A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Tom LoBianco, writing for the Associated Press, has a story on the lobbying within the state Republican Party on the subject of marriage equality in advance of the party convention. Some want to include a plank that prefers heterosexual marriage. Others want to leave that plank out.

At question is whether the party’s platform, its official statement of party values, should oppose gay marriage. The fight to win over the roughly 1,700 Republican delegates to the convention has been waged with the trappings of a professional campaign: Postcards and fliers have been hitting mailboxes, and volunteers have been calling delegates for close to two weeks now.

The ever-present Jim Bopp is confident that the marriage clause will make it into the platform. Megan Robertson, who led the campaign for Freedom Indiana opposing SJR 3/6, is working to keep the language out of the platform.

Cheryl Musgrave, a delegate out of Vanderburgh County (and former head of the Department of Local Government Finance) is quoted as saying:

“Our party platform should have broad-based support and concentrate on issues involving lower taxes and smaller government. I don’t believe the marriage debate is an appropriate thing for a party platform to be discussing.”

The convention is this weekend, so I guess we’ll see how that shakes out.

If I was in the habit of dumping my trash in the neighbor’s lawn rather than paying to have it removed from my house, I would have a rational motivation for resisting passage of anti-dumping laws. I’d still be kind of a jerk, but I’d have my reasons.

That’s kind of how I think of Indiana officials when I read that they plan on resisting anti-emission rules by the EPA designed to reduce pollution.

“Indiana ranked seventh among the states in coal production in 2012, and coal-fired electric power plants provided about 84% of Indiana’s net electricity generation in 2013,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration website.

. . .

So when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule Monday for reducing carbon emissions by as much as 30 percent, Hoosier officials lashed back.

“Indiana will oppose these regulations using every means available,” Gov. Mike Pence said in a statement.

“The EPA’s proposed rules amount to a backdoor energy tax that will damage Indiana’s economy and hike electric bills for all Hoosiers,” Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., said in a statement.

I sympathize with the pain this sort of thing might cause, but when your business model relies on dumping your trash on someone else, it’s not a good business model. Externalizing your costs means you are imposing them on someone else who isn’t necessarily a party to your transaction — this distorts the price of your product, artificially lowering it because of the involuntary subsidy being provided by the third party (in this case, all the people breathing the air and paying for the environmental consequences of the emissions.) And, because the price is distorted, it sends bad signals to the marketplace, creating incentives for suboptimal economic activity.

Rather than bellyaching, Indiana’s lawmakers should figure out ways to help Indiana’s energy and other businesses shift to a more sustainable business model.

I came in touch with Chris primarily through his work with the Hoosier Beer Geek a fine website that, near as I can figure, I first mentioned on my blog in early 2007. The rise of Indiana brewing and Indiana blogs seemed to coincide, and Chris was involved with both. I was sad to hear of Chris’s passing. After a struggle with cancer, Chris died at the age of 37. Jim has posted a moving remembrance at the HBG site. My condolences to his friends and family.

(H/t Ben and Derrick). About eleven miles north of Richmond, near Bethel, tower the commanding heights of Hoosier Hill. At 1,257 feet, the hill stands an imposing 30 feet or so above the surrounding country side.

But this proud land feature is in danger of being usurped.

Atlas Obscura reports:

Hoosier Hill was also the final state high point visited by A.H. Marshall, the first person to ascend all 50. However with the land being as flat as it is in Eastern Indiana, there was been some controversy in recent years as a landfill in neighboring Randolph County has requested permission to stack its garbage above Hoosier Hill’s elevation, thus potentially making the highest point a peak of refuse. It is unknown whether the garbage pile has bested Indiana’s natural peak, but it certainly is not as well cared for.

I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast on World War I off and on over the past several months. With that war on my mind, this Memorial Day, it occurs to me that probably most soldiers who die in battle represent a failing on one level or another. We failed to avoid the conflict in the first place and there was a failure of imagination to solve the conflict in a way that did not cost the soldier his or her life.

As Isaac Asimov’s fictional Salvor Hardin said, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Or, if Sun Tzu is more your style, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

There are times where the value gained or preserved through war exceeds the costs of war itself. And there are times where the gain or preservation can only be accomplished with the loss of life. But, in retrospect, it appears that more often the gain or preservation did not match the cost. And that the loss of life could have been eliminated or lessened through better diplomacy or better strategy.

Today is a day to remember and honor the individuals who died serving our country. But I believe our debt is even greater to those who died because of our failings, the failings of the public, and the failings of our leadership and their leadership.

A 22 year old man named Elliot Rodgers apparently stabbed his three roommates, shot three college women, and wounded seven others in a mass murder and subsequent gun battles with the police. He appears to have concluded the episode by taking his own life.

Prior to the shootings, he posted appalling Youtube videos with rants that were filled with misogyny and envy against “lesser men.” In particular, his complaints centered around his virginity, his inability to attract women, and his complaints about the men who did seem to attract women.

The efforts to paint this as the outcome of a societal trend and, alternately, as an isolated event unique to the murderer and, additionally, to critique the media as insufficiently attentive to one’s preferred narrative will, I suspect, be a spectacle. It features sex, violence, and money, so there will be no lack of media attention.

I’ve noted to date:
-Discussions about how this is about our lack of gun control.

-Objection to calling him mentally ill because: a) it is disparaging to the mentally ill; and/or b) doing so minimizes the ability to critique this crime as a product of other objectionable societal trends (e.g. misogyny, permissive gun laws).

-Discussions about how this is the result of misogyny and a pervasive attitude of entitlement by men to sexual access to women.

-Pornography and video games are to blame.

-Women are to blame. (I won’t go into details about this argument — coming from a site that adds weight to the complaints about misogyny)

-Race and religion. If this man were black or Muslim, the media narrative wouldn’t be about a crazy loner.

-Whether he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and whether those with Asperger’s are prone to violence.

The frame that seemed to fall in place for me was of a guy who was misogynistic on an even deeper level than merely hating women. Rather, his disregard of women as objects and baubles was deep enough that much of his anger wasn’t for the women in particular, but for the “lesser men” who were with those women. As if the women themselves were a means of keeping score as to how he ranked against the other men and that they weren’t keeping score fairly. (But, disclaimer, that was based on the little bit of his rants that I read about — I didn’t much have the stomach to wade through all of it.)

I’m sure I am missing any number of potential narratives to “explain” this crime. But I’ll be watching with interest the efforts we take to explain this to ourselves.

Network Indiana via WBAA has a story entitled “Indiana Senate President Pushes for a Constitutional Convention.”

Delegates gather in Indianapolis next month to lay the groundwork for a constitutional convention. Indiana is one of more than 20 states to call for a convention to consider amending the Constitution.

Senate President Pro Tem David Long (R-Fort Wayne) has backed the effort, in hopes of drafting an amendment to realign the balance between state and federal power, and, in his words, bring the national debt under control.

Those sound like good things, obviously. But the devil is in the details and, really, there is no need to call a Constitutional convention to enact the desired policies. There is just a lack of political will.

For his part, Long envisions a convention which is narrow in scope. But revolutions often get away from their bourgeois instigators. Once a Constitutional Convention was opened up, I would anticipate radical factions taking over.

For reference, here is the Constitutional Amendment process:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.