Dana Hasinger and Tom Spalding, writing for the Indy Star, are reporting that Hat World is expanding its Indianapolis headquarters and will add 571 jobs.

I mention this primarily as an excuse to quote the epic movie Fear of a Black Hat:

Nina Blackburn: So, what’s the deal with the hats?

Ice Cold: Shit, the hats’re what NWH is all about. See, back in the day when there were slaves and stuff, we was forced to work in the hot sun all day, hatless. I mean, not even a babushka.

Tone Def: Word. Heads totally exposed to the sun.

Ice Cold: So when the slaves got back from the fields, they was too tired to revolt against they masters. So what we’re sayin’ now is: Yo, we got some hats now, muh-fuckas.

Tasty Taste: And we ain’t too tired to bust a cap in yo’ ass.

Howey politics has a message posted by Mark Souder that makes him look like even more of a tool. It’s part political strategy guide, part gossipy high school blow-by-blow about who said what to whom and when, and with just a little dash of “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their dog.”

He talks about who he thinks should win the Republican nomination to replace him (Marlin Stutzman.) He talks about how the story got out. And, he talks about how he was trying to resign without disclosing specifics to minimize political damage, but gosh darn it, someone was leaking specifics to Fox News.

Most importantly, he does not sound contrite. My advice – unsolicited, admittedly – is to let the Third District take care of itself, shut up for a good while, and focus on how you betrayed your family. But that’s just me, and I’m not a stalwart champion of family values, so what do I know?

Inchoate: being only partly in existence or operation, especially imperfectly formed or formulated.

From the Simpsons:

Homer: Here it is everybody! The world’s greatest web site! [a highly annoying newbie web page, complete with several clashing sounds, is seen] You’d think all the noises would be annoying, but they’re not.

Bart: I got suspended from school today.

Homer: No kidding [obviously ignoring and then continuing to ignore Bart] What do you think of my page, Lisa? Be honest, it’s great, isn’t it? Go ahead, say it’s great if you want to.

Bart: They found a switchblade in my locker.

Lisa: Well, a web page is supposed to be a personal thing. You’ve just stolen copyrighted material from everyone else. They could sue you for that.

Bart: I took a swing at a cop.

Homer:They can’t sue me if they don’t know who I am. I’ll just call myself Mr. “X”.

Bart: I’m just mad all the time.

Homer:Yep, you just can’t go wrong with Mr. “X”.

The Wild One:

What are you rebelling against?

What do you got?

Ron Fournier, writing for the Associated Press, has a column trying to find political themes shaping this year’s political cycle: Antipathy toward elected officials and the establishment. The power of special interests. Tests of party purity. The tea party. The quixotic fight against hyper-partisanship.

For my part, I think people are mad, and the things they’re mad about are just too big and complicated for them to handle in any focused kind of way, so they’re just lashing out. They hate partisanship but punish party members who cooperate with the opposing party. They hate big government but want the government to shove aside the invisible hand of the marketplace that’s not cleaning up the Gulf. They want lower taxes and deficit reduction but can’t seem to identify government expenditures from which they benefit which they’d be willing to do without. My guess is that these issues are just lightning rods for general dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction comes from a sense of economic insecurity. Job security is nil, and there is no real confidence that the U.S. is going to get its act together and get going in a direction where an individual willing to work hard is generally assured of becoming economically comfortable, surpassing the standard of living of his or her parents, and reasonably expecting that their kids will be able to do the same.

As Fournier points out:

The unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent. Oil sullies the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. troops die in Afghanistan and Iraq. Government bailouts and Obama’s health care initiative stir fears about the national debt. And, nine years after 9/11, doubts linger about the country’s defenses.

Oh, and in other happy news, I’ve heard that Afghanistan has surpassed Vietnam as the longest war in U.S. history. (I disagree with that method of counting; but it’s still a sobering milestone.)

Eric Bradner, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article about how the Chrysler Bankruptcy is playing into the Indiana Treasurer’s race between incumbent Richard Mourdock and challenger Pete Buttigieg.

At issue is Mourdock’s decision to go glory-hound with a legal challenge to the decision of the Chrysler bankruptcy court, costing Hoosiers a pile of money. What I have never seen described – and I have been paying some attention to the issue – is any reasonable scenario in which Mourdock’s legal challenges would have resulted in a net financial gain to Hoosiers.

See here for detailed analysis, but this is the gist:

The nut of Indiana’s objection is that, under the plan, lesser priority claims will receive value while Indiana’s (and other) first-priority claims will not be made whole. Under a liquidation scenario, typically you sell everything off and then, from that pool of money you pay the first class of creditors (e.g. first priority lien holders). Once they are paid in full, you move on to the second class of creditors (e.g. unsecured lenders). When you reach a class of creditors whose claims exceed the remaining pool of money, you pay those creditors a pro rata share of what’s left. Any remaining classes of creditors get nothing. The important point is that you don’t pay the second class creditors anything until the first class creditors have been paid in full.

Here is the problem with Indiana’s analysis: the restructuring plan under which the government and the UAW and other lesser creditors receive value also provides more money to the first lien creditors than they would get from a liquidation.

Under the scenario that happened, the United States Government was willing to fund payments to Chrysler’s creditors and fund the start up of a new, post-bankruptcy Chrysler, including money that went to unions. That second part pissed off ideologues who don’t like money going to anyone before a privileged group of creditors get paid in full and particularly not to unions. But – and here is the catch – a) the United States Government wasn’t willing to fund the bankruptcy transition under other terms; and b) there were no other buyers willing to pay more for the liquidated assets or otherwise in a manner that would net more to secured creditors than the scenario offered by the government.

To my knowledge, Mourdock has never told us something to the effect of “Hoosiers would have gotten more out of the bankruptcy if the U.S. Government had stayed out, because _______. They would have gotten $0.___ per dollar which is more than the $0.29 per dollar received under the existing decision. This justifies the expenditure of $x million in legal fees.”

The challenger, Pete Buttigieg makes no claim to legal expertise for analyzing the particulars of bankruptcy law, but he notes something that doesn’t often get mentioned – this was junk paper that the State was buying for $0.43 on the dollar:

“One of the facts that he rarely mentions is that when he originally bought Chrysler debt, Chrysler bonds were rated junk bonds,” Buttigieg said. “If we had a safer investment policy to begin with, none of this would have happened.”

Jeff Wiehe, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has a pretty good article about the struggles taking care of the mentally ill at the Allen County Jail. One of the basic problems is that when you do not treat the mentally ill up front, there is a strong likelihood that they won’t comply with society’s norms and will, consequently, end up in jail. Jails become the mental treatment centers of last resort.

The article doesn’t specify costs, but my strong suspicion is that it costs more to treat mental illness in jail than it would elsewhere. But, lawmakers get beaten around politically for spending money on “do gooder” crap like mental illness. We don’t even much care for government spending our money to help people with real diseases, let alone mental illness which – I suspect – a lot of us see as more a sign of weakness than as a valid illness. It’s not true, of course, that mental illnesses aren’t real. It’s just that, when we see a broken leg, we know what we’re dealing with. A sick brain is a lot more subtle.

But jails, we’ll let our politicians spend at least some money on jails. Punishment, as opposed to treatment, is something we can get behind. I’m not sure why we’re generally happier with tax dollars spent on retribution, but there it is. Unfortunately, that means that the treatment provided ends up being a lot more slapdash. The mentally ill are mixed in with people who are actually bad. And, once the confinement ends, the treatment usually does to. The person, still unable to conform to societal norms, re-offends in some way or another. Rinse. Repeat.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I don’t think we’re spending our money wisely by using jail as a proxy for mental institutions. But, on the other side of things, it’s hard for me to escape the notion that segments of our population can present a huge, sucking vortex of need into which we could throw every available resource without seriously diminishing the demand. Guess I’m a little cynical.

Once again, I’m out of my depth, but after reading Tipsy Teatotaler’s thoughts on the mystery of confession in the Orthodox Church, I got to thinking about the notion of shame. (Note: one isn’t necessarily closely related to the other – the synapses in my brain just fire pretty freely on occasion.)

My thought was to question whether shame is a valuable emotion for the individual. I can definitely see the value in such things as guilt, regret, sorrow, and other emotions which are similar, but a little different. Shame, it seems to me, not only has a component dealing with unhappiness about something one has done wrong; it also has to do with perceiving one’s self as having low self-worth in the eyes of the community or some outside source. In other words, it’s not just (or even primarily?) about judging one’s actions as deficient and feeling bad for that; it’s about believing that the Other judges one’s actions as deficient, attributing weight to the judgment of the Other, and feeling bad accordingly.

So, in a sense, shame is a diminishment of self in favor of others. (Not a libertarian emotion, I guess!) I can see how, as a society, it would be a useful emotion to cultivate in members. But, is it beneficial on a personal level?

Random thoughts for a Wednesday morning.

Memorial Day is a day to honor the dead who have died in military service to our country. Gifts impose duties upon the recipient. In fact, in some cultures, you could do great offense by giving a gift that exceeded the recipient’s ability to reciprocate. I’m not sure how you adequately respond to a gift of this magnitude. But, I have some ideas.

First, simply honor the sacrifice. As I tell my kids, never underestimate the power of “thank you.”

Second, the military in our country serves the civilian political authority. This gives us an opportunity and a civic duty. Keep informed and object to the extent you’re able when the civilian authority proposes to use the military in ways that aren’t necessary to “defend our freedom,” as they like to say. If the policy in question isn’t worth killing and dying for, possibly the military shouldn’t be involved.

Third, (and to be honest, I’m not sure there is any help for this), it would be nice if we could stop our politicians from using the trappings of patriotism and military service for partisan advantage. Use of flags, love of country, and our military can mean short term gain for the politician who is able to appropriate the “good will” associated with these things. But, the long-term effect is for these symbols to become tainted by association with the partisan using them. For example when I see a flag and hear the word “freedom,” I start thinking of the disastrous policies of George W. Bush who liked to wrap himself in such things. He’s hardly the only one, but his branding efforts seemed especially vigorous.

That’s short term stuff. We need to remember the patriots who died in the Revolution to found the country; the soldiers who fought the British invasion in 1812; the Union soldiers who preserved the Union against treason in defense of slavery; and the Greatest Generation who fought the evil of the Nazis and the aggression of the Empire of Japan. But our reverence needs to be tempered by the realization that soldiers’ lives have also been spent on efforts that were, at best, of ambiguous moral character even if the soldiers’ personal efforts were valiant. Among others: our war against Mexico for territory; our war against the various Indian tribes for territory; our war of empire against Spain premised on sketchy evidence about destruction of the Maine; our efforts in World War I where neither side seemed especially virtuous; any number of skirmishes in Central America that primarily benefited the United Fruit Company; and, of course, Viet Nam. (I didn’t forget the Korean War, but I’m not entirely certain which side of the ledger to put it on.)

So, thank you to all of the soldiers who have died in service to this great country of ours. Our country would not be what it is today without them. It is up to us as citizens to see that that willingness to serve and sacrifice is used wisely in the future.

Lindsay Beyerstein has a good post, specifically about Dr. Wakefield being stricken from Britain’s medical register and more generally about his work attempting to link autism to vaccination. The links between vaccination and autism have never been very credible, and Wakefield’s excommunication discredits them further.

“The investigation focused on how Wakefield and colleagues carried out their research, not on the science behind it,” according to the New York Times. That makes it sound like Wakefield’s ethical lapses had no bearing on the validity of his research, or lack thereof. In fact, some of Wakefield’s unethical behavior undermines the credibility of the study, which made international headlines when it was published in the Lancet in 1998. The report propelled Wakefield to guru status within the international anti-vaccination movement. His research went down in flames, but he’s still getting on the Today Show.

I am certain I am not immune to it, but I am always irritated where our risk assessments are significantly out of proportion. We blithely and routinely accept risks with a 1/1000 chance of happening and then completely freak out over a 1/100,000 risk that’s more exotic. And the fact that this crap gets on the Today Show is a big part of the problem. These shows have no sense of responsibility. They just know if they can run a story with Jenny McCarthy holding forth on the perils of vaccination to scare the bejeezus out of a bunch of suburban moms, they’ll have a nice demographic sticking around through the commercials.

As a population, we’re basically innumerate and unscientific. Our sense of perspective is skewed. Again, I am not immune, I’m no scientist and my math skills are decent but nothing spectacular. But, in the long run, we’re all dead; there are about a billion different ways we can die; and if we spend our lives worrying about all of them, we might as well be dead. So, you have to spend your time and resources protecting against the major dangers and take your chances with the rest. We know that the diseases against we immunize our kids were huge risks – autism from vaccination is comparatively insignificant, if there is an increased risk at all. Probably we have been so successful with immunizations, we don’t really appreciate what a problem those diseases were.

For some reason, this Memorial Day Weekend, it occurred to me to compare and contrast soldiers and ACLU attorneys. They both fight for our freedom. The ACLU lawyers don’t die for the cause, so this weekend is justifiably not for them, but they frequently (to paraphrase J.D. Salinger) live humbly for the cause. And, while they do their thing without the physical risk that our soldiers so courageously face, they also do it without much in the way of gratitude. Time after time, they challenge infringements to our rights under the Bill of Rights. I suspect they get so much grief about what they do because they frequently make those challenges on behalf of the less desirable elements of our society; folks every bit as entitled to Constitutional protections, but still we’d rather not hear the bellyaching from these particular people. I respect what the ACLU does, even though they sue my clients from time to time which, I’ll have to admit, is a bit of an annoyance.

Anyway, they are at it again; challenging an Allen County ordinance (h/t Indiana Law Blog) that requires doctors who don’t live in Allen County or surrounding counties or who don’t have admitting privileges to area hospitals to provide contact information to area emergency rooms and the local health department. It looks like at least part of the challenge is going to come from an angle that I suggested when these ordinances hit the news. The trouble Allen County will face is that the practice of medicine in Indiana is already heavily regulated by the State.

As a general proposition, the default setting is that municipalities have a power unless it is specifically withheld. However, once the State undertakes to regulate an area, the presumption shifts to an assumption that municipalities do not also have the power to regulate that area unless the legislature specifically gives them that power. It was this dynamic that resulted in county “Certificate of Need” ordinances being struck down – the counties wanted to protect their county hospitals but the federal courts held that the counties didn’t have the power to enact those ordinances because the State had already taken over the hospital regulation business. I would expect a similar result for Allen County’s abortion regulation statute.

Here’s one from the “Special Place in Hell” Department:

Three people kept a 65-year-old woman locked in a tiny room with a urine-soaked mattress to sleep on and a dog bowl to drink from so they could live off her monthly Social Security checks, authorities said.

You can usually understand people to a certain extent by realizing they are, to some extent, good guys in their own personal narrative. You find the angle where their actions are justified, and things usually click into place in terms of understanding where they’re coming from. I have no idea what kind of messed up mental contortions you’d have to do to make you think that it’s somehow “o.k.” to lock up an elderly woman for her social security check.