One theme I keep coming back to in this blog is an annoyance at the notion that there was some perfect yesterday from which we are in decline. I notice it probably most often in those seemingly evergreen pieces that bemoan the state of “kids these days.”

Doghouse Riley takes down Maureen Dowd who apparently wrote one of those “things fall apart” columns in relation to the Jerry Sandusky matter. She suggests that our “formerly hallowed institutions” are sinking into a moral dystopia; leaving our sense of right and wrong more malleable. To which Doghouse responds:

Listen, I dunno about you, but I was filled to dyspepsia with mid-range Boomers like Dowd pretending there were such things as hallowed institutions and icons in their (my) youth, which have mysteriously sunk into anything in the interim, around two decades ago. Pius the Fucking Twelfth for the win, MoDo. These institutions were hallowed-out by the end of the 19th century. Did two World Wars escape your notice growing up? Maybe they weren’t routinely ignoring boy-buggering football coaches at Penn State in the 1950s. Would you care to guarantee it?

(Internal link added). This notion that humans have been in a state of decline since being ousted from Eden drives me nuts. It’s a kind of fatalism that’s frequently used to blame other (presumably lesser) people for things you don’t like. It allows you to sit on your ass, do nothing to change yourself or those around you, and bask in your moral superiority.

Humanity is not entirely good or entirely evil. We have a stunning array of coalitions of the two, both within ourselves and among others. Those coalitions are constantly regrouping, preserving, destroying and building. And if you think that, at one time, there was a center holding it together, that’s because you weren’t stepping back far enough to have much perspective. Like thinking the earth is the center because you have no notion of the sun or that the sun is the center because you have no notion of the galaxy, and on and on.

The kids are all right.

So, being a Dad has become pretty much the most important thing in my life. Funny, that. Before kids, I’ll be honest, I had little to no use for them. And, I knew it would be different for my kids – and I knew that I wanted kids; but there is no way I ever would have understood on a visceral level until I got my own.

I know that, from time to time, I’ll have occasion to eat my words; but, so far, I seem pretty good at it. My kids are generally well adjusted and well behaved. They even seem to like me. Of course, they’re 6 and 8 — that might be the easiest level there is. Liking you is just what they do. And the ways you screwed them up are often like seeds that take a bunch of years to really sprout. But, as the saying goes, you can only play the games on your schedule. And, so far, there seem to be more wins than losses.

Half (or probably a lot more than half) of the battle, of course, is having a spouse that makes you look good. Since I’m using sports analogies, and since it’s father’s day, I get to be the quarterback in this one. When your spouse is an unbeatable offensive line, you’re going to complete a lot of passes. I’m fairly sure that’s what is going on in my case.

There are guys who don’t seem to take these things seriously, and now *that’s* what I can’t seem to understand on a visceral level. I can understand, day-to-day that this or that might seem more fun or rewarding than whatever you should be doing with your family. And, frankly, if you don’t throw in some fun from time-to-time, you’ll end up not being a terribly good dad. But, as a life strategy, the more rewarding of life’s undertakings are slow, subtle, and hard. But, ultimately, worthwhile.

Happy father’s day to all you good dads out there!

Couple hundred million here, couple hundred million there, and eventually lawmakers are going to decide to take a closer look. That’s what’s happening with the state government. Niki Kelly reports that the State is going to hire Deloitte to take a look at the $500 million in “financial miscues” by the Indiana Department of Revenue.

Instead of financial miscues, I think we should call them “whoopsies”.

Lore Sjoberg, writing in Wired, has some good commentary about the spacecraft Dragon visiting the International Space Station and delivering food and computers to astronauts. The Dragon is a privately built and funded vehicle. This, Sjoberg notes, means the function is becoming routine; aside from the whole vacuum of space business, it’s like a long-haul trucker delivering goods to a government warehouse. He looks forward to the day it becomes so routine we have a corrupt and inefficient Space Docker’s union and we get maudlin country-western songs about the lonely but honest life of a geosynchronous cargo handler.

That said, I agree with Neil Degrasse Tyson who said that what makes many of us sad about the retirement of the space shuttle Discovery is that it was done without something else ready to go. We didn’t bemoan the end of the Mercury program when you had Gemini and Apollo ready to go. And, make no mistake, private enterprise will not forge new ground in this area. It might perfect and improve the ground already covered, but you won’t see private business pioneering planetary colonization or interstellar flight. Profit in those areas are far too uncertain. You needed Prince Henry the Navigator to get the Portuguese moving, you needed Queen Isabella for Columbus, and you needed the British Navy to get Captain Cook plying the Pacific. Once the exploration is done, private business will come along after to develop things, but you need a sovereign with something other than a spreadsheet in mind to jump start the project.

I might be getting the real world mixed up with Caddy Shack again, but it was something like that. Judge Smails Superintendent Bennett tells an aspiring student who can’t afford college, “The world needs ditch diggers, too.” “College isn’t for everyone.”

In reality, college — or more to the point, the expense of college — maybe isn’t for everyone. But, I’d probably let parents and families make that decision. Having the top educator send that message strikes me as a bad idea. He should be sending the message that education is valuable for its own sake. Instead, he is sending the message that education is valuable only insofar as it trains an individual for an occupation.

Individual enlightenment and betterment might be fine for the sorts of people who can afford college without government assistance, but for the rabble, your purpose on this earth is to labor for as long as you can without creating negative entries on the balance sheet.

Soraya Chemaly has a powerful message to girls. It tells them, in essence, when girls are told by men (usually under the guise of religion) that they are shameful or sacred, but, in any event, must use or not use their bodies in a particular way; it’s because these men fear them.

Maybe it’s fear. Certainly I get a fearful, self-loathing vibe from St. Augustine underlying his hang ups about sex. But, if I had to give my gut reaction to why patriarchal cultures oppress women, I’d go for greed, not fear, as the primary emotion. Greed for domestic control, sexual control, getting more and doing less – imposing more burdens on women so there are less burdens on themselves. Hunting is more fun and more rewarding than hauling water. Taking what she wants out of the domestic equation makes life easier.

But, that’s just my gut reaction. I’m a privileged white male and so don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about such things. Aside from the “God told me so” explanation, what’s the reasoning -if not fear- behind imposing cultural distinctions between men and women beyond what they (particularly the women) might freely choose for themselves?

Are people worthless? It occurred to me that this is the underlying assumption in many ways when we regard public expenditures as sunk costs for which we don’t recognize getting anything of value in return. That’s the primary way in which cuts to those expenditures can be viewed as, essentially, a purely good thing. After all, if we killed everyone off, taxes and government would go away entirely. Nirvana!

I’m not sure how closely related the cause of the firing neuron is to the idea that came to mind, but here is the article that triggered my thought. It was a column about the economics of health care. Particularly this passage:

If we actually prevent diseases or conditions, would our bills go up in the end? People would live longer and develop lots of other chronic diseases that can be expensive to control or treat. And they would draw Social Security.

In the fiscal sense, health improvement can cost us money. But that totally ignores the value to society.

For example, H.I.V. prior to antiretroviral therapy was like a death sentence. With the introduction of those drugs, we took a killer and made it more like a chronic illness. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how do we pay for the drugs. But that completely ignores the value to society.

We think of health care as an expense, but we really should be thinking of health care as an investment. We want to invest where we have the greatest return. I would put prevention in that bucket.

In some fashion, which I have not entirely pinned down yet, I think this also ties into the world view where the biologically human life is of critical importance before birth and after brain death but where the biographical human life in between those points is a matter of relative indifference.

The Urbanophile has a post about New York City potentially privatizing its parking meter operation. He notes that Chicago’s meter privatization was a fail but that such projects are not necessarily doomed to failure; and offers some notions that are probably applicable generally.

First is, you have to appreciate how dynamic the system is. Contracts have to be able to evolve – practically, that probably means shorter term contracts, easier escape clauses, or an ability to amend duties.

Another is appropriate allocation of risk. Renn notes that one of the main benefits to a municipality of privatization is shifting risk but that all too often, privatization contracts do not leave the contractor with much in the way of appreciable risk. They need to make a profit, of course, but assumption of risk is one of the primary justifications for allowing someone profit (labor and innovation being the two other ones that come to mind.)

He suggests that it’s too bad former Indianapolis mayor and New York deputy mayor Steve Goldsmith is not working on the issue given his experience with privatization efforts in Indianapolis. I’d be interested to know how successful Goldsmith was in protecting Indianapolis from risk by shifting it on to private contractors.

All too often what you get with privatization is all of the monopoly of a municipality with none of the transparency and with more of the compensation getting shifted away from ground level workers and up the management chain.

Sheila Kennedy has a good post entitled “Looking Backward.” She reminisces about how, in 1980, she won the Republican primary in what had been the Eleventh District and how her loss in the general to Andy Jacobs was typically attributed to her being a bit too much of a Goldwater Republican. She says her governing philosophy hasn’t changed in the last 32 years, but now she’s routinely accused of being a leftist or a socialist.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist also had a good post a few days back about the tribal markers of evangelicals that got me thinking. It occurs to me that conservative policy, whatever that means exactly, is perhaps incidental to the conservative movement except as it serves as a tribal marker for the movement.

There are explanations for the embrace of the policies, but those aren’t the reasons. The reason is that Leaders I Trust told me these policies are Good and these policies are what distinguish Us from Them.

As Democrats drift to embrace more conservative policies (compare, for example, Birch Bayh v. Evan Bayh) in an effort to co-opt that vote, knowing there is no pressure on the Left; the conservative tribe keeps looking for more distinctive markers which are available only to the right. Rinse. Advocate transvaginal ultrasounds, girl scout antipathy, defaulting on the national debt, climate change denial, evolutionary denial. When Democratic policy drifts too close, move to greener pastures on the right. (The girl scout thing was probably unfair — Doug)

Just a thought.

President Obama made a statement today on marriage equality. Some have given him grief for previous statements that his views on marriage equality are evolving. I get it. For a politician to talk about “evolving” views on something suggests lightly held convictions of Romney-esque malleability.

But, because of my own evolution of thinking on this subject, I completely understand the President. Back in 2010 when discussing Indiana’s marriage discrimination amendment, I said this:

I’ve described my progression before, but for those just tuning in: Growing up, I thought of myself as anti-gay, because I didn’t know any gay people. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know I knew any gay people. Turns out a non-trivial number of guys I knew growing up and in college were gay. (Sorry if I said or did anything to offend, gentlemen). Once I met a guy I new to be gay, being “anti-gay” quickly seemed silly. He was, in most respects, just like anyone else I knew, and it seemed awfully small of me to dislike him simply because of who he loved. But, from there, I probably only got as far as indifferent to gay issues. I wasn’t against them, but they weren’t important to me either.

Now, I’ve progressed to being affirmatively in favor of allowing gay marriage. There just isn’t any rational basis for opposing it. If your God tells you to work against gays, I guess that’s between you and him. But the State’s supposed interest in promoting procreation is just hogwash. If that were anything but a pretext, you’d see prohibitions on marriage by post-menopausal women and sterile men. Working from the presumption that sexual orientation is a birthright and not a “lifestyle choice,” denying gay people such a fundamental right for no good reason seems gratuitously mean.

The President’s statement today made me feel a little better about what happened in North Carolina yesterday. The primary voters of North Carolina decided they wanted a constitutional ban on marriage equality. One of my good friends from elementary school is gay. (We had a bit of a falling out in 6th grade fighting over a girl, amusingly enough). He is in a committed relationship with his significant other in North Carolina. That the people of North Carolina would rebuke my friend because of who he loves made me angry on a personal level. That the President of the United States would take a political risk by publicly expressing his personal opinion that “same-sex couples should be able to get married” helps diminish that anger somewhat. The President said:

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Mr. Obama told Ms. Roberts. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”

But he added that “I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally.”

Politically, I don’t know how this plays. But it’s the right thing for him to do if that’s what he believes. I tend to think that the people who would withhold their votes from President Obama based on this position probably weren’t going to vote for him anyway. On the other hand, maybe I’m just letting my current views color how I perceive voting tendencies of people who hold my past views.

By the same token, this might have the potential to drive a bit of a wedge between libertarians and the younger conservatives on the one side and the older conservatives on the other side. A lot of the types of conservatives I talk to just don’t honestly seem to care about gay rights, pro or con. They aren’t marching in the streets demanding equality for gay people; but they seem to wish they could ignore the conservative wing that spends a lot of energy opposing gay rights. It creates a stumbling block when the younger conservatives want to talk about government staying out of peoples’ lives. If marriage equality becomes a prominent difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties; they might not be able to shrug off the issue as easily.