Monthly Archives: July 2012

Your Virtual Front Page, Tuesday, July 31, 2012

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Just very quickly:

  1. India’s Power Grid Collapses (WSJ) — More than twice as many people as live in all the United States are without power, calling into question the viability of the infrastructure of Asia’s third-largest economy.
  2. ‘Thousands trapped’ in Syria city (BBC) — While the rest of us are dazzled by sport, the Beeb keeps its eye on the ball.
  3. Boehner, Reid reach short-term spending deal (WashPost) — For “short-term,” read “until after the election.” Hmm. This raises a question: Can Boehner make a deal like this? Did he check with Cantor?
  4. Phelps Sets New Olympic Record With 19 Medals (NPR) — Oh, wait — were you waiting to see this on TV tonight? Too late — everybody’s reported it.
  5. Romney campaign attacks media (The Guardian) — “Kiss my ass. This is a Holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.” It now joins “nattering nabobs of negativism” among the annals of warfare between GOP pols and the American news media.
  6. Partisan Rifts Hinder Efforts to Improve U.S. Voting System (NYT) — This is the kind of “thumb-sucker” (to use the phrase of a national editor who once worked for me) that the NYT saves to top its report with on a slow news day. The premise: “Twelve years after a too-close-to-call presidential contest in Florida ended in a divisive Supreme Court ruling, the United States’ voting methods are as laden with problems as ever…”

I know my mix is missing anything local, but I could not find anything worthy. I’ve no idea what The State will put on its front tomorrow…

A blast from SC’s past (and present, alas)

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There was a meme bouncing around on Twitter this morning having to do with the expression “dog whistle politics.” It’s a phrase you’ve probably heard before, which is easy to understand intuitively, but I was curious about its provenance, so I looked it up. And I found a little gem that, if I had read it before, I had forgotten.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on the term. WARNING: OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE:

One group of alleged code words in the United States is claimed to appeal to racism of the intended audience. The phrase “states’ rights“, although literally referring to powers of individual state governments in the United States, was described by David Greenberg in Slate as “code words” for institutionalized segregation and racism.[8] In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater when giving an anonymous interview discussing the GOP’s Southern Strategy, said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”[9][10]

Assuming that actually was South Carolina’s own Lee Atwater speaking (and it sounds like him), that’s the most direct line I’ve ever seen drawn — by an insider, that is — from the old segregationist politics, through the Southern Strategy and the redefinition of the Solid South, to today’s anti-government, anti-tax ideology.

The implication has been, ever since we entered this phase, that government is all about taking money from people like us and giving it to those people. Which of course is an idiotic understanding of what government is and whom it benefits, but it’s a line of thinking we often hear, with varying degrees of explicitness.

The thing is, most of the anti-government crowd would be furious at being called racist, and would indignantly point to Tim Scott and the sometimes nonwhite Nikki Haley as “proof” that they haven’t a racist bone in their bodies. And indeed, some of them (such as Mark Sanford, and his longtime friend and ally Tom Davis) are just natural-born libertarians. But far, far from all.

The thing about Atwater was that unlike the true believers, he was aware of what he was doing. That’s what made him so good at it.

Of course, as he points out, this is a process of distillation that takes us from the physical-world idea of race and transforms it to a pure abstraction that doesn’t literally bear on skin color. So it actually does become something other than racism, a set of attitudes more intellectualized than merely a visceral response to melanin. So those who become indignant at cries of “racism” do have a leg to stand on, and get angrier and angrier at having such an epithet flung at them. And so the back-and-forth accusations about what such attitudes really imply leads to even greater alienation, and the polarization of our politics gets worse and worse.

But you knew that, right?

Your Virtual Front Page, Monday, July 30, 2012

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A slow news day, on the cusp of the official Dog Days, but hey — that just makes it a challenge:

  1. Syria army steps up Aleppo attack (BBC) — One part of the world that does not have “slow news days.” You might also be interested to read this NPR story, Is Assad Carving Out A Haven For Syria’s Alawites? And this from The Guardian: Al-Qaida turns tide in battle for eastern Syria.
  2. Aurora Suspect Charged With 24 Counts Of Murder (NPR) — And 116 cases of attempted murder. You didn’t have to be hit for it to be attempted murder, of course.
  3. Insurance Rebates Seen as Selling Point for Health Law (NYT) — Hey, did you get yours? Mine was just under $100. Doesn’t affect what I think of Obamacare, though.
  4. Romney’s remark creates new stir on overseas trip (WashPost) — Fresh from insulting the Brits, he ticks off the Palestinians.
  5. Three people in Midlands have tested positive for West Nile virus (thestate.com) — This is obviously a very serious situation, since all three cases were middle-aged men!
  6. Anti-Putin Punk Band Pleads Not Guilty (WSJ) — I just thought this had a lot of man-bites-dog elements. Or rather, punk-girl-bites-Putin elements. Including the fact that it’s the most prominent story on WSJ at the moment, which is an additional irony. Here’s a picture of the girls.

Then, of course, there’s the Olympics. An American won gold today. But I figure you know that’s going on…

So, are we ‘allowed’ to ask about THIS?

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This came during today’s Rotary meeting, while I was hearing Robbie Kerr talking about Obamacare. (More about that later.):

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – Gov. Nikki Haley’s husband Michael is being deployed to Afghanistan with South Carolina’s National Guard.

Gubernatorial spokesman Rob Godfrey says Michael Haley received his orders Monday and is leaving the country in January.

Michael Haley is a first lieutenant with the South Carolina Army National Guard. Col. Pete Brooks says Haley is being deployed as an individual and will be a liaison between an agricultural unit and Afghan leaders.

He is slated to return to the United States in December…

So, the first thing that pops into my head is, If we have any questions about this, are we “allowed” to ask them? As you’ll recall from last week’s long-awaited story:

At an impromptu press conference last week, a reporter for WSPA-TV in Spartanburg, Robert Kittle, asked Haley about her daughter working at the gift shop.

“Y’all are not allowed to talk about my children,” Haley responded…

I feel I need to check. It used to be we had the First Amendment, but now we have to check with Nikki. It’s confusing.

By the way, I neglected to post the video of that the other day. Sorry. Here it is:

Is the number of handicapped spaces proportional?

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I often find myself wondering what sorts of formulas are used by the people who lay out parking lots to decide how many spaces to dedicate to handicapped parking. However they do it, they often seem to be wildly off.

For instance, look at these photos I took late last week, in the middle of a weekday, at the Target at Woodhill shopping center. You can see the two views more or less from the same vantage point. In the photo above, I’m looking slightly to my right, toward the store entrance. You see a huge expanse of spaces that are empty, because they are reserved for handicapped parking.

Turn slightly to the left, and you see the tightly packed “regular” parking. (Yes, I was in part motivated to shoot this by the Karmann Ghia in the foreground — I love those cars.)

Something seems off, although it probably isn’t.

I say it probably isn’t because, if I backed away and took a picture of the whole parking lot, the number of “regular” spaces would be proportional to the handicapped — and if, say around Christmas, the whole lot were nearly full, so would be the handicapped spaces. But it seems to the casual observer, day to day, like the number of handicapped spaces are disproportional in relation to the demand.

I worry a bit that the fact that it seems disproportional could undermine public support for handicapped spaces in general, since folks so often find themselves walking past so very many empty ones.

Maybe there would be a way to shift the number of dedicated handicapped spaces according to the demand at different times, the way some cities change the direction of some lanes according to which way rush hour traffic is going.

Or maybe, just maybe, those of us who have two good legs and relatively good health should shut up and walk the few extra yards without complaining. If for no better reason, because it helps to keep us healthy …

The Raskolnikov Syndrome

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This wonderful photo, entitled "Portrait of Raskolnikov," was taken by Samanyu Sharma of India. I hope he doesn't mind my using it here; it just illustrated my point so well. I couldn't figure out how to contact him.

“You’re crazy,” Clevinger shouted vehemently, his eyes filling with tears. You’ve got a Jehovah complex… You’re no better than Raskolnikov –“
“Who?”
“–yes, Raskolnikov, who–“
“Raskolnikov!”
“– who — I mean it — who felt he could justify killing an old woman –“
“No better than?”
“– yes, justify, that’s right — with an ax! And I can prove it to you!”

I’ve long had this theory that people who do truly horrendous things that Ordinary Decent People can’t fathom do them because they’ve actually entered another state of being that society, because it is society, can’t relate to.

Quite simply, people like James Eagan Holmes are able to spend time planning a mass murder, prepare for it, gather guns and ammunition and explosives and body armor, and actually go to the intended scene of the crime and carry it out, without ever stopping and saying, “Hey, wait a minute — what am I doing?” because they’re not interacting enough with other human beings.

This allows their thoughts, unchecked, to wander off to strange places indeed — and stay there, without other people making social demands on them that call them back.

I think there’s a quality in the social space between people that assesses the ideas we have in our heads and tells us whether they are ideas worth having, or so far beyond the pale that we should stop thinking them. This vetting doesn’t have to be conscious; it’s not like you’re overtly throwing the idea out there and seeking feedback. I think that in your own mind, you constantly test ideas against what you believe the people around you would think of them, and it naturally affects how you regard the ideas yourself. I think this happens no matter how independent-minded you think you are, no matter how introverted in the Jungian sense. Unless, of course, you are a true sociopath. And I believe a lack of sufficient meaningful interaction with other people you care about plays a big factor in turning you into one of those.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov was the perfect case, fitting all the criteria we keep hearing about. Brilliant young mind, but he suffered a series of setbacks that embarrassed him and caused him to draw away from his friends. Living hundreds if not thousands of miles from his family, he was forced by lack of money to drop out of school. Rather than make money doing the translations his friend Razumikhin tried to throw his way, he fell to brooding in his ratty garret, or wandering alone through the crowded city, thinking — and not sharing his thoughts.

His murderous plan started with a provocative, if not quite mad, idea that he wrote an essay about — setting out the theory that extraordinary people who were destined to do extraordinary things for the world had a right, if not a duty, to step over the normal social rules and boundaries that restricted ordinary people. Had he been in contact with friends and family, they would have challenged him on this, as Razumikhin did late in the book, when he learned of the essay. Maybe they wouldn’t have changed his mind, in the abstract, but if he had been having dinner each night with his mother and sister, and going out for drinks regularly with Razumikhin, it would have been impossible for him to have carried it to the next level.

I’m not saying he would ever have run the idea up the flagpole with his friends and family, and then been checked outright. He wouldn’t have said, “I think my idea’s a good one, so you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to kill that old woman I keep pawning my possessions with, and take her money, and go back to school and achieve my potential.” No. What I’m suggesting is that if you are constantly around normal, decent human beings who care about you, who ground you in humanity, you won’t allow your thoughts to run that far out of bounds. You’ll check yourself.

My “proof” for this theory — which I’m sure has occurred to thousands of other people (I don’t share Raskolnikov’s delusions about my own brilliance) — lies in what happened when, unexpectedly, his mother and sister appear in his life again, right before him in his own dingy room.

It happens after Raskolnikov has committed his crime — a crime that that has an emotional impact on him he didn’t anticipate, although he’s more or less holding up. He has renewed acquaintance with Razumikhin, a bit late for any positive socializing influence to prevent the murders.

And he comes home, and BANG, there are the two most important people to him in the world, the people whose absence had sent him into such a tailspin:

The 40 years since I read that played a trick on me. I could have sworn that the passage was more specific about exactly what happened in his mind when he saw his mother and sister. I thought it said something like, “In that moment, it came to him in a flash what he had done.”

And maybe the translation I read did. Or maybe I was just so sure that that was the “sudden and insupportable thought” that “chilled him to the marrow.”

In any case, it still seems clear that while he had been able to think of his crime in one way in isolation — a way that actually made it possible — he didn’t truly realize what he had done, in human terms, until suddenly faced with the two people who most mattered to him, and who would be most horrified, to the cores of their souls, to know what he had done. He saw himself, and all he was and all his actions, in an entirely different way through their eyes.

Under my theory, if he had been in regular contact with his mother and sister, he would have had that realization long before getting to the point of committing his crime.

Nice job of repairing the ol’ Special Relationship there, Mitt. You trying to restart the War of 1812?

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Well, you know how that awful Obama person went and insulted our Cousins across the water by dissing the Churchill bust?

Fortunately, Mitt Romney, a.k.a. The Mighty Mighty White Man, hopped across the pond to set things straight.

Above was the result. That’s from The Sun. Very lively newspaper industry they still have over there. Here’s more on the subject.

Anyway, the White House has really, really been enjoying this. And and at least one of Romney’s likely supporters is highly dismayed:

As Charles Krauthammer, who is probably Obama’s most vitriolic foreign policy critic on the right, put it, Romney really didn’t have to do much more than show up for the trip to be a success. Instead, he opened his mouth and undermined both of his goals. Whatever the right might say about the Obama administration damaging the “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K., Obama has never caused an incident like the one Romney did yesterday. As an exasperated Krauthammer remarked last night, “All Romney has to do, say nothing. It’s like a guy in the 100-meter dash. All he has to do is to finish, he doesn’t have to win. And instead, he tackles the guy in the lane next to him and ends up disqualified. I don’t get it.”

People are hiding from me! On purpose! In 2012, when all info is supposed to be easily accessible!

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Yes, we live in amazing times, even though we still don’t have flying cars.

Michael Rodgers is NOT hiding.

Just one example, from today, of the sort of miracle we take for granted, but which would have sounded like the wildest sort of science fiction back in, say, 1987 — the year I came to Columbia to become governmental affairs editor.

We were kicking around an idea for a TV commercial for a potential client, and suddenly I had a sort of half-memory of having seen an ad, long ago, that did something familiar. I whipped my iPhone from its holster (and if I wanted so see Cleavon Little say, “Just let me whip dis out” in “Blazing Saddles” within a few seconds, I’d do the same), and found a reference to the ad I was thinking of within 30 seconds. Within another 30 — still using my phone (my own  personal phone that goes everywhere I go, which was conceivable in 1987 but still fantastic) — I was watching that ad on YouTube. An ad that last ran in — get ready for it — 1987.

If, in 1987, I had wanted to find out about an ad from 1962, I would have had to spend half the day or more at the library, and whether I even found a reference to it would depend on some pretty tedious guesswork with a periodicals index, and I would have to cross my fingers for a miracle hoping that the library stocked that particular publication, and kept them going back 25 years.

Kathryn Fenner is NOT hiding.

As for actually seeing the ad, without a trip to New York or L.A. and a pretty tedious search once I got there — well, I would have been s__t out of luck, to use the technical term. Oh, maybe if I reached the right person on the phone in one of those places, and they were willing to make me a VHS tape and mail it to me, I might get to see it within a week. But it would have been iffy at best.

Anyway, I say all this to express my appreciation for all the things we can so easily find and experience now, right at our fingertips.

But this post is about the things we can’t, and how frustrating that is.

Phillip Bush is NOT hiding.

Today, the very day of the 1987 ad miracle, I was looking for a mug shot for my contacts list. You know how Google Contacts and iPhones and even Blackberries and Palms allow you to attach a picture of a person to their contact info? Well, I try to take advantage of that whenever I create a new contact. It usually only takes a few seconds. (It took me maybe a minute total to find the four mugs you see here, using Google Images.) I do this because I’m terrible at keeping names and faces straight — I know, or sorta know, too many people for that. By having this feature in widely used software, we are encouraged to do this. It’s normal. (If you had tried it in 1962 — the way the dwarf character did to Mel Gibson’s character in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” keeping a dossier on him and other friends — it would have creeped people out.)

For instance, if you Google me, you get a lot of pictures that are not me, but just people associated with me, but in the first couple of pages of results, there are about 17 images of yours truly. That’s high, on account of my blog and my long association with the newspaper, but not all that high. I get similar results with a lot of people on my contacts list.

But then… every once in a while… there’s someone I can’t find. Sometimes it’s understandable. They are quiet people who work in some private business that doesn’t require a lot of public interaction. But sometimes… it’s like Winston Smith and the gang in 1984 have expunged the person from existence.

Today, it was someone who actually leads a very public organization that advocates on behalf of a very hot local political issue. I had that person’s contact info, from an email, and while I could sort of picture the person in my mind from past interactions, I wanted the crutch of having the mug shot there in case memory failed me at a critical moment.

Doug Ross is NOT hiding.

And I could not find this person anywhere. Eventually, I set my pride aside and tried her Facebook page, which for me is really last-ditch (and feels, even in 2012, even for an unreconstructed journalist, a bit like prying sometimes). And discovered that this was one of those people who not only doesn’t have her own face as her profile picture, but doesn’t have a single image in which she appears among any of her Facebook photos.

At which point I started hearing that little dee-dee-DEE-dee music from “The Twilight Zone.”

Yeah, I realize, some people are just private, as anachronistic as that is in 2012. But I don’t see how a person who is heavily involved in the community manages to disappear so completely.

Thoughts about this? Does this happen to you? Does it drive you nuts? It does me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. Information is normally so extremely accessible, that when it isn’t, it just seems wrong…

The news story that was (in part) about itself

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You may or may not have seen that the finished version of the story about the ramifications of Nikki Haley’s daughter getting a PRT job finally appeared in The State today. Of course, it was far more involved and complete than the “draft” version that appeared inadvertently on the web pages of The Rock Hill Herald and (so I’m told) The Charlotte Observer last week.

In the end, the story turned out to be almost as much about itself as about the suggestion of nepotism.

While nothing can really erase the embarrassment for the newspaper of readers knowing about the story for a week before it appeared, the editors did everything they possibly could to make up for it. Most importantly, they thoroughly explored the ridiculous “controversy,” generated by the governor herself, about whether it should be published.

I particularly like the sidebar box that lists all the perfectly rational, professional questions that the newspaper had been asking the governor’s office from the beginning of this silly saga, followed by the immature, petulant, emotional statement from the governor’s office, refusing to answer those questions — all of which a public official who actually does believe in transparency would have answered immediately. Let’s quote that sidebar in full:

Questions, but no answers

Emailed questions sent by a State reporter to the governor’s office on Monday, July 16. (The State has removed the name of the governor’s daughter in the email exchange below.)

Here are my questions about (NAME REMOVED) Haley working at the State House gift shop:

When was she hired? When she did she start work? Will she continue to work at the shop after school starts?

What are her duties?

How many hours a week does she work?

How much is she paid?

Is this her first job?

Who does she report to? How many people work at the shop?

Was this job posted to the public? (If so, can I see a copy of the posting?)

Was the job budgeted? (If not, how was this job added and funded?)

Were work hours of shop employees adjusted to accommodate (NAME REMOVED)?

Why did her parents choose the gift shop as a place to work?

Some people might not think it’s fair for (NAME REMOVED) to have a job tied to a state agency where the director is appointed by her mother (PRT). Response?

If the governor’s office has concerns about (NAME REMOVED)’s safety, about the public knowing where she works, why does she have a job at one the state’s most-prominent and most-visited historical sites?

Would she have needed additional security if she got a job outside the State House?

The governor’s office response

Sent on Tuesday, June 17

What follows constitutes our office’s response for any story you plan to write regarding (NAME REMOVED) Haley.

Quote from Rob Godfrey, Haley spokesman: “The State newspaper – the reporter who wrote it, editors who approved it, and ownership who published it – should be ashamed for printing details of a fourteen year old’s life and whereabouts, against the wishes of her parents and the request of the Chief of SLED, who is ultimately responsible for her security. We have nothing more to say.”

Quote from South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel: “I have expressed my concerns, as of yesterday, that publication of information regarding minor children of elected officials creates problems for State Law Enforcement and its efforts to provide security for the children of this governor or any governor. In my 30 years-plus of experience at SLED, the security or activities of minor children of elected officials is something that the media in general has taken a ‘hands off’ approach to in reporting except as officially released by the elected official’s office.”

Did the newspaper manage to convey to you that it was going out of its way not to name the child, or do you need to get hammered over the head with (NAME REMOVED) a couple more times? No? OK, good, we’ll move on…

The story was unaccompanied by editorial comment (unless you count Mark Lett’s statement of the newsroom’s thinking on publishing the story), but for anyone able to put two and two together, the lesson to be learned here is obvious: This governor, when backed into a corner, will use hypocritical obfuscation in an effort to manipulate an emotional backlash reaction from her base so that she can hide behind it, rather than give straight answers.

Most telling on that score was the fact that Gov. Haley herself has consistently disclosed information about her children and their doings, even to providing the name of her daughter’s orthodontist — and yet has the nerve to (apparently) induce the head of SLED to say, absurdly, that disclosing that her daughter has a job that is just outside the governor’s office and protected by more than one layer of security somehow threatens her safety. Yes, any information published about any person’s whereabouts could, conceivably, make that person marginally less safe. So maybe the governor will think about that in the future when she posts on Facebook.

Substantively, in terms of the bare bones of the original story, what this story contained that last week’s draft did not were some basic facts that Nikki provided to the Charleston paper after refusing to answer The State (more petulance): such as her daughter’s hours, and what she was being paid. (Actually, the Charleston story turned out to be less about the governor, and more about the continuing, puzzling absence of the story from The State.)

No one who brought the draft story to my attention ever mentioned the one significant fact that was missing from it: What the child was being paid, or even whether she was being paid. This seems to be what held up the story. I think that’s a lousy excuse to hold the story– I would simply have written, we don’t know whether she’s being paid because the officials who should tell us refuse to — but it does seem to explain the delay. As soon as it had that information, from the third party, the paper ran the story.

Nikki Haley will continue, to the extent she acknowledges this story’s subject, to try to dupe her base into rage that the paper intruded on her child’s privacy.

But to anyone with even a rudimentary capacity for reason, it should be obvious that this story, now that it has finally appeared, is not about a child. It’s about the governor’s childishness.

Could (should) Big Brother have stopped Holmes?

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Fascinating piece in the WSJ today, posing the following question:

Would Total Information Awareness have stopped James Eagan Holmes?

You perhaps remember the fuss. That program by the Defense Department was curtailed when the Senate voted to revoke funding amid a privacy furor in 2003. The project had been aimed partly at automatically collecting vast amounts of data and looking for patterns detectable only by computers.

It was originated by Adm. John Poindexter—yes, the same one prosecuted in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal—who said the key to stopping terrorism was “transaction” data. For terrorists to carry out attacks, he explained in a 2002 speech, “their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures in this information space.”

The Colorado shooter Mr. Holmes dropped out of school via email. He tried to join a shooting range with phone calls and emails going back and forth. He bought weapons and bomb-making equipment. He placed orders at various websites for a large quantity of ammunition. Aside from privacy considerations, is there anything in principle to stop government computers, assuming they have access to the data, from algorithmically detecting the patterns of a mass shooting in the planning stages?…

This not only evokes 1984, but the department of “pre-crime” envisioned in “Minority Report.” Which should send all sorts of shivers down the sensitive spines of libertarians.

But a legitimate question is being posed here. Since such data is being mined, should not someone be on the lookout for transactional patterns such as those Holmes engaged in? Guy suddenly isolates himself from society (a step leading to what I call the Raskolnikov syndrome), buys several rapid-fire weapons and lots and lots of ammunition? If it’s possible for such patterns to raise red flags, then shouldn’t it, if it can prevent the deaths of innocents?

In passing on this question, I’m not thinking in terms of having the cops bust down doors and file charges against people for having raised red flags. But I do think it might be worthwhile to have a chat with someone displaying such signs, to ascertain what is going on — or perhaps making the people in that person’s life aware of what’s happening, to empower them to intervene if they see fit. That could go a long way toward snapping some potential killers out of their trip down the rabbit hole.

As the columnist asks of the NSA: “Did it, or could it have, picked up on Mr. Holmes’s activities?” And if not, why not? And if it did, what should it have done?

Only Robinson Crusoe did it alone — and then only until Friday came along

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And note that not even he made the musket, or the hatchet.

Since I’m not at the paper any more, it fell to Cindi Scoppe to write this column that ran today, basically addressing the orgy of indignation among the libertarians who call themselves conservatives over President Obama’s unfortunate choice of words in explaining the painfully obvious fact that practically no one in our crowded, interdependent world achieves anything worthwhile alone:

A LOT OF what the president says and does is ripe for criticism. But what he said the other day about no one being an island, about how our parents and our communities and our teachers and mentors and, yes, our government all contributed to our success is not one of those things.

If you’re wondering who in the world would criticize such obvious commentary, it’s because you don’t recognize the full context of that bizarre, ridiculous, one hopes bungled quote that came in the middle of it: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”…

Of course business owners built their businesses — unless they inherited them or bought them from someone who did. Their initiative and hard work and luck set them apart.

As important as parents are to our success, one sibling can create a multi-billion-dollar business while another languishes on welfare. As much as we need good teachers, even the best have some students who drop out of school. Although government policy can give some businesses a leg up, others can go bankrupt even with too-generous government grants.

That’s because some people have initiative, and some do not. Some people are creative, and some are not. Some people are smart, and some are not. And while the schools can affect which group any individual is in, government does not eliminate those basic differences.

At the same time though, the vast majority of people who own businesses would not have been able to do that if we didn’t have a monetary system and a court system and roads and police and other functions of government. The vast majority of people who have any sort of success would not have it in a world without government. In fact, they wouldn’t have it if not for the peculiar kind of government that our country embraced from the start: self-government.

Can, and should, our government be more efficient? Of course so. Is there room to debate whether the government should bail out the banks or the auto industry or help pay for our medical care? By all means. Is there a legitimate question as to whether taxes are too high or too low? Certainly.

But the vast majority of Americans would not have the lives we take for granted — lives that are inconceivably luxurious compared to the lives lived by the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history — if it weren’t for our flawed but better-than-any-alternatives government.

Seems to me Cindi was being slightly over-cautious in saying that only “the vast majority of people” would have gotten nowhere without the basic conditions — civil order, rule of law, basic infrastructure — that are provided through the processes we call “government.” I suppose there are some to whom that doesn’t apply, but very few. It’s even harder to think of anyone who accomplished anything worthwhile completely and utterly alone — without anyone, whether you’re talking about government or not.

I suppose there’s Robinson Crusoe — that is, until Friday came along. This reminds me of an economics exercise we did in high school. We had to suppose we were stranded on a desert island, and we had to allocate our resources — which included time, and effort — so as to survive. This much time building a shelter out of available materials meant that much less time spent gathering food. X amount of time spent making a tool that would facilitate building that shelter cuts the construction time, leaving more time to weave a net to make fishing easier, etc.

A castaway who is completely alone can create something useful — to him, anyway — without anyone else’s involvement. But a business, in our crowded society? Well, to start with, you have to have customers. And then, depending on your business, there are suppliers, and vendors providing services that it would be inefficient to perform yourself. And as you grow, there are employees who become essential to your further growth, etc. Without the willing participation of those often vast networks of people, you can work and create all you want, but you’re not getting anywhere.

The extreme libertarians would put government in another category from just “people.” But in our system, the government and the people are the same thing. “Government” is just the word for the set of arrangements that we have among us, the people, for handling certain things that are best handled that way, such as building roads or deepening a port or passing and enforcing the laws without which the concept of private property is meaningless.

In fact, if I had a quibble with Cindi’s column, it would be that, in her litany of things for which government is essential, she kept referring to government as “it.” As in, “It creates and maintains a monetary system,” and “It provides a civil justice system…”

Given the screwy way so many of our neighbors these days think of government, that can be misunderstood as government being some separate entity that provides certain things to us, the people. But it’s not that at all. A better word than “it” would be “we,” because government is simply the process through which we create and maintain a monetary system, provide a civil justice system, and so forth.

Government does not give or take away. It’s just the arrangements through which we, the people, do certain things that we decide, through our system of representative democracy, are best done that way.

Show the man we’re serious, little guy!

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"And there are no penalties for paying it off early, right?

I had an appointment this morning with a man at Palmetto Citizens to talk about refinancing the house, seeing as how interest rates are about half what we’ve been paying. (There’s no time like the present, folks — see the ad at right.)

So my wife walked me through all the documents she had gathered in preparation, and I nodded, and eventually said, slightly hyperbolically, “You realize I don’t understand any of this,” and she said she knew — but she had to be at my son’s house this morning taking care of our grandson.

In the end, she decided to bring him to the meeting. I could have handled it, you understand. I understood the broad concepts, and knew that we were shooting for a number that would enable us to wrap together the basic mortgage and our home equity loan into one payment that was sufficiently lower than our total now that we can still pay it off, via overpayments, in five more years — which is when we’d be done with our current 15-year mortgage. I had, after all, suggested we do this. Actually, I meant that I wanted her to do it, but you know what I mean.

I had the bundles of documents, and the numbers written out in front of me, and was all set. Except that she and I both felt better with her there, and doing  the talking, while I rocked my grandson’s carryall back and forth, and jiggled my keys in front of him.

But I tried to act like I was following the proceedings, with a fixed look of concentration on my face — just like our little guy in this picture taken during the meeting. We were a team, and together we got through it, and it’s looking good…

2012 electoral math (as usual, SC influence=zero)

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Paul “The Forehead” Begala, writing about the swing voters in those six states that are still in play in the 2012 presidential election, runs the numbers for us:

The truth is, the election has already been decided in perhaps as many as 44 states, with the final result coming down to the half-dozen states that remain: Virginia and Florida on the Atlantic Coast, Ohio and Iowa in the Midwest, and New Mexico and Colorado in the Southwest.

But of course not everyone in those closely divided states will make an electoral difference. We can almost guarantee that 48 percent of each state’s voters will go for Obama, and another 48 percent will decide for Romney. And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states.

I did the math so you won’t have to. Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year—and my beloved Astros sucked last year; they were the worst team in baseball. Put another way, there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election. That’s not even as many people as attended Puerto Rican cockfights in the past year—-although there are obvious similarities.

And, oh, the lengths we will go to reach those magical 916,643. The political parties, the campaigns, the super PACs (one of which, the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action, I advise), will spend in excess of $2 billion—mostly just to reach those precious few. That works out to $2,181.87 per voter—or as Mitt Romney might call it, pocket change…

There’s nothing wrong with the election being decided by we few, we unhappy few, swing voters. What’s awful is that your favorite swing voter, founder of the UnParty himself, yours truly, is not among those whose vote counts. On account of how, during my lifetime, the overwhelming majority of my fellow South Carolinians have done some extreme swinging of their own, switching from never considering voting for a Republican to never considering voting for a Democrat.

Which is a shame. Since we have now totally blown our status as the state that picks the eventual nominees (the Republican ones, anyway) by that Gingrich snit back in January, it would be really nice if the nation had to hold its breath to see which way we choose to go.

But it is not to be.

Driveby Beat, Hawaiian Style: Thanks for sharing, Burl!

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On a previous post, I noted that years ago I lobbied for creation of a “driveby beat” at The State — to have a reporter dedicated to answering people’s understandable curiosity about things they drove by and wondered about in the Midlands. It would have been a wonderful way to root the paper and readers solidly in the community, aside from telling people something they actually wanted, and occasionally perhaps even needed, to know.

Also, it would satisfy my own curiosity about a lot of things, which to my mind was, to a great extent, what reporters were for. There was always that.

Anyway, it never happened — although I saw that today, The State actually did have a story about what was going on at the State Fairgrounds, which I had driven by and wondered about just yesterday.

Anyway, when I brought it up, Burl Burlingame noted that he actually used to have such a beat, which was his idea (it must have been subliminal planted in both our brains at Radford High School) at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Here and here and here are some links.

And here’s an excerpt from his “Wat Dat” (I don’t think I’ll have to translate that pidgin for you) feature:

Somebody whose name we can’t read – but who does draw a nice map – was curious about a brown statue or chimney standing at the end of row of trees just north of the Mililani exit.
It is a statue, and it’s of a tree trunk, rising more than 30 feet above a circular grassy platform, which is in turn surrounded by a large gravel walkway, which is atop a tall wall – kind of a rounded ziggurat – which is accessed by a grand tile stairway, which is approached by carefully tended Japanese gardens, which are guarded by carefully repaired antique marble Chinese lions, which are flanked by enormous granite slabs, which cap hobbit-like stools and benches that seem to be made out of logs but are really cast cement, which are parked beneath a series of carefully tended trees, which have the names of local politicians inscribed upon signs at the foot of each.

The area is grand and imposing, and at the same time intimate and quiet. It’s also generally deserted, which adds to the otherworldly experience.

This is one of the WatDatiest of WatDats to come along in some time!

The site is the local mission of the Honbushin Honbu, a Shinto religious sect with nearly a million followers, mostly in Japan. There is also a mission in China…

The “sculpture” is a koa log that seems to be protected by a coat of brown paint. It’s called “GENTEN,” which, translated from Japanese, means roughly “starting point” or “origin.”

The sculpture represents nature and the unity of hearts, religions and countries that work toward peace. Honbushin missionaries regularly gather around the genten and pray…

Of course, in Hawaii, the stuff you drive by and wonder about has a tendency to be slightly more exotic than what we have around here…

Take it from me, based on personal experience: Time travel’s just not worth the hassle

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I had a time-travel dream last night.

This is a first for me, which is sort of odd, given what a popular theme that is in movies. I’ve had dreams before in which I encounter people such as my grandparents who’ve been gone 40 years and more, but never a dream in which I was conscious of the fact that I, a denizen of the 21st century, was in another time.

What confirmed it this time was the price of gasoline: In the dream, it was 26 cents a gallon. Which means I landed somewhere between 1949 and 1959. I had a sense that it was within my lifetime, and a time I would have remembered, so we’re talking toward the last two or three years of that period. And no, I don’t remember what I was driving, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a DeLorean. It was probably something that didn’t look out of place.

That’s really all I can remember of the dream, but I recall a number of details about this gas station stop. I don’t specifically remember the attendants surrounding my vehicle to pump the gas, check the oil, clean the windshield, etc. I just remember staring at that pump price, and marveling at it.

Of course, it was the old-style pump, and the gauge had the old digital-yet-analog numbers — white on a black background — that physically clicked over to tote up the price as you pumped. The pumps looked kind of like the ones in this picture — the kind with rounded corners, like an old refrigerator, or a car from the early ’50s — only brand-new. The enamel paint on them was shiny white. I don’t recall the brand.

As it happened, my tank was almost full, to the point that I just needed slightly more than a gallon. My total was 35 cents. I felt this great disappointment that I hadn’t had an empty tank, so I could have the pleasure of filling it up for less than five bucks. I wondered whether I could spare the time to drive around a few hours and come back, just to experience that, before having to be wherever I had to be.

But then I realized I had a bigger problem than frivolous disappointment. I had no way of paying the 35 cents.

Out of habit, I was holding a debit card in my hand. I suddenly realized that not only was it useless — no way to swipe it — but I couldn’t let anybody see it, or it would raise questions I couldn’t answer: What’s this strip like recording tape on the back? What’s this shiny square that looks like a mirror, with the shifting image in it?…

I slipped the card into my pants pocket, and even before I started to feel around for change, I realized that even if I had some, none of it would pass a close look — or even the briefest glance, or touch, for that matter. Post-1964 “silver” coins are a different color from coins before that date, and feel different in the hand. They would look like what they are — cheap imitations of real silver. Never mind what would happen if somebody looked at the date, or if it were one of those quarters with the 50-states theme on the back: What’re you tryin’ to pull, Future-Boy?…

Without looking, I knew there was close to zero chance that I’d find a coin that would pass muster. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a pre-1964 quarter outside of a numismatist’s blue book? You still run across dimes and nickels that old, but they’re rare as hen’s teeth.

And don’t even think about trying to pass modern paper money. The shape, the color, the size of the presidents…

I started wondering whether the station manager would take barter (in which case, what did I have to trade that wouldn’t be suspicious?), or trust me for it while I tried to go scrounge the tiny amount I owed him, somehow. It was a tight spot.

And you know what? I’m not sure what I could have done to avoid this problem. I suppose I could have bought the coins from a collector before leaving the present, which would have totally ruined the joy of buying cheap gas, since the coins would have cost me many times their face value.

It’s all just a huge hassle. So take my advice, based on bitter experience: Forget about time travel. Just stay here in good ol’ 2012. Going back’s just not worth the trouble.

Shawarma: The lunch of superheroes

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The above sign, spotted today at Al Amir on Main St., got me to thinking of “The Avengers.”

Tony Stark: You ever try shawarma?

SPOILER ALERT! OK, not really, because it reveals nothing about the plot, although it will ruin a tiny little fun surprise. It’s just one of those little lagniappe things at the end of the credits. Although, come to think of it, this does tell you that all the heroes survive the movie, so SPOILER ALERT!

At the end of the climactic battle, as he’s lying dazed among the rubble, Robert Downey Jr., who as Iron Man has 90 percent of the movie’s good lines, reassures his comrades that he is alive by saying offhandedly, “You ever try shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don’t know what it is, but I wanna try it.”

Then, the fun part: After all the credits — apparently, Joss Whedon needed the help of about 3.7 million people to make this flick — you see the exhausted heroes lounging, disheveled, around a table in the shawarma joint, slowly munching away in complete silence. This continues for more than 30 seconds, as a restaurant employee sweeps up in the background.

This sort of backhanded, non-branded little product placement has apparently launched a bit of a shawarma craze:

Those of you still reading will likely recall Tony Stark’s fascination with shawarma toward the end of the film. During the climactic battle, Stark suggests the team adjourn to a nearby restaurant to try the dish, which Wikipedia describes as “a pita bread sandwich or wrap” filled with spit-roasted meat (commonly lamb, goat, chicken or a mixture of various meats). At the very, very end of the film, after the credits have rolled, we witness the superhero team sitting at a table, silently eating their shawarma for a surprisingly long amount of time.

Now, based on that short in-joke, TMZ claims that the Los Angeles shawarma industry has seen a massive spike in popularity since the release of the film. “At Ro Ro’s Chicken — a famed Lebanese joint in Hollywood — the manager says shawarma sales jumped 80% in the days after the movie opened,” the gossip site claims, while saying that a number of other Lebanese restaurants offered similar results…

That’s fine. Just as long as they don’t start rebranding it the Super-Gyro…

Haley suspended mayor who allegedly hired son

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Catching up with e-mail (my inbox is down to 296!), I came across one from several days back, from one of a number of readers who remain puzzled as to why The State still hasn’t published Gina Smith’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t story about Nikki Haley’s daughter getting a job working for an agency she supervises.

I wonder about it myself. But that’s not what this post is about. What it’s about is something else I had missed, and which this reader was attempting to bring to my attention:

The Associated Press

NORWAY, S.C. — The mayor of the Orangeburg County town of Norway has been indicted on charges of misconduct in office and nepotism.

Gov. Nikki Haley has suspended Jim Preacher from office while the charges are pending.

The indictment says Preacher gave himself a raise without the approval of the town council and hired his son at the town’s water treatment department…

There was more to it than that, including a bizarre alleged interaction between the mayor and a state trooper. One senses that more than nepotism brought the mayor to this pass. But what struck me was the irony that the governor has suspended this guy who among other things is charged of providing his son with a job in a department that apparently is under his purview.

Yet, in the story that briefly appeared in the Rock Hill Herald before disappearing, we found this:

State law prohibits public officials from causing the employment of a family member to a position they supervise or manage, according to the State Elections Commission. However, Haley does not supervise the gift shop; she supervises the agency that operates it, making the teen’s summer job permissible, an attorney with the commission said.

Really? So we’re to suppose that the governor’s position had nothing to do with an agency that reports to her deciding to hire a 14-year-old child?

This is a strange little story. To quote Jubal Harshaw, “this has more aspects than a cat has hair.”

Bob Inglis and market-driven environmentalism

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Inglis blowing bubbles during his speech. Yes, he was making a point, but it would take too many words to explain it here. You had to be there.

Don’t know whether you read Bob Inglis’ op-ed piece in The State the other day or not. An excerpt:

There is important work to be done in order to realize the full potential of South Carolina’s advanced-energy sector. We need less government and more free enterprise. Some clean-energy technologies are more cost-effective than fossil fuels, and others are not there yet. But even the most cost-effective clean fuels still routinely lose out to more expensive fossil fuels. Why? Because the energy market is not a free market.

Speaking at the Clean Energy Summit is timely for me because, a few days ago, I launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a national public-engagement campaign to promote conservative solutions to America’s energy challenges. One of our first efforts will be to convene forums around the country, much like the summit, that bring together economists, national-security experts, climate scientists and interested citizens to explore the power of free enterprise to solve our nation’s energy challenges. We’re going to be saying that, given a “true cost” comparison, free enterprise can deliver muscular solutions to our energy and climate challenges — solutions far better than clumsy government mandates and fickle tax incentives…

The day that appeared, he was speaking to the South Carolina Clean Energy Summit at the convention center. I attended the event, which was sponsored, understandably enough, by the South Carolina Clean Energy Business Alliance.

In case you wonder how Inglis gets to being an environmentalist from the perch of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative (which shouldn’t be puzzling — conservatives should by their nature want to conserve the environment, if words have meaning), here’s an example of how it works for him: The problem now, he explained, is that different sources of energy don’t compete on an even, market-driven playing field. For instance, the true cost of gasoline is hidden. If the full costs of our military operations in the Mideast were attached directly to the price of gasoline (as we in the Energy Party think it should be), “we’d beat a path to the Prius dealership.”

Some views of the Moore School that is to be

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This is a story from the “drive-by” beat that I always wanted The State to create, but it never did. The idea would have been to satisfy people’s curiosity about things they drive by every day and wonder about. Today, we answer the question of, “What’s that thing coming out of that hole in the ground next to the Carolina Coliseum?”

That was the subject of Hildy Teegen’s talk today to the Columbia Rotary Club. (Disclosure, to the extent that it means anything: I invited Hildy to speak to the club, and introduced her.)

Speaking to Rotary. That's Club President J.T. Gandolfo in the foreground.

It’s the new Moore School of Business, of which Dr. Teegen is the dean. It’s intended, among other things, as the gateway to the Innovista, and should go a long way toward helping people understand that Innovista is NOT those two buildings everybody keeps obsessing over, but will constitute a transformation for that whole underdeveloped urban expanse from this location down to the river.

Innovista is conceived around the “live, work, play” concept, and the new Moore school has been designed to complement that. The key word Hildy keeps using to describe it is “permeable.” That goes from the literal sense of the rooftop garden, to the fact that it will be open to the whole community 24/7. In fact, she pointed out, it is architecturally impossible to close off the building.

One of the goals is for the building to achieve “net-zero” status, meaning its energy and carbon impact on the surrounding community will be nonexistent.

The building, which is to be completed in December 2013, will house the nation’s No. 1 international business master’s program and all of the school’s other business education programs — such as the night school that has just entered the top 25 in the U.S — except, of course the multiple distance-learning opportunities the school offers across SC and in Charlotte.

You can see the entire PowerPoint presentation here. And here are some pictures:

So did they win those games, or didn’t they?

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Photo by Melissa Dale from Meadville, USA

First, I’d like to know whether this Penn State thing is over yet. Oh, I know it will never be over in terms of what happened to the victims of that pervert coach. May God ease their pain. I just want to know whether, now that he has been duly convicted, the bulletins will stop coming on my iPhone, and interrupting me as though war had been declared, as though what happens or doesn’t happen to a college football program in a whole other part of the country from me were of earth-shattering importance. Which it isn’t. I think it reached the height of absurdity on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) when I was awakened (I like to sleep late on weekends) by bulletins telling me that this Joe Paterno person’s statue was being taken down. Really. A statue.

As of this moment, there are four recent bulletins still available on my phone from The New York Times reaching back nine days. Two of them are about Penn State (one is about the Colorado shootings, the other about the new Yahoo CEO). I still have five WLTX bulletins, going back about two days (WLTX has a low “bulletin” threshold) . Two are about Penn State, one of them being about said statue. Another is also about college football, telling me that former Gamecock coach Jim Carlen has died. The other two are actually about things that people in the community might need to know about urgently — the standoff in Five Points on Saturday.

Now, another question…

The most recent bulletins to pester me had to do with this morning’s decision by the NCAA as to how it would punish Penn State, in the wake of last week’s finding of a long-term coverup.

First, what the NCAA did not do: It did not close down the football program. If you want to say the program was rotten because of the cover-up, it seems that would be a logical thing to do. But they didn’t. Whatever.

But what grabbed my attention was among the steps taken against the program was that “all victories from 1998-2011 have been vacated,” to which I went, “Huh?”

Excuse me: Did those players win those games or didn’t they? If they won them, they won them. If they didn’t win them, they didn’t win them. Period.

I Tweeted that out early today, and one reader immediately responded to agree with me. But others started arguing. Beth Padgett, editorial page editor of The Greenville News, explained, “Games won Wins don’t count,” which may make sense to football fans, but not to me. I replied, “You’ve lost me. Probably because I’m not fan, don’t understand the mystique. Facts are facts. Wins are wins. Not that I care…”

Garrett Epps responded to my assertion that “they either WON those football games or DIDN’T, regardless of the unrelated, horrible things some coach did,” with a one-word question: “unrelated?”

Absolutely, said I. Over here, some coach did horrible things. Over there, some kids won some games. One fact is not dependent upon to the other. He responded, “Glad we cleared that up. Sanduskywas NOT defensive coordinator for a number of years? i was confused. Thought he was.”

OK, so… is the theory that without this guy, they wouldn’t have won the games? We know that? How? All we know is what happened.

And to me, whether some kids won some games they played in is a fact that has no moral content whatsoever, good or bad. I could not care less who won those games. But I do know absurdity when I see it. And saying they didn’t win games they did win, for whatever purpose, is an absurd lie. We don’t get to say that the North lost the Civil War because (in South Carolina’s estimation, anyway), William Tecumseh Sherman was a terrorist, and Ullyses S. Grant was a drunk. They either won or they didn’t. (And they did. So, you know, time to take down that flag, boys.)

Saying Penn State didn’t win games it did win is like the NCAA deciding to “punish” the program by declaring the players took the field in yellow uniforms instead of blue. It’s just not true.

I get a clue as to the thinking behind this denial of reality from this WashPost Tweet, “Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest football coach in college football history.”

OK, so, from what little I know about college football, I’m guessing that statement would really hurt Paterno where he lives. If, you know, he lived. But he’s dead. You can’t do anything to hurt him. And as an attempt to do so, this denial of what happened is pretty lame.

I mean, as long as we’re changing history, why not wave the same magic wand and declare that all those kids were not abused by Sandusky? I’ll tell you why not: Because it would be a cruel mockery. Of course they were abused, and that pain will never go away. And it seems extremely unlikely that it would be assuaged in any way by pretending that Paterno’s team didn’t win those games.