Blogging is light because of work obligations, but here is a good article by matt Tully entitled Conflicts of interest rampant at Indiana Statehouse.

I’ll just comment that it’s a tough balance between avoiding conflicts and the appearance of impropriety on one hand and putting legislators in a position to legislate in areas where they have expertise. Having a banker oversee the banking industry makes people understandably uneasy. But, for example, I can see if I were in the General Assembly where I’d have a lot to say and contribute to regulating the judiciary and the legal profession; and I think I’d do a decent job. (And I can see where I’d need a lot of education on banking before I’d be much good at regulating the banking industry.)

The Evansville Courier Press has an editorial entitled Rover finds evidence Mars likely had life. I’m not sure why it was in the editorial section. It looks like a straight up news story. My conspiratorial side suspects the placement has something to do with environmentalism and young earth beliefs making such things “controversial.” But, more likely, that’s just where the story fit, and it was the editorial board which was interested. Or maybe it’s because the underlying reporting was not original with the newspaper or related wire services. I don’t know.

In any event, the editorial reports:

[I]n a rocky formation called Yellowknife Bay, which the rover crossed over what was possibly an old streambed to get to, Curiosity drilled through the surface into a layer called mudstone and, using its little lab, identified sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and carbon, all essential to sustaining life as we know it.

Curiosity is exploring a promising 96-mile-long crater called Gale, which at one time was apparently a relatively salubrious neighborhood.

“We have found a habitable environment that is so benign that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it[.]”
. . .
The Martian surface of 3 billion years ago evidently was a far livelier place than it is today. There were apparently volcanoes that spewed dust that chemically resembles the basaltic lava. So what happened?

Explains The New York Times: “With just one-tenth the mass of Earth, Mars was unable to hold on to most of its atmosphere. The inside of the planet cooled, and the volcanoes stopped erupting. … Mars became cold and dry.”

For the sake of the species, I just hope we can keep this planet habitable and in one piece at least long enough to figure out how to get to and survive on other planets.

Just finished a cruise with the family to Nassau & Freeport. We’re en route home now & I’m pecking this post out on my iPhone. That’s probably the longest I’ve been off the grid in awhile. Not all bad to disconnect from time to time. So, did the Indiana legislature do anything inspiring and/or useful while I was gone?

I’m on the road so I’m trying the mobile blogging app. The time change happened last night, so we lost an hour. Fortunately, I drove through the night on Friday, so I figure I’m net +7 or so.

My latest notion on DST is that it shouldn’t be this early in the year. I was enjoying the morning light. Maybe equinox to equinox would be the way to go.

I’m not really feeling the politics this morning. A friend of mine was talking about a conversation she had with her husband about Johnny Cash. I’d rather talk about Johnny; but only in a superficial way, because I’m not very knowledgeable about music. I didn’t know I liked Cash until I saw the video for Hurt. Cracked – where I seem to get about 90% of my information these days – ranked it as the number one cover song that stole the show from the original.

Trent Reznor had written the song, but Johnny owned it.

Ultimately, “Hurt” was about the fragile psychological state of Trent Reznor — and wow, it probably did not help matters at all when Johnny Cash roared up on a Harley, stole that manifesto of emotional agony right out of his shaking, bleeding hands, then threw a whiskey bottle at the wall and fell asleep on top of his girlfriend. Yes, you still gave birth to that song, Trent, and we all know it wouldn’t exist without you, but it very clearly loves Johnny so, so much more now. Cash’s cover was a testament to a lifetime of hard living and regret, from the lips of a man who’s lost nearly everything he’s ever loved and is now facing down death himself. No matter how real you think shit got in your 20s, your goth/industrial problems are just never going to compare to the lifelong issues of Liquor: The Cowboy. Cash had about five decades of pain on Reznor when he first performed “Hurt”; you’re just not fighting in same weight class.

From there, thanks to Pandora, I came to learn that I loved a lot of Cash’s stuff; especially, it seems, songs out of the American series toward the end of his life. Maybe I’m just a sucker for end-of-days music by hard living musicians – I very much enjoyed Warren Zevon’s “The Wind” as well.

These musicians are a bit of a deviation from my normal fare. I’d made a playlist for a poker night once, and my buddy observed, “all your songs are catchy but angry, Doug.” Which seems to be a trend in the music I like. (I didn’t come to punk music until my 20s, but that’s what I should have been listening to in high school and college.)

Like I said, my tastes in music are fairly unrefined and certainly unstudied. I mainly wander into music I like. I had friends who very methodically built collections and studied the racks at music stores. I was never that serious about developing my catalog. I mostly have just kept my ear open for stuff I like.

So, news of Rand Paul’s filibuster has been seeping into my consciousness. What I’ve heard is that he is conducting a real filibuster – all talk, all the time. Good on that. I’ve also heard that he’s protesting that the Obama administration is claiming the authority to kill citizens. OMFG! But, I actually clicked through to Holder’s letter to Paul which said:

On February 20, 2013, you wrote John Brennan requesting additional information concerning the administration’s view about whether the President has the power to authorize lethal force such as a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil without trial.

As members of this Administration have previously indicated, the U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter, moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.

“The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.

Were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the President on the scope of his authority.

That’s the response that has him all worked up over an out of control government?

I’m all for Congress imposing more structural restraints on the war powers of the executive branch; for beefing up the due process rights of U.S. citizens; and improving the transparency of the federal government.  Close Guantanamo, get rid of the mass wiretapping by the NSA, repeal the USA PATRIOT act. Legislate against existing, real world abuses.

But I’m baffled by a mindset that sees that mild response to a hypothetical scenario as a sign of impending tyranny when other, more routine abuses, actually exist and could stand legislative attention.

There’s your problem right there. This helpful video gives graphic representations of what most people think the distribution of wealth ought to be, ideally, in the country; what most people think the distribution of wealth actually is; and the actual reality of our distribution of wealth:

Our economic machine is diverting a lot of resources to a subset of people who aren’t generating commensurate value from their work or ingenuity. This is happening because they are able to leverage their position in the economy to appropriate value being generated by others. That’s wasteful and inefficient.

This is not advocacy for just giving everybody the same amount of stuff. It doesn’t even have to be precise – if the wealthy get within shouting distance of taking in something close to the value they create, we’ll be good. But, it defies belief to think that the wealthiest 1% are generating 40% of the economic activity in this country.

On the drive into work, I had the misfortune of listening to Cokie Roberts getting a little excited about the pageantry of the Papal resignation. Now, she’s a special case when it comes to power worship, but I think the American fascination about the Pope is akin to our fascination with royalty.

I recall the weeping and rending of garments in the American public when Princess Diana died. I allowed as how her death was untimely and sad, but not uncommonly so and questioned what all the fuss was about. The couple of responses I got were along the lines of “she was such a great humanitarian and did a lot of good work.” Maybe so, but not so long after, Mother Teresa died without anything near the attention. So, clearly, the humanitarian undertakings had little to do with the Princess Diana worship. It was her status as royalty that prompted the attention.

I don’t know why Americans have that tendency — maybe because we have no formal royalty of our own. But, in any event, I think that’s what’s going on with Pope Benedict; at least in the U.S. I doubt any but a passing small percentage of the population could describe with any particularity what acts he’s taken that have had a positive influence on the world. He’s interesting because he’s royalty of sorts.

Sometimes industry standards will be incorporated into law by reference. This poses a big problem when the publisher of those standards asserts a copyright. A citizen shouldn’t have to pay to learn what the law is if the citizen is expected to comply with that law.

The Indiana Law Blog has been covering this issue for a long time. It has a new entry today entitled Sheet metal and AC contractors demand take down of federally mandated standards posted online.

There are code publishers, like West, who are able to charge for value added with analysis and organization. And, historically, costs associated with duplication and distribution often resulted in a charge. But with the Internet and digital technology, duplication and distribution are not significant barriers. Words describing the rules lawmakers have given the force of law should not be withheld from citizens on the basis of copyright.

Keith Roysdon, reporting for the Muncie Star Press, has an article entitled Detention center has trouble with state inspections. The Cedarbridge Detention Center was found to be in “minimal compliance” with Department of Correction standards. The company that runs the center apparently has some sketchy financial underpinnings and “DOC cited problems with staffing, food service, medical care and the run-down nature of the facility.”

That’s unnerving if we’re committing children to this facility. According to the report, the facility’s juvenile inmates are mostly from out of the Muncie area.