Ya. Hoo.


No good St. Louisan could watch how our beloved baseball team is doing and not comment.  The Cardinals had to come back from 8 games behind the Braves to get into the post-season, and tonight, in the last game of the regular season, they did it.  By just creaming Houston, 8-0, with Carpenter pitching one of the great games of his life, 2 hits, 11 strikeouts.  This team has heart, and it's a great time to be here.

Federalismo

The debate that's shaping up over the role of government is great; we small "l" libertarians have been waiting for this for years.  But the lawyer in me insists on pointing out the way the argument can conflate the questions of which level of government should handle things, and whether government should handle them at all.

There's a great example.  You hear all the time about the founding fathers, how they put restraints on government through the Bill of Rights.  (Well OK, most of them did - but it wasn't really the framers of the constitution who did it, it was the first Congress and the States - they were Ten Amendments to the constitution, after all, not there from the start.  Side point, but not the interesting point. )

Take the First Amendment.  It has a whole lot packed in there, but one idea I really like is separation of church and state.  So that means the founders - whoever - believed there shouldn't be, say, a state religion.  Right?

Not necessarily.  They didn't think the Federal Government should establish a state religion.  It was OK for States, and some did.  Connecticut didn't toss out the Congregationalists until pretty well into the 1800's.

Changed by the 14th Amendment, as were so many things - but that wasn't until after the Civil War.

The point is, distinguish between what's right for the federal government to do - or, a little more broadly, at which level of government should something be managed - and what's not right for any government to do.

It's a big part of my problem with Roe v. Wade.  That case and its progeny have said a lot, including the idea that the state has no role in the early stages of a woman's pregnancy.  My take is, fine, as to the federal government; I would prefer that it butts out of any stage of a woman's pregnancy.  But States have long had two roles:  defining murder and regulating the practice of medicine and there, from a legal standpoint, is where this issue is addressed.  So leave it to the States.  They could have  - and would have - worked out rules for abortion and the whole issue would have done so much less to wreck the tenor of the national debate.  There would have been differences, just as with divorce.  So what?

Of course it's still a judgment call.  Federal, State, municipal - or neighborhood association, parish, workplace - who makes the rules - or does no one make them at all.  I don't have an all-purpose key.  It's just a way of thinking about it that I think the founders did, and we do less.

Picking Losers

There's a lot to be said about the evils of direct government funding of businesses - the picking-winners-and-losers meme.  One company, Solyndra, really stands out.  The USA lent it about half a billion, and after a refinance we aren't even senior.  Now they are broke and now its officers are taking the Fifth, so you know it's all going someplace bad.  Maybe even someplace really bad for the Administration, its first major scandal.


The New York Times covered Solyndra in a piece the other day that was well-positioned but seemed awfully restrained.  One point stuck out for me:  the lobbying.  I certainly think it's basically wrong for the USA to lend money to a private company.  But it seems really, really wrong for them to spend $1.8 million of that money to go and lobby for more money.  There probably were restrictions on the use of proceeds - I know there are in an analogous situation, government procurements - but borrowed dollars are fungible.

The lobbyists are $1.8 million richer, we are $1.8 million poorer, and that's it.  No other benefit.  Pretty clear who's the loser.  We got picked.

Publish or Perish

I had forgot Bird by Bird, a book about writing that was pretty persuasive.  The main message:  don't wait for inspiration, just sit down and do it.

The problem is that the only-vaguely-inspired stuff can be tedious.  The stuff you crank, if you're just cranking, may be well written but that may be it.  Anyone who does this for the Fat Lady, as I do, and maybe for posterity wants it to be well-written and insightful and even interesting to read.  Will you always get there just by putting your butt in a chair?

Gets one to the difference between the kind of writing the Bird by Bird author, Ann Lamott, was writing about, and this blogging stuff.  If you're working on a novel or a play or a history you presumably generate a big pile of writing - OK, bird by bird - and then go back and reread it and edit it and then someone else reads and edits it and maybe someday it is published.

These squibs just emerge, a spellcheck if I remember, and off they go.

So if you do them everyday, whatever the inspiration or lack thereof, the risks of suckiness go way up.

But if you don't - in this medium, who wants to wait for a damn thing?

Calling Ronnie

I'm not part of that Reagan-Was-God crowd, but he had an amazing ability to see fundamental wrongs that everyone had got used to - or figured would never change -  and say they were still wrong.  Like the Soviet Union.  Like marginal tax rates of 80 percent.  Like nuclear war, as a matter of fact.

No one around with that kind of vision.  I don't know what's fundamentally wrong that everyone accepts - perhaps China? - but I know that 20 years from now, whatever it is, it will then seem obvious.

Battling Back

With the Fall coming in, I'm afraid Strays is going to turn back to some of that serious policy wonkie stuff that will reduce its readership from about ten to about one, but it's in the air.  With a jumpy philosophical twist.  So here goes, Mr. (or Ms.) Reader:

Back up on the table with the Republic of Equity.  The name - it is simply to imply the opposite of the Empire of Debt - means that we move back to a global society where more free people own more of their own stuff and rely less on borrowed money.  Top to bottom.  Drive that car after it's paid for.  Prepay the mortgage until it  hurts.  Let failed businesses fail. Let Greece default  and tell them - much as I like all the Greeks I know - that they can't borrow their way out, they will have to live on what they earn.  The point being, if we are coming to the end of a Kondratiev wave, let's get there.  Liquidate, take our lumps, reconstitute our moral strength, go to work, and move on.

And don't try to reflate the economy, don't monetize the debt by running the printing presses, and don't start another war.

I know it sounds a little like calling for the Dark Ages.  But I don't think we go back to that, or anything near, because technology has made intelligence and communication cheap.  Knowledge won't be limited to the monasteries.  There won't be a priesthood that can deny us heaven.

Labor Day

Oops... sometimes these babies hang up in draft....

As usual the day was for serious labor, including ducking into the chateau from time to time to bang out a contract.   Outside it was vines removal.  This puppy had been clinging to the NW corner and was home to many critters.

I figured I'd have a lot of angry birds, real ones.  The sparrows in particular inhabited this hanging forest throughout the winter, and I figured a few would stick around and make a claim.  But as it happened, not a sound.  No nests, no remnants of nests.  Some chewing or pecking away at some of the exterior, but mostly pretty clear, once the brush was down.

It's late summer.  They probably have more to worry about than some middle-aged guy on a ladder with a pair of clippers.