. It also caused Japan to withdraw its powerful aircraft carrier force from the Indian Ocean to defend their Home Islands, and the raid contributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s decision to attack Midway—an attack that turned into a decisive rout of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) by the U.S. Navy near Midway Island in the Central Pacific.

And, because I’m GenX and, therefore, incapable of proper, unalloyed sentimentality, it reminds me of a scene in Starship Troopers:

We’ve got one of their brains now. Pretty soon we’ll know how they think, and then we’ll know how to beat them. One day it’ll be over, and everyone will forget that this was the moment. This is when it turned. And it wasn’t the mighty Fleet, it wasn’t any fancy new weapon, it was a cap trooper named Zim who captured a brain[.]

For World War II, Doolittle’s Raid may have been the moment it turned.

Consideration of WWII also feeds into my skepticism of the cult of individualism that seems to be ascendant in the U.S. just about now. As an individual, I don’t really want others controlling my behavior or limiting my liberty. But, wars between nations demonstrate that an individual’s survival often depends on allowing one’s self to be incorporated into a larger organism. An individual can’t do those things necessary to create and project munitions across the Pacific to do damage to the Empire of Japan. Doolittle and his raiders were the tip of the spear. But the shaft of the spear and the body wielding it was the rest of the nation. Eleven of the raiders were heroically killed or captured in service to our nation.

Update This is also the 70th anniversary of Operation Vengeance where Admiral Yamamoto’s airplane was shot down. Naval intelligence had intercepted and decrypted a message revealing the admiral’s tour of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea.

The ongoing coverage of the Boston marathon bombs has reminded me of Luigi Galleani and the anarchists of the late 19th / early 20th century. We don’t know what was behind these bombs, and I’m not going to speculate; but it’s worth remembering that there was a period of time when these sorts of bombings were more of a common problem.

1919 was apparently a very bad year.

In late April 1919, at least 36 booby trap dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a cross-section of prominent politicians and appointees, including the Attorney General of the United States, as well as justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller. Among all the bombs addressed to high-level officials, one bomb was notably addressed to the home of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI) field agent once tasked with investigating the Galleanists, Rayme Weston Finch, who in 1918 had arrested two prominent Galleanists while leading a police raid on the offices of their publication Cronaca Sovversiva.

These bombings fed into the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare of 1919-1920, persecution of immigrants, and contributed mightily to the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and all of the civil rights abuses he stood for.

Mike VanOuse, writing a column for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has a good column complaining about the lack of transparency in pricing medical services and insuring medical services. When he buys a loaf of bread, it says $1.49, he turns over $2, gets $0.51 back; end of story. Nobody telling him being vague about the price and telling him they’ll work with him based on income or being quoted one price, paying it, and then getting hounded by collectors after the provider decides whether or not they like what the insurance company’s done.

The first thing we need, particularly in the case of non-emergency medical procedures and services, is price transparency. What does it cost? The Indiana Supreme Court has recently decided that when you sign up for medical services; unless your contract says something different; you might well be bound by the prices in the hospital’s chargemaster. This is notwithstanding the fact that these chargemaster prices are largely works of fiction and very probably won’t be shared with you just for asking.

I’m sure I don’t have anything original to say about the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Two people are dead, dozens are injured, and we don’t yet know why. What we know at the moment is that some people are psychopaths, some people are heroes, and most of us are neither or both depending on the circumstances.