Today is apparently National Coming Out Day. My thinking has really evolved over the years on the issue of gay rights. (“Gay rights” is something of a misnomer, I think — what I mean by it is basically the notion that you should treat gays with the same respect and decency that you’d show to anyone else.) I grew up thinking I was homophobic, probably into college somewhere.

Anyway, I think my evolution on the subject was triggered when I actually knew real people who were gay – gays weren’t just abstract, notional others upon whom I could project fears and prejudices. Once they were real people, I had to start thinking about them as such.

The thinking went from “gays are bad and icky; I dislike them.” To, “that guy seems pretty decent; oh, he’s gay; no skin off my nose.” After that first encounter, and the advent of Facebook, I came to learn that I knew a lot of gay men. (Oddly, the only friends I know to be lesbians are online – as opposed to in-person – acquaintances.) I suppose I don’t know what I would have done with that information had I known they were gay in high school or college or whatever. (Maybe they weren’t quite sure, themselves.) Regardless, I’m glad they are friends now. From my perspective, the value of gays “coming out” is that most of us have an easier time hating abstract strangers who are different; it’s a whole different story when it is your friends and family. Maybe when we have a more accurate idea of how many people, and who, are actually gay; we will treat the issue a little more rationally. A guy can dream anyway.

A lot of the antipathy toward government comes from a sense that it is something alien, spending our money outside of the tribe. I’ve been trying to figure out what I see as a disconnect between stated reasons for disliking government spending and the things that actually seem to get people riled up. Some kinds of spending seem to get folks agitated – e.g., Reagan’s famous Cadillac driving welfare queen and the young bucks eating T-bones. Others, not so much, e.g., bombing foreigners. (The latter often seems draw opposition based more on anti-war sentiments than a visceral reaction to the money spent on bombers.)

I don’t think people generally mind spending more in taxes than they personally get back, necessarily. What they mind is having their money taken for the benefit of what they regard as people who are more properly characterized as “them” than “us.” And if the money is being spent for “them,” then pretty much any amount is too much.

So, I think one’s animosity toward government is a decent gauge of whether a person thinks of government as being “of the people, for the people, and by the people;” or as an alien force, subjugating “us” for the benefit of “them.”

A Pew Study on religion has been making some headlines. It finds that atheists know more about religion than theists. Heather Horn has a pretty good round up in the Atlantic on some of the reaction.

I suppose the catty reaction is to suggest that the more you learn about a religion, the less likely you are to believe. But, my guess is that it’s a correlation thing, and not a causation thing. I’d suggest that (with plenty of exceptions), it’s the type of folks who are most likely to think hard about religious issues and study what various religions have to offer as answers are also the type of folks who are most comfortable reconsidering whatever it was their parents taught them and more comfortable making their way in the world without religion.

At a relatively early age, I found it telling that most people followed whatever religion their parents followed. That was a pretty good indication that people didn’t subscribe to a particular religion because they considered the evidence, weighed the options, and picked a winner. I also found notable that most religions tend to indoctrinate kids at an early age as part of their program. I was raised Presbyterian, and even though my folks were never fire breathers about their religion, I still found it difficult to finally admit to myself (let alone to others) that I didn’t believe the stuff I had been taught. There is a huge social pressure to go along to get along. And most people just aren’t that inclined to buck the pressure and really consider closely whether their religion is most likely to be true.

To me, a good bit of religious language seems to reflect this sort of unfocused thinking. The words come together like a salad and don’t convey a lot of meaning. At least not to me. Taking something pretty well at random off the Internet:

“In Him [Christ], you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”

If you parse this and diagram it, you could probably turn it into something coherent. But, my guess is that your average listener just lets something like this wash over them. Maybe the average person’s faith is something like Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, a truth a person knows intuitively, “from the gut,” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. But, maybe I’m wrong. That’s just what it looks like from the from the outside. Obviously I can’t crawl inside someone’s mind and know how closely they’ve examined what their parents told them about religion.

Matt Taibbi has an article in Rolling Stone entitled Tea & Crackers. He highlights a fundamental flaw in the Tea Party movement. It’s not that they’re predominantly white or they’re too angry or they’re insufficiently concerned with the plight of others. It’s that they are full of crap.

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about[.]
. . .
[T]he Tea Party doesn’t really care about issues — it’s about something deep down and psychological, something that can’t be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are (“radical leftists” is the term they prefer), and they’re coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.

But, Taibbi goes on to predict, no matter what the Tea Party thinks it’s doing, it will ultimately be castrated and co-opted into the two party system the way any other grass-roots movement is. “Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.”

Tea Party 1.0 was the (whatever his other faults) honest Ron Paul, anti- war, pro-legalization Republican. Tea Party 2.0 got rolling with Rick Santelli’s CNBC rant, not against the billions going to prop up Goldman Sachs and AIG, but rather the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan which was 1/100th the size of those financial institution bailouts. Supporters of Tea Party 2.0 were conspicuously silent about that spending as well as the previous administration’s “gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires.”

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul “Tea Parties,” but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey “unconstitutional” orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

O.k., I find myself wanting to blockquote the whole thing, so I’ll just stop. It’s good reading.

Just noodling here, but one of the crises we’ve been told is going to cause enormous problems for us is the aging of America. The ratio of young people to old people is decreasing which means there will be fewer young people bearing the burden of paying for the care of more old people.

Not to be too ghoulish, but it occurs to me that, one consequence of this ought to be –sooner or later– more people dying. As the dead have no need of their property, this would also mean more estates available for taxation. Seems to me that the estate tax is the rational means of compensating for the decreased ratio of young-to-old. Sort of a use tax on the aging of America, if you will.

Just a thought.

The Journal & Courier has a sound opinion piece where it points out that we need to devote more of our resources to maintenance and repairs of infrastructure.

Infrastructure repairs are expensive. Maintenance is somewhat less expensive, but in many cases, preventative or rehabilitative maintenance has not kept pace[.]

When you have limited resources, there is a temptation to devote them to more noticeable things and delay maintenance for another year. You increase or maintain operating expenses and your capital fund suffers as a result. Delay maintenance long enough, and you’re looking at a catastrophic repair bill. It’s the whole “stitch in time saves nine” concept.

But, as a rule, we voters don’t reward politicians for keeping the lights on, the roads smooth, the sewers flowing, the trash picked up, and the water clean. Rather we raise holy hell when these things don’t happen, and pout when we’re asked to pay for them.

Indiana is 4th in the nation in terms of women who smoke while pregnant, trailing West Virginia, Missouri, and Montana. As a debt collector, it’s always a little frustrating when confronted with a smoker who can’t pay his or her debt. A pack-a-day habit is probably something like $125/month. But that’s just a financial matter where the people harmed are the smoker/debtor and the creditor.

I can only imagine the frustration of medical professionals confronted with pregnant women smoking. It’s a bad habit and a poor choice with cascading negative consequences for mother and future child. (It would be interesting to see where pro-life & pro-choice advocates fall on this particular issue and why – though, abortion is arguably a less pressing issue in that 17% of Hoosier pregnancies aren’t being terminated through abortion.)

The March of Dimes, which advocates for healthy babies, says if all pregnant women in the U.S. stopped smoking, there would be an estimated 11 percent reduction in stillbirths and a 5 percent reduction in newborn deaths. Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are up to three times as likely to die from sudden infant death syndrome as babies of non-smokers, according to the March of Dimes.

Other effects are more common and better known: Smoking nearly doubles a woman’s risk of having a low-birth-weight baby, slows fetal growth and increases the risk of preterm delivery.

There are an interesting couple of paragraphs talking about why Indiana has such a high smoking rate. Dick Conklin, of Tobacco Free Allen County, says it has to do with economics, family tradition and a belief in a fundamental right to smoke. I’m not sure why poor people are more likely to smoke – it’s probably more of a correlation than a causation – but it’s really the “fundamental right” thing that drives me nuts. I suppose I have the right to jam a knitting needle into my eye, but I’m not going to do it. And the issue of whether there ought to be legislation to stop smoking is distinct from the issue of whether any given individual ought to smoke or, in particular, smoke while pregnant, knowing what we do today and have known for quite some time about the risks of smoking.

So what is the mindset? “I have the right to smoke, so I’m going to stick it to all you liberal nanny-staters by poisoning myself and my fetus?” More likely, I think the mindset is that the person is addicted, doesn’t want to deal with the hard work of giving up the addiction, and doesn’t want to confront the problem in their own minds, so through the magic of fuzzy thinking, the “right to smoke” somehow allows them to short-circuit that mental process.

Yes, I should be working, but I had a trial scheduled for today that settled at the last minute, so I’m having trouble re-focusing my attention. I came across a post talking about how to get and play old DOS games, so I figured cool, old computer games would be a good thread.

My all-time favorite was probably Sid Meier’s Pirates! In high school, T and I spent endless hours playing this game, eating Pizza King Royal Feasts, and drinking cokes. Basically, you sailed around the Spanish Main plundering cities, finding buried treasure, and advancing your career by playing the Spanish, Dutch, English, and French against each other. To this day, my knowledge of Caribbean geography is heavily influenced by this game, and I probably think of places by names that are 400 years out of date.

Next in line was probably Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This was a morality tale wrapped in a fantasy game. The goal was to learn about and improve your character in the 8 virtues (honesty, compassion, valor, justice, honor, spirituality, and humility) and their relationship to the three principles of Truth, Love, and Courage while killing monsters and getting loot.

Other notables for me: Civilization, Zork, , Raid on Bungeling Bay, Leaderboard Golf, Leisure Suit Larry, Seven Cities of Gold, Montezuma’s Revenge, and Full Throttle.

The Health Care Reform Law (yes, the one that will destroy America as we know it and make the Founding Fathers cry) has provisions that take effect today. The National Conference of State Legislatures has put out a handy grid that itemizes the changes that will kill your grandma and whatnot. The fiendish measures destroying America today:

#No annual or lifetime limits on insurance policies for essential health benefits.

# Limiting rescission (the practice of canceling policies only after the insured gets sick) to cases of actual fraud or an intentional misrepresentation of material fact. (In other words, you have to pay to fix the broken leg even if the insured lied about having a bad cough 5 years ago.)

#For plans beginning after 9/23/10, coverage for preventive health services with no copayments and the service being exempt from deductibles.

#Extending coverage to adult children until they are 26 years old.

#No exclusion based on pre-existing conditions for children under the age of 19.

#Group plans can’t discriminate on eligibility in favor of higher paid employees.

Frankly, I don’t know how the Republic can survive.

The tone of this Associated Press article on nutty things Tea Party heroine Christine O’Donnell has said on camera was striking to me. It’s generally dismissive of using past statements to evaluate the woman.

You see, it’s not that O’Donnell talked about dabbling in witchcraft on the Bill Maher show in 1999, rather Maher is “digging up” clips. But this paragraph is what I really noticed:

Opponents have been unearthing unflattering age-old television clips. Her campaign didn’t immediately return a telephone message Saturday, but she has in the past dismissed previous comments.

So I guess there are no clips of modern vintage? And how many years is “age-old” in the AP style book? Is the War in Afghanistan about to become “age-old”? Will the inevitable hero worship of things Reagan supposedly did or said be described as “age-old”?

It’s just such an odd editorial choice.