Confluence and Heart

We talk a lot about confluence here in St. Louis, because here the country's two mightiest rivers meet and flow together.  The Mississippi flows down from the North, from Minnesota,  and the Missouri flows in from the West, from Montana, and they converge in river bottoms, and as they start their journey to the heart of the South the first high ground, on the west bank, is St. Louis. 

Tonight this town rings with another kind of confluence, and beats with a tremendous heart.  It's a baseball town, likes to think of itself as the baseball town, and it's the capital of a huge region, seven or eight states, surrounding the tradition of its baseball teams.  It used to have two, a National and an American League team, the Cardinals and the Browns.  The Browns have long moved on, but what remains is this fine ball club, the center of what we call, proudly but not too seriously,  Cardinal Nation:  the St. Louis Cardinals.

"Go Cards."  I've heard it ever since I moved here.  At times like this it replaces "good-bye" or "see ya" in our conversations.

Tonight this tradition converged with a team, and the team won the World Series.

This 2011 team is a miracle.  For the last week I, and many others, have said "Cards in Seven", and it's not just municipal pride.  I'd make this prediction - before Game Six - because  this team plays with its back to the wall like no other.  It has come back from the brink literally dozens of times since August.   But I didn't really know how  true and deep their heart was, until Game Six, when the team was down to its last out, last strike, two runs down  - twice - and came back and won.  The gamest, biggest-hearted team ever.

Game Seven, tonight, was kind of a victory lap.  Not the firestorm of Game Six.  Just a steady, confident final act, eliminating any lingering doubt. This is one of the greatest sports teams America has ever seen.

Faith

From someplace on the Internet:

"In the 17th century, the people that we would now call atheists were called nullfidians. The state of insufficient faith was also of common enough interest to be given a name - petty fidianism.

"John Trapp, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 1647, recorded the term:

" 'O ye of little faith. Ye petty fidians; He calleth them not nullifidians.' "

I'm afraid I'm a petty fidian.  Never knew it before.  Always thought I had doubt, and that was okay because everyone does from time to time. 

At least I'm not a nullifidian.  What faith I have, I keep, and guard carefully.

Jubilee

Just when I was ranting about my inability to find anything insightful, I stumbled onto this in the Guardian.  It's George Monboit discussing a book by  Steve Keen, Debunking Economics:

"President Obama justified the bank bailout on the grounds that "a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or 10 dollars of loans to families and businesses. So that's a multiplier effect." But the money multiplier didn't happen. The $1.3 trillion that Bernanke injected scarcely raised the amount of money in circulation: the 110% increase in M0 money led not to the 800% or 1,000% increase in M1 money that Obama predicted, but a rise of just 20%. The bail-outs failed because M0 was not the cause of the crisis. The money would have achieved far more had it simply been given to the public. But, as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated over the weekend, governments have learnt nothing from this failure, and seek only to repeat it.

"Instead, Keen says, the key to averting or curtailing a second Great Depression is to reduce the levels of private debt, through a unilateral write-off, or jubilee. The irresponsible loans the banks made should not be honoured. This will mean taking many banks into receivership. Otherwise private debt will sort itself out by traditional means: mass bankruptcy, which will generate an even greater crisis."

Like they say, read the whole thing.  http://bit.ly/na6WnQ

There really is something going on here to which we should pay attention.

So What Planet Is This, Anyway

I've been hanging back, lurking really, to see if I can shake this impression that almost everything I hear lately is trite, half-baked, the opposite of insightful - outsightful?   - inblindful?   And it's not like I'm not looking.  I read the Times, listen to NPR and the BBC, watch CNN and both C-SPAN's - but it all seems like they all  - pols, journalists, pundits - are starting the day reading the same playbook and then come out spouting the same utterly conventional wisdom.  To mix a metaphor or two.

Not that I'm a bundle of insight, but I think I know it when I see it and I ain't seeing it.

More than ever, it seems to me the most intelligent things to do are listen to music, tend the garden, read history, and keep the day job.  Plus, in my own case, hit the keyboards and try to sound different every time.  Plus, I would say, look for simplicity without trusting it, but the thought isn't my own.   Alfred North Whitehead - now there's a guy with insight.

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.