The Connecticut shooting and reports that the shooter had a personality disorder but no criminal history got me thinking about Indiana’s involuntary commitment process for people with mental illnesses. I don’t have a lot of experience here but have looked at the statutes from time to time. Generally, the procedures are available at IC 12-26.

A law enforcement officer can take someone believed to be mentally ill and dangerous to a mental health facility for immediate detention. That’s good for 24 hours. If the doctor thinks there is cause to keep the individual detained, an application for emergency detention can be filed. This extends the involuntary commitment to 72 hours.

If the physician thinks the person is mentally ill and dangerous or gravely disabled, the physician is to prepare a report that will be filed with the court. The report must state the physician’s opinion that the person is mentally ill and dangerous or gravely disabled and requires continuing care and treatment. The report is filed with the court which can either release the person or order a hearing. The hearing has to take place within two days. If, after a hearing, the court agrees, a longer commitment can be ordered under IC 12-26-6 (temporary commitment – not more than 90 days) or IC 12-26-7 (longer than 90 days.)

If you think a guy is mentally ill and he’s doing things that scare you, your options are more limited if you don’t have a physician going along with your opinion that the person is dangerous. There are some protective order options in the Indiana Code, but the specific ones mainly deal with protection from family members and fears of workplace violence. Of course, the courts do have their general equitable powers. But, at the end of the day, there is always the concern that, if a guy is so mentally ill he’ll do you violence for no good reason, he might not be overly obedient to a court’s injunctive order telling him to stay off the property or whatever.

The Associated Press has an article on a study on the Toll Road deal by a government studies professor out of William & Mary.

“These transactions have important consequences for intergenerational justice because they enrich current citizens and governments at the expense of future citizens and governments by transferring future revenue to current budgets,” Gilmour states in his report.
. . .
“It is easy to see why current politicians view asset leases with up-front payments as wonderful, allowing them to spend today without raising taxes or appearing to incur debt,” Gilmour said. “In short, the ITR lease is a great deal for current residents of Indiana, but it offers little to those who will live in Indiana in future decades.”

Presumably this means that people who are now criticizing the national debt because “won’t somebody please think of the children,” were also against selling off the toll road, but that’s not quite how I remember it going down.

Whether the toll road sale was a good deal or not pretty much hinges on whether there would have been political will to raise tolls. Historically there had not been. My sense at the time was that the sale was a solution in lieu of developing that will. Aaron Renn has said that the numbers on the deal were favorable to Indiana. I trust his judgment on such things better than my own or Professor Gilmour’s.

Still, I’m philosophically against selling off public infrastructure. The way I saw it at the time:

I’m against selling off Indiana’s infrastructure. It’s just not a good idea to eat your seed corn. Mitch Daniels reminds me of one of those kids who gets set up with an annuity through a lawsuit from when they were a minor. They see an ad on daytime television from a company that will pay a lump sum purchase on the annuity. The kid is being ripped off, the company’s only paying 50% of what the annuity is worth, but he doesn’t care, he just wants a pocket full of money right now so he can buy that bitchin’ Camaro he’s had his eye on.

Another thing that caught my eye was that the AP story quotes Troy “I’ll never vote for DST” Woodruff as the INDOT chief of staff. As you might recall, Indiana owes the implementation of Daylight Saving Time to him. It passed by one vote – that vote was his; after he said he wouldn’t vote for it. It would be uncharitable of me to suspect he got taken care of after he got his arm twisted and lost his seat.

Over the weekend, I was putting together a new shelf and, for entertainment while I was doing it, fired up Netflix and turned on a Ken Burns documentary about the West from a few years ago. (Yes, Amy also razzed me for my choice of background entertainment.)

It had, as you might expect, a healthy dose of “Native Americans were here first but Europeans did not regard their claims very highly.” That is an uncomfortable topic. In the past, I thought it was uncomfortable simply because it feels a lot like you’re blaming me for the sins of my fathers. I’m supposed to feel bad, even guilty, for the bad things that happened to people 150 years ago?

But, it’s not just guilt. I don’t have a lot of patience for the shaming of white people. In the case of the Native Americans, in a lot of cases, we took it from people who had taken it from others not that long ago. But, it’s valuable to think about, I think, because it puts front and center questions about the nature of property. And I think that’s another reason we don’t like to think about it. We get uncomfortable looking under the hood and examining the nature of property. It’s something magical and fairly immutable.

But, with some exceptions, title to real estate in the U.S. originates with a grant from the United States Government. The government got it by taking it from someone else or sanctioning, after the fact, the taking the grantee had already accomplished. Property does not exist without the framework set up by the government and without its sanction. Without the legal framework, you don’t have property, you have stuff you have managed to acquire for awhile and which no one has yet taken from you.

Americans, by and large, get very uncomfortable with the idea that property is a blessing of government. We like to pretend that government is a necessary evil (sometimes not even that) and don’t like to recognize that government is a fundamental underpinning for our whole way of life. When it comes to property, you’ll get some happy talk about natural rights or being endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. But such talk is entirely inadequate for explaining why it is that the Native Americans don’t dominate the real estate market. The reason is that we alienated the hell out of their right to property and nature’s law didn’t lift a finger to stop us.

Rob Fishman, writing for Buzzfeed, has a long article on how Google killed Google Reader. The reader itself is still there, but it’s sharing functionality was taken away in October 2011 as part of Google’s disastrous Google Plus plan.

Readers of this site might remember that I used to have a “News of Interest” widget on the sidebar. Judging from the click throughs, this was a fairly popular feature. I have a bunch of news feeds aggregated through Google Reader. Back before Google disabled it, I could click a share button when I saw a news story I found more or less interesting, and the link would show up in the widget. This was an easy way for me to say “you might like this” for stories that didn’t really merit an independent blog post or about which I didn’t have a lot to say. Apparently there were related Google communities surrounding these sharing functions. (I didn’t know much about those).

In any event, it all went away with Google’s ham-fisted effort to move everyone on to a new Facebook. This was, apparently, part of a new philosophy at Google where they were trying to consolidate their products and focus their efforts. The company got huge in a fairly simple way: by having a good search engine and allowing you to use it without having to endure a bunch of screaming bells and whistles while you did. Remember the idea of a web portal? You would go to a site, maybe set it as your browser’s start page, because it had search functionality. But it would also throw out news stories, stock prices, maybe an e-mail service.

For me, these were awful because they usually took forever to load. I tended to use Altavista because it was a little lighter; then I caught wind of Google with a search box and not much else. Sooner or later everyone else in the world caught wind of it too and bailed in favor of Google as well. Meanwhile, Google kept rolling out great products you could use in addition to the search page if you wanted – maps, reader, scholar, earth. None of them seemed to get in the way of the other, so you could take a sort of a la carte approach.

The Google Reader – Google Plus stunt, however, showed a more humorless side of the company and a darker approach to things. Instead of continuing with its organic approach to product development, the company broke a product people liked in order to impose its will that they move to Google Plus.

I have long been neglectful of Prof. Larry DeBoer’s (Everybody’s Favorite Economist ™) Capital Comments. November’s installment explains the “fiscal cliff” and why going over it is a bad idea.

Come Jan. 1, the Bush-era tax cuts expire, so everyone’s tax rates will increase. The two-year cut in the Social Security payroll tax will expire, raising taxes some more. The Alternative Minimum Tax won’t be adjusted for inflation, so millions of people will see their taxes rise still more. Automatic spending cuts will kick in, reducing both defense and entitlement spending. Extended unemployment insurance will expire; so two million people will lose benefits. And Medicare payment rates to doctors will be cut.

All told, it yanks about $500 billion out of the economy. That’s bad. But it cuts the deficit, that’s good, right? Well, yes, but it’s a matter of competing priorities. Pick you poison – slow or receding economy on the one hand or large deficits on the other. Right now, the deficits are the lesser poison because there is a lot of idle capacity in the economy. Demand created by the government isn’t pushing out or competing much with private sector demand so, at the moment, printed money isn’t driving inflation. In fact, interest rates are very low.

Yank the deficit money out of the economy, and businesses will have less reason to produce goods and services, will cut production, and you probably end up in vicious circle territory.

It’s a nasty choice: recession and unemployment now, or high interest rates, inflation and slower growth later.

DeBoer recommends coming up with a plan now that tackles deficits when the economy has recovered, not while it’s in the process of recovery.

In the past, I had the sense that, politically at least, there was quite a lot of talk about opposition to abortion, but contraception was by-and-large acceptable. When I noticed more anti-contraception talk, I had a vaguely formed notion that this was caused by drift having to do with the difficulty of opposing the legal underpinnings of Roe v. Wade (concerning abortion) without also opposing the underpinnings of Connecticut v. Griswold (concerning contraception.)

But, the Slacktivist has another theory.

White evangelicals have begun adopting Catholic language and Catholic teaching regarding contraception. This change has not occurred due to any new theological or biblical understanding, but due to a political change — due to white evangelical opposition to President Barack Obama.

Whether that’s true or not, I think there is a largely unstated desire among both groups that, as Libby Anne suggests, sex have consequences. If true, I don’t know whether that desire comes from Augustine or Paul or God or what.

Politically, I think that highlighting the overlap between those opposed to abortion rights and those opposed to pro-contraception measures is ultimately a losing proposition for the pro-life movement. Broad support for contraception isn’t going anywhere. And, to the extent arguments against legalized abortion also apply to contraception, those arguments will become less appealing to the voting public.

Lesley Weidenbener, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article entitled Study: Same-sex marriage amendment would impact 600 Indiana laws. This is according to a report released Monday by Indiana Equality and students from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. (I briefly looked for the report on line without success.) The amendment would change Indiana’s constitution to prohibit laws recognizing rights for unmarried individuals, including same sex partners, that are similar to rights granted through marriage.

Among the laws documented by the report:

• For purposes of Medicaid, “immediate family” includes spouse and dependent children under 21 years of age.

• The spouse of a mentally ill individual may initiate a proceeding to commit that individual to an appropriate institution.

• A spouse may request the health records of a deceased spouse.

• A spouse is not legally responsible for the contracts his or her spouse signs or the civil harms she causes.

This is probably a good strategy by proponents of marriage equality. I have found that people who have ideologies very different from mine, nevertheless, tend to have common ground with me when we focus on particulars. For example, I think you’ll find that folks who generally feel that “gay marriage is bad” will nevertheless not have a problem with unmarried gay partners (or unmarried heterosexual partners for that matter) having access to one another’s health records. If it’s just the health records, you can amend just that law, I suppose. But, if the bundle of rights available to married people reach a critical mass of provisions that most folks agree should be available to married and unmarried partners alike, I think you’ll see support for the Constitutional amendment slide away due to a lack of appetite for that ambiguous second sentence: “A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.”

The Evansville Courier Press has an editorial on Gov-elect Pence’s decision to defer implementation of health care exchanges to the federal government instead of exercising local control as the health care act permits.

The editorial drags out the old chestnut about Pelosi saying that we can’t know what’s in the health care act until we vote on it. Republicans seeking to score points on Obamacare have delighted in using that quote as ostensible proof that Pelosi was acting in a dictatorial or rash fashion – essentially forcing legislators to buy a pig in poke. But, the context of the quote was simply that, at the time, the particulars of the legislation was a moving target – as negotiations amended this or that; which – and this was the point of the quote – made it difficult to defend against false allegations about what was in there. (See, e.g. “death panels.”) It’s even harder to prove a negative about a document when the contents of that document are in flux.

But the Courier Press makes a good point – it’s time to stop using Obamacare for scoring political points. It’s the law now, and, like it or not, the best course of action now is to optimize its implementation. Make the best of a bad situation if you were opposed to it. The alternative is to make things worse for Hoosiers. However, the paper makes another good point – it’s hard to know whether federally run exchanges or locally run exchanges are ultimately better for Hoosiers.

It’s probably even tougher because many lawmakers and politicians have wasted the past few years trying to wish away Obamacare – time we could have spent preparing for implementation. (On a much larger scale, I expect we’ll see a similar dynamic when it comes to the impact of global warming – cursing the time we wasted pretending it wasn’t true.)

Kind of phoning it in today with a re-run, but my Thanksgiving post from last year was solid, and I’m not sure I can improve on it at the moment. So, Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

—–

I’ve blogged about this before – 2007, in particular, but in the recent past, I’ve come to learn that the “First Thanksgiving” has only a nodding acquaintance with the mythology we’re taught in school. At the end of the day, it boils down to our country’s harvest festival and, as such, the literal history probably isn’t that important.

As I recall the version I learned in school, the Pilgrims left England because they hated religious oppression, they arrived a Plymouth Rock, hewed a settlement out of the wilderness, received the help of some friendly Indians; in particular an English speaking one named Squanto; they were taught how to plant corn with the help of fish fertilizer; and then, at harvest time, had a feast to celebrate.

The reality is a little more complicated. The Pilgrims mostly did not think the right kind of religious oppression was underway in England. The Pilgrims had left England and settled in Holland for about 10 years; but, among other things, they thought the environment was a little too permissive for the kids and that the congregation was losing its identity. Their trip was poorly timed, bringing them to New England in November 1620. While on the Mayflower, the Mayflower Compact was created and signed in response to the suggestion of certain passengers that, once in the New World, they would be at liberty to do as they pleased.

Arriving in New England at the beginning of winter was a bad idea. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, the Native Americans along the coast had been decimated by disease – leaving empty villages with at least a little in the way of food and supplies. The eventual site of Plymouth Colony was in an area that had been cleared by the Patuxet before they had been ravaged by smallpox.

The Pilgrims were assisted by Squanto (Tisquantum), a Patuxet who had been kidnapped years earlier and enslaved by Thomas Hunt and taken to Spain to be sold. Some friars intervened, and Squanto was not sold. He made his way to England and worked for some time as a shipbuilder. After about 5 years away from America, he got back to find his tribe had been wiped out by disease. Shortly thereafter, he seems to have been captured by the Wampanoag people and may have still been a captive when he was acting as an intermediary between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims; leading to some tension later on between Squanto and Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader. Squanto may have been playing the two sides against each other to some extent. I even read that the actual Thanksgiving feast was as much a display of arms and strength among the competing sides as a celebration of the harvest. I’m not sure how much to credit that.

Regardless of the beginnings, what I think is important to remember is that the tradition stems from a time where people can and did starve. Survival was uncertain from year to year where a bad harvest could mean famine in the winter. People had an incomplete understanding of the science behind weather and agriculture, so Native Americans and Europeans mixed their gratitude with a fair amount of superstition, believing, perhaps, that angry gods would cause famine in the future and gods who felt well respected would be more beneficent. Even without incorporating the supernatural, gratitude is entirely appropriate. I am thankful to live in a society (if not necessarily a world) with a secure food supply. And, of course, I have a lot of other things for which to be grateful – a loving family, a good job, and a warm place to sleep primary among them.

So, take stock of what you have going for you; and if you’re not cold and hungry tonight, you have it a lot better than a good chunk of the multitudes that have lived over the course of human history. And, if you think your good fortune is attributable to God or the Great Spirit or Ceres or Demeter or being responsible for good harvest; by all means offer thanks to them as well. Gratitude isn’t a limited resource; but should be spent freely.

Michael Hainey at GQ asked Marco Rubio a “gotcha” question:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

The problem isn’t with Rubio, exactly. I don’t believe that he’s actually mystified. The problem is with a political constituency that regards the answer as controversial or as an affront that would cause them to withdraw their support.

The answer is only a mystery if you insist on it being so. Human ingenuity has developed methods of thinking and tools for ascertaining the age of the earth. The earth is 4.54 billion years old. Not 6,000. That the fact doesn’t comport with the mythology of bronze age shepherds shouldn’t pose a significant problem for a major 21st century political figure in the strongest country on the planet. And, yet, it does.