So, the news told me that Ron Palillo is dead at age 63. He was world famous as Horshack from the show “Welcome Back Kotter.” A lot of you may be thinking, “big deal.” But, he had his face on a lunch box. I don’t care who you are; that’s big time. The actor who played Epstein died a few months ago. Travolta and Kaplan are probably sweating. The guy who played replacement sweathog “Beau” is probably too obscure to be bothered with by the conspiracy. I’m hoping Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington is too cool to die.

These deaths bring minor waves of nostalgia. It also hammers home just how much TV I watched as a kid. Hours and hours of the kinds of craptacular shows the networks were shoveling out in the 70s and 80s, particularly the ones that made it to re-runs. So, yeah, occasionally I’m a bit concerned about the amount of time my kids spend in front of a screen. But, honestly, they don’t watch too much TV. Time spent solving a puzzle in a video game has to be better for the brain than any time spent watching “Three’s Company” or “Gilligan’s Island.”

If that stuff wasn’t enough to irreparably rot my brain, I’m guessing Minecraft isn’t doing Cole any long term damage either. Though I do wonder if his generation will have the same kind of generational nostalgia my friends and I seem to get in these situations. Their culture seems more fragmented – albeit in a way that generally features higher quality entertainment than was prevalent circa 1980. Besides that, Horshack is mortal. Mario will never die.

According to Issue Brief: Analysis of Obesity Rates by State, Indiana is one of the top ten most obese (adults with a body mass index of 30 or higher) states. In Indiana, that’s 30.8% of adults.

According to the newly released CDC data, part of the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, the obesity rates by state from highest to lowest were:

1. Mississippi (34.9%); 2. Louisiana (33.4%); 3. West Virginia (32.4%); 4. Alabama (32.0%); 5. Michigan (31.3%); 6. Oklahoma (31.1%); 7. Arkansas (30.9%); 8. (tie) Indiana (30.8%); and South Carolina (30.8%); 10. (tie) Kentucky (30.4%); and Texas (30.4%); 12. Missouri (30.3%); 13. (tie) Kansas (29.6%); and Ohio (29.6%); 15. (tie) Tennessee (29.2%); and Virginia (29.2%); 17. North Carolina (29.1%); 18. Iowa (29.0%); 19. Delaware (28.8%); 20. Pennsylvania (28.6%); 21. Nebraska (28.4%); 22. Maryland (28.3%); 23. South Dakota (28.1%); 24. Georgia (28.0%); 25. (tie) Maine (27.8%); and North Dakota (27.8%); 27. Wisconsin (27.7%); 28. Alaska (27.4%): 29. Illinois (27.1%); 30. Idaho (27.0%); 31. Oregon (26.7%); 32. Florida (26.6%); 33. Washington (26.5%); 34. New Mexico (26.3%); 35. New Hampshire (26.2%); 36. Minnesota (25.7%); 37. (tie) Rhode Island (25.4%); and Vermont (25.4%); 39. Wyoming (25.0%); 40. Arizona (24.7%); 41. Montana (24.6%); 42. (tie) Connecticut (24.5%); Nevada (24.5%); and New York (24.5%); 45. Utah (24.4%); 46. California (23.8%); 47. (tie) District of Columbia (23.7%); and New Jersey (23.7%); 49. Massachusetts (22.7%); 50. Hawaii (21.8%); 51. Colorado (20.7%).

Picking a random BMI calculator off the Internet, a 6 foot tall person gets a BMI of 30 with a weight of 221 pounds. At 5’5″, it’s 180 pounds. The measure certainly has its limitations; you can be skinny and horribly out of shape or carrying more weight and be able to run a marathon. As a general matter though, carrying around more weight leads to more health problems and a great deal of corresponding expense.

I’m in favor of policies that encourage healthier food consumption and availability, communities that facilitate exercise and make it easier to walk, run and bike to get from place to place. I am, however, leery of the temptation to do nothing about health concerns on the theory that obesity is nothing more or less than a moral failure; a just punishment for a life of sloth and gluttony that is entirely the fault of the individual.

So, Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan for Vice-President. I just wanted to give my readers fair warning. Ryan was a Delta Tau Delta down the street from me when I was a ZBT at Miami University. In my fevered brain, those guys occupy the pantheon populated by the likes of Confederates and class basketball. They didn’t come to my bar (The Saloon) and I didn’t go to their bar (Top Deck).

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Tipsy has a piece with some fascinating (to me) thoughts on faith and reason. It’s in the context of the marriage equality debate, but the themes are larger than that. A couple of items that caught my eye:

-“[O]ur culture assumes a fundamental split between faith and reason . . . the severing of faith and reason has led to a nihilism wherein the greatest good is the fulfillment of whatever desires among consenting adults. Is that all reason can really say, that anything one wants goes as long as no one else gets hurt?”

-“William of Occam’s nominalist and voluntarist theology . . . conceived of God not as reason but as raw arbitrary will.”

You might recall William of Occam from Occam’s Razor, the methodological principle of parsimony that suggests, if an element is unnecessary to explain a phenomenon, there is no reason to assume that element. The simplest explanation is usually best. (If gravity explains why a celestial object moves from place to place, there is no need to posit that a herd of invisible angels is moving the thing around.) Which brings to mind a Simpson’s quote on conspiracies:

Bart: So finally, we’re all in agreement about what’s going on with the adults. Milhouse?

Milhouse: [steps up to blackboard] Ahem. OK, here’s what we’ve got: the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people —

Bart: Thank you.

Milhouse: — under the supervision of the reverse vampires —

Lisa: [sighs]

Milhouse: — are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish
plot to eliminate the meal of dinner. [sotto voce] We’re
through the looking glass, here, people…

But, I most certainly digress. Probably because these themes are of the type that can be done justice only by a lifetime of reflection and writing. Pre-coffee blog posts aren’t going to do them justice.

Any religious skeptic I have talked to has been familiar with the phenomenon of debating this or that matter of religion with a believer and getting to the point where the believer says something along the lines of “you just have to have faith.” That’s the most immediate example that comes to mind of the separateness of faith and reason. But, I suppose it’s probably only superficially related; having more to do with the relative mental agility of the debaters as to the relationship between faith and reason.

Also there is the interesting notion that it’s nihlism to believe that the greatest good is fulfillment of the desires of consenting adults where no one gets hurt. Rather than nihlism, that description sounds not too far off from utilitarianism; a school of thought for which I have a great deal of respect.

Greater goods that are abstractions, not necessarily accounting for individual’s desires for themselves, are tough. One has to have faith that the person espousing that greater good is actually speaking for the Almighty and not merely dressing up their own individual desires about how other people should behave.

WISH-TV reporter Jim Shella has a good blog post on former House minority leader, Pat Bauer’s, removal from that post entitled Why the Democrats ousted Pat Bauer.

He gives some behind the scenes details of Bauer’s leadership style. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but more of this kind of reporting (if we’re paying attention to process instead of the substantive details of legislation) would have been interesting while Bauer was inflicting his brand of leadership on his caucus.

I was a little startled by Jim Shella’s statement that, in Indiana’s Fifth District, 30% of the voters are retired. Given the context of the blog post, I think that means that maybe that number are also on Social Security.

This is Dan Burton’s district; a reliably conservative district. It reinforces my sense that the talk about “small government” is usefully inexact. What is desired is not really less government; but, rather, government benefits that go to Us – the deserving and not government benefits that take from Us (the deserving) and give to Them (the undeserving.)

The utility of “small government” is that it tends to short circuit a close examination of who Us and Them might be and what it is that makes Us deserving and Them undeserving. When someone points out this or that part of government that isn’t small and that isn’t getting objected to by small government advocates, they can just protest, “we’re not anarchists!”

I hadn’t really intended to do a post on Chick-fil-A because I regard it as a fairly unimportant sideshow, but a couple of things came up. A buddy of mine was hoping I’d address it, and Tipsy included some thoughts of mine in a piece wondering if anti-Chick-fil-A sentiment had its roots in “Christophobia.”

I never spent a lot of time thinking about Chick-fil-A. When I go to fast food joints, I never care much for chicken sandwiches, so it was never a store I was going to seek out in the first place. I had a vague understanding that the company had staked out a position in the culture war. Closed on Sundays, but not just closed, but closed so its employees could honor the Sabbath. That assumes a whole lot about your employees and your relationship to them. But, hey, whatever. None of my business, really. Hobby Lobby was more distasteful to me because of their even more rampant commercialization of their Christian-tribal affiliations. They, honest to God, sell “Test-a-Mints.”

But, then I became dimly aware that the owner of Chick-fil-A said something negative about whether our gay citizens should have equal rights. And, again, dimly aware that some big city lawmakers started showboating by threatening to use legal authority to impair the company’s ability to do business in their cities. And then very aware that conservatives were showing their solidarity by eating fast food chicken.

Meanwhile, I responded on Twitter to the event by being a smartass in the back of the classroom shooting spitballs. So, I can certainly understand Tipsy thinking I had stronger feelings on the subject than I actually do.

First, based on what I know, I can conclude that the city lawmakers are out of line; legitimately creating First Amendment concerns among those who care about such things. Second, I think gays and those who support them are acting in a perfectly rational and defensible way when they choose to oppose Chick-fil-A’s position and to seek to do the company economic harm through boycotts or whatever. Company owners aren’t inertly believing something in a vacuum. They’re taking profits and directing them to organizations and candidates with political influence which, in turn, help ensure that laws and policies harmful to gays remain on the books. You can pick a side, or not, depending on your policy preferences.

So, if you pick the side of the gays over the side of Christian culture warriors, does that make you Christophobic? No. For me, even though I don’t happen to believe in the divinity of Jesus, I’ll still happily attend the fish fry of a local church to raise money for the local homeless shelter. Some of my gay friends are devoutly religious, and I don’t shun them for that. Which, I think raises a central point in this debate: neither side of the culture wars has a monopoly on Jesus. This point was made rather well, I thought, by those taunting the Chick-fil-A solidarity people by pointing out that many of those who would routinely ignore the plight of the homeless and hungry rushed out to eat fast-food chicken in order to show their support for gay rights antagonists.

A business owner with strong religious beliefs causes me no concern; but commercializing the culture wars for political influence catches my interest, particularly when I’m opposed to your policy preferences.

The economy does not distribute wealth perfectly to the smart and hardworking and withhold wealth perfectly from the dumb and lazy. Digby takes a crack at explaining why this unremarkable fact is causing so many twisted knickers among Romney supporters.

Hard and smart work help you hedge your bets, but ultimately luck is very much a non-trivial factor in whether and how much wealth you have. However, acknowledging this fact makes it morally difficult for those who hit the jackpot to make the case that they should retain so much more wealth than others with equal or greater smarts and work ethic but with less fortune.

Personally, I think we want inequality in the system. We want a little randomness, and we want a lot of reward for being clever or hard working. That promotes incentives that complete equality can’t. But, of course, no one is arguing for complete equality. Just a recognition that wealth isn’t entirely a function of moral worth, a recognition that you can still have those incentives even if the jackpot isn’t quite as big, and a system that reduces the upside of good luck a bit in order to soften the blow from the downside of bad luck.

And, in fact, what you should see is that as a country becomes wealthier and smarter about work; the productivity of workers increases and the number of hours worked should decrease as it takes less hours of production to support a comfortable life. See this NBC news report:

Mark Keese, head of OECD’s employment division, told 24/7 Wall St. that the wealth and productivity of a nation plays a large part in the structure of employment in the country. One component of this is the technological sophistication of industry. “Generally, richer countries can and should see reductions in hours worked … basically, you have stronger productivity performance and eventually you’re replacing workers with machines, which allow you to cut back on the number of hours of work.”

I think what we see in the U.S. is that our legal structure is set up so that the wealthy are those who have most successfully appropriated the value produced by others for themselves.

Great article in the Atlantic by Barbara Kiviac entitled “The Big Jobs Myth: American Workers Aren’t Ready for American Jobs.”

Americans seem to have a deep hunger to regard one’s economic situation as a morality play. If you’re rich, it’s because of your drive and skill. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re dumb and lazy. This allows us to complacently let the rich stay rich and absolves us of any duty to the poor.

Kiviac goes into more detail, but this dynamic is part of what makes the jobs/skills myth so popular. She also notes that, strangely, the problem with the labor market is rarely descried as a pay mismatch. Want the skills? Pay for them. Individuals don’t acquire such skills for free.

Except the ones they do. She notes that a couple of the skills noted as lacking in employer surveys aren’t really the kinds that come from more education — particularly the types of education marketed as getting you a job:

A 2011 employer survey from the Manufacturing Institute found that the top skill deficiency among manufacturing workers was “inadequate problem-solving skills.” No. 3 on the list was “inadequate basic employability skills (attendance timeliness, work ethic, etc.).

In any case, she says, the skills mismatch trope serves many ideological masters:

As sociologist Michael Handel points out in his book Worker Skills and Job Requirements, in the skills mismatch debate, it is often not clear who is missing what skill. The term is used to talk about technical manufacturing know-how, doctoral-grade engineering talent, high-school level knowledge of reading and math, interpersonal smoothness, facility with personal computers, college credentials, problem-solving ability, and more. Depending on the conversation, the problem lies with high-school graduates, high-school drop-outs, college graduates without the right majors, college graduates without the right experience, new entrants to the labor force, older workers, or younger workers. Since the problem is hazily defined, people with vastly different agendas are able to get in on the conversation–and the solution.

The skills mismatch trope also offers a little something for everyone politically. Those on the right get to talk about taking personal responsibility for upgrading one’s skills, while those on the left get to emphasize how we must do a better job with education, that great pathway to an egalitarian society. Between the two sit the nation’s employers, who get an argument for sharing labor-training costs with government agencies, non-profits, and institutions of higher education; it would hardly be fair to expect them to bear the full burden if the American workforce itself is defective. Finally, a fast-growing industry of for-profit colleges get reassurance that their student pipeline will stay full.

I hope Tom LoBianco didn’t write this headline. I really like Tom, and the article is good, but I really hate the headline: “Legislators Use Patriotic Language To Help Bills Become Law, Some Say.” Some say?!?! Of course they do.

Using measures labeled “right to work” and “freedom to work” as examples of similarly named but very different pieces of legislation using the same rhetorical trick, the article goes to Kristen Sheeler:

“The intended response is a visceral or emotional response. If you can get at someone’s emotions, then they’re going to be more likely to react,” said Kristina Sheeler, chairwoman of the Department of Communication Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

By using words like “right” and “freedom,” which call to American cultural values, politicians try to win over as many people as possible while alienating as few as possible, she said.

“The words have power because they’re strategically ambiguous,” she said. “They’re so full of meaning, but the very specific meaning is not there.”

At LSA, we used to joke about this when drafting bills. “This law may be referred to as the Puppies and Kittens are Cute Bill of 2012.” Nevermind that it’s a pro-vivisection measure.

And, I think, the “Some Say” in that headline is part of why the trick works. Journalists generally do not feel free to call b.s. on a law’s title when it’s disingenuous. They have to resort to a bland, “he said/she said” faux objectivity. “Some say puppies won’t really be cute while being cut open.”