A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Two stories on littering caught my eye.

Robin Gibson, writing for the Muncie Star Press, has a story about littering in Muncie and an organization that helps clean it up. The AP has a story that appears in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette about junk that’s been in a ravine since 1957.

Generally, littering speaks of laziness and a pretty significant sense of entitlement. Rather than taking the usually minimal effort of getting trash to some appropriate spot, the person is going to inflict their trash on the rest of the world. My anecdotal experience is that smokers are often the most frequent offenders. For some reason, many of them think nothing of flicking their filters on the ground as if, for some reason, they don’t “count” as litter.

I had not seen the news about Gov. Pence taking the talking point about the supposed scientific consensus in the 70s about “global cooling” or a new ice age. This is a bit of handwaving intended to discredit the current scientific consensus about human caused climate change. Silly eggheads are always changing their minds. Aren’t they silly?

In this story about our IDEM official conflating “local weather” with “climate,” the AP states:

In February, Gov. Mike Pence said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wasn’t sure climate change was caused by human activities.

“We haven’t seen a lot of warming lately,” Pence said.

“I remember back in the ’70s, we were talking about the emerging ice age,” he said. “We’ll leave the scientific debate to the future.”

Who can say whether that light coming at us down the tunnel is a body smashing freight train or not? We’ll leave that debate to the people who write our obituaries.

In any event, someone who actually cared about the realities of scientific thought in the 70s went back and took a look at what scientists were actually saying back then:

Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”

As for the IDEM guy who took our unusually cold weather as an opportunity to suggest that it disproves the idea of global warming, turns out that “Indiana” is not “the earth.”

Baugues wrote to his staff on March 19 in response to their outcry. But he stuck by his position, calling himself “a skeptic on global warming.”

“It seems silly to be talking about global warming at a time when we were having extremely cold unseasonable weather,” he wrote.

Although January was indeed unusually cold across much of the United States, it was actually the fourth-warmest January on record worldwide, according to Lonnie G. Thompson, an Ohio State University professor of earth sciences.

Updated: The original post was from April 6, 2014 – I’m updating this on May 15, 2017, to add a link to this 2013 column debunking the “ice age scare of the 1970s” myth and a link to this story about Trump’s staff giving him a fake Time cover hoax as real news about the 70s ice age myth.

Keith Roysdon, writing for the Muncie Star Press, reports that the long struggling Cedarbridge Juvenile Facility has closed.

Cedarbridge Treatment Centers — which recently told other Indiana county court systems it would be relocating and moving their juveniles — closed on Thursday. Employees told The Star Press on Tuesday that representatives from Cedarbridge’s corporate office in Indianapolis loaded the last 19 or so juvenile inmates into vans on Thursday and took them away, presumably to a facility in Ladoga in West Central Indiana.
. . .
In early 2013, the Indiana Department of Correction reported on inspections of the facility by noting, “Cedarbridge Treatment Center has not demonstrated an ability to ensure long-term compliance with the Indiana juvenile detention standards or an ability to improve and maintain the quality of confinement for youth entrusted to their care.”

I just read a joke in an alumni magazine Miami sent to my house, presumably in hopes that I would supplement my tuition with additional contributions to that institution.

“Politics. Remember the word. It came to us from the Greeks. Poli, meaning many, and tics, meaning blood sucking insects.”

It’s a hackey joke, but more than that, it speaks of an alienation from the political process. Government isn’t “them.” Or at least it shouldn’t be. Government is “us” — it’s a tool we use to accomplish our goals. Allowing government to be “them” seems like an abdication of civic responsibility.

I get the temptation. It’s emotionally satisfying to be a victim of “them,” to only include in “us” people who are alike. If you are separate, then you can remain pure without working very hard at it.

This is as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else who happens to read this.

Charles Marohn, writing at Strong Towns, has a post entitled “The Lexus Lane.”

His opening grabbed my attention:

I penned an opinion piece in the Minnesota Daily about congestion pricing back when I was an undergraduate in civil engineering school. At that point in my life I believed – like most Americans today believe – that gas taxes pay for the cost of highways, that any lack of funding was due to bloated bureaucrats taking money from roads to pay for other things and that rural areas generated most of the revenue in the system. If that article surfaced today, it may be a bit scandalous, especially given how much my understanding has changed over the years.

So, here today, he’s trying to come up with good policies to generate and allocate revenue for transportation in a optimal way. Too much, he figures, is being spent on building and maintaining roads with under-used capacity and not enough – I suppose – for roads with over-used capacity.

He suggests:

Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.

With that approach, I see a system that would ultimately be always slightly congested for everyone, but slightly less congested for the wealthy. Still, it’s worth thinking about. We need good transportation policy and good ways of figuring out where to put limited dollars.

Austin Frakt, writing in The Incidental Economist, has a good post on studies that have provided some insight into “job lock” caused by our health care policies. This is the latest in a series of posts along these lines and this one deals specifically with “entrepreneurship lock.” In other words, do people forego starting and running their own businesses because they need healthcare through another employer.

The preponderance of evidence from the literature is that “entrepreneurship lock” exists, though there are varying estimates of its extent.

I’ve always thought health care and employers go together like fish and bicycles. I would have preferred that Obamacare go further in decoupling the two things.

The Indiana Law Blog raises an interesting point that I’ve found mildly irritating for years. The underlying post is about Speaker Bosma’s request for an opinion about whether Rep. Turner violated ethics laws or other authorities by lobbying for a family member’s nursing home business. But that led Ethics Committee chairperson Rep. Steuerwald to voice concerns about the investigation potentially running up against confidentiality concerns with legislative caucuses.

Legislative caucuses are, generally speaking, where members of the same political party in a chamber (e.g. House Republicans, Senate Democrats) meet behind closed doors to discuss strategy.

Generally speaking, I think private discussions have some utility. For example, members can speak their mind without fearing that some poorly articulated nuance is going to be thrown in their face at the next political campaign. So, I’m not entirely against these private discussions. My gripe is that the General Assembly does not extend the same privilege to other public bodies. Under the Open Door Law, other boards, commissions, departments and offices exercising administrative, judicial or legislative power aren’t entitled to meet in private to hash out a decision in advance.

Whatever standard the General Assembly applies to itself should also be applied to other state and local boards and commissions. It’s a goose and gander thing.