Assistant Village Idiot

Instapundit, Althouse, McArdle, and other sites touching on a wide range of topics occasionally link to “relationship” sites; that is, women’s sites that have much discussion of sexual dilemmas, relationship advice, gender roles, personal fulfillment, and careers. The commenting level is not high, but the opinion pieces themselves aren’t bad. I sometimes click through to other posts listed in the sidebar. One topic that seems to recur is the complaints that single women have against those married with children, specifically, that they are regarded as not fully adult because they don’t have kids. They counter-accuse that they know lots of irresponsible parents, and mothers become entirely kid-focused, unable to talk about other subjects for long.

It would be tempting to dismiss most of this as over-sensitivity, reading more into stray comments than is intended, but the comments usually do include some young mothers who make broad statements that come pretty close to the complaint, plus a few who are quite open and adamant that single women just don’t know how immature they are, but will “get it” when they grow up and have children themselves.

Let me assure you that men never argue about this when they are alone, but I’ll have a go at it anyway.

Do I have to pull this car over? If you kids don’t stop fighting back there, someone’s asking for a swat on the behind. (Spanking young women? Yeah, I don’t think I’ll pursue that analogy any further.)

The immediate problem is that people quickly personalise generalisations about their groups. For example, whenever characteristics of children raised without fathers is discussed, single moms seem to immediately think You are saying bad things about me and my children. My children are wonderful. I’m a good Mom. I know rotten kids from intact families. Whenever churchgoers, or gays, or Asians, or engineers are discussed as a group, representatives of those groups conclude So that’s what you think of me, eh? If the original speaker is not very careful to note that he is talking about tendencies, possibilities, rough guides, then he deserves whatever flames come back at him.

Yet we all have been present when even exquisite care not to offend is not enough. People either have a chip on their shoulder and want to be offended or they are unable to extricate their emotional alarm-bells from the intellectual part of the discussion.

So. What about the question itself? Does parenting make one into an adult? Or more precisely, Is parenting a necessary part of being fully adult? Well hmm, Jesus wasn’t a parent, unless you want to dart into theological territory of being a parent to the world. So, Paul, then. Paul wasn’t a parent. We can look around and find lots of folks who seem to fully qualify as grownups who never had kids, throughout many ages.

OTOH, all societies until very recently have regarded parenting as the main, if not almost the only, entry into adulthood. It’s not smart to discard the collective cross-cultural wisdom of many generations.

OTOOH, it is not the magical nature of having a kid around the house, but the first-and-last-lines-of-defense aspect that prompts responsibility. It is taking responsibility that defines the adult, and there are other places in life where one has to be responsible. Work is one. Home ownership another. Care of individuals other than children, owning a business, serving in the military – all these provide opportunity to learn or demonstrate adulthood. Parenting is no guarrantee of maturity? Neither are any of the others.

OTOOO…(Too many other hands, so that I would eventually be writing OTOOOOOOH, or OT6OH. Implied sufficient other hands.)

The 24/7 nature of parenting is pretty unusual, however – the others seldom or never have that. You can let down, go be an irresponsible jerk in another state 3 nights a week or two weeks straight, and still be counted responsible. Parenting doesn’t give you that flexibility – that is, unless you find some way to stick your spouse with the 24/7 part, at which point parenting is no more grownupogenic than the others.

This is all fairly obvious, enough that it should not need to be said. Why are we still arguing about it?

I suspect that the emotional issues around feeling underappreciated and devalued drive the continued discussion. What I do is valuable and I don’t get enough credit. True. Welcome to adulthood.

Slightly off-topic. Much is often made in accusing Christians about their role in bringing Hitler to power that he made such explicit appeal to "evangelical" churches about the good morals he was going to instill in German citizenry, especially the youth, and how easily they lapped it up. This is one of those partial-truth statements that would qualify for a yellow light on snopes.

Evangelical does not mean the same thing in German and modern American contexts. In 1930 Germany, it meant Lutheran and Reformed. Very mainstream, and already misshapen by a hundred years of bad German theology, which culminated in German Christianity, a pretty clearly heterodox movement.

Second, that line of argument always seems to ignore that it was American (and British) Christian peace groups that led the charge to keep us out of war in the 30's, allowing Hitler to consolidate power, build weapons, and start killing Jews. See also the run-up to WWI.

I'm not arguing that the Christian church gets anything like full distance on this. I'm adding a necessary corrective to a popular accusation.

The Biblical imagery makes for some confusing comparisons and analogies. Not only are half of the people in that "bride" category male, but like most societies until quite recently, the authorities mostly came from that male category. A similar difficulty obtains for Jews, for when God complains at them about worshiping false gods, He often uses the image of an unfaithful woman, and calls Israel "she." To make things one step more complicated, a lot of those other gods this bride was going with when unfaithful were themselves female.

Thus when some era of Christian or Jewish history is described in terms of how the (male) gods of this world treat the (female) bride, and how they are treated in return, the people we associate with that era - Moses, David, Augustine, Calvin - are er, male brides. It screws up analogies, but God seems to be quite insistent on the idea. Even if you are one who doesn't believe in God, or believes that our male and female language for the Deity is largely cultural, it would still be curious, and significant, that all these male authorities take such pains to describe themselves as collectively female.

Secular systems are sometimes regarded as gods in scripture, and their representatives are mostly masculine. When scripture describes demonic forces, gods, and secular authorities, the word "prince" is often used. In a modern era where entirely secular authorities might be female, we get the same confusion. A female secular authority, as stand-in for a male world-system, is "he," while the generally male church authorites acting as stand-ins for a female Church, are in some way "she."

I went through all of this just to help you keep the following analogies straight, but I probably made it more confusing. Let me make that worse by appearing to change subjects.

Most tribes in history have treated the women of other tribes, when they encountered them alone, with especial contempt and disregard. Any Hittite, Tutsi, or Irish woman who wandered away, was left unprotected, or was captured was likely to be sold, raped, or beaten. It is horrific, but almost unremarkable in history because it is so common. In most places, it has been considered a far worse thing to treat the women of one's own tribe badly. Even in places where women are in fact treated quite badly, there is often an official party line that they are treated quite well. Even in some Christian groups in the West, where this attitude is been discredited for some time, we still find it. And in many Moslem cultures the contrast between the ideal (Women are treated with great respect, the Quran says so), and the daily reality of women's lives, is stark. Extending ultimately to the common condemnation of incest, to treat the women of one's own tribe badly is far more often condemned than however one treats girls from competing tribes.

Got that? Okay, the "tribes" reference should have been a hint. Think how liberal Christians are treated, not by secular conservatives, but by secular liberals. Think how conservative Christians are treated, not by secular liberals, but by secular conservatives. James Dobson has been the most critical of other conservatives, but he is not the only one to note how conservative evangelical concerns seem to be sent to the back of the line after elections are over. It occurs to me that we are now seeing the same thing with liberal contempt, not only of conservative Christians, but of liberal Christians.

Much was made of Obama's throwing his pastor and mentor under the bus. It's much worse than that: he threw his whole church under the bus. When condemned certain sermons of Wright's, and claimed he had not heard this theology in his time there, it went unnoticed that somebody must have heard the pastor preach those things, have thought it acceptable, and continued on. So Obama condemned the values of his entire congregation. Not that they complained, of course. We Christians love to be lied to by powerful people, apparently.

Remember also that Bill Clinton needed some quick moral cover and brought in Tony Campolo to spiritually advise him. I thought at the time that Campolo was likely a fool for believing Clinton, but had to admit that some Christian had to at least attempt the task. Since Campolo said some nice words about Clinton's efforts to reform, has Bill even thrown a cookie to the liberal church? Hasn't he, rather, been pretty open about not spending more than a few hours a month with his wife and running around, as if rubbing their faces in it? I guess the liberal Christians are now going to start getting the same treatment conservatives have been getting. Their fond hopes of influencing liberals for Christ by allying with them and giving them their support doesn't seem to be working very well.

Not that conservative Christians are in any position to sneer about that. The hyperventilating progressives fearful that the dangerous Religious Right must be stopped or we could rapidly descend into a theocracy need to get a grip. As if. Every other year, along about March or April, the Religious Right has a morning Walk of Shame across town in a rumpled cocktail dress, not even given cab fare for the ride home.

Liberal Christians seem to be getting a different style of humiliation. They're kept offstage most of the time as neglected wives, dragged out whenever erring hubby gets in trouble to help them look respectable ("Tell them we were at prayer meeting that night.")

I overdraw the picture, certainly. There are folks from both Christian camps who work very hard rendering unto God what is God's and Caesar what is Caesar's. But anytime we support a cause, we put ourselves in danger of giving our hearts to it, whoring after other gods. There are plenty of conservative Christians who have about had it with brethren who have lost all clarity about what God, exactly, is being served. There are fewer liberal Christians who have had this light go on, but they've been at it a shorter time. More will start to get it. May we race each other to that finish line, even if we all still vote the same as we do now.

The humiliated wife has gotten the kids off to school and still weeping, gone down to the open church a few blocks away. She goes to the left side of the church and pulls down the kneeler. Across the way on the right side she sees her sister, also kneeling and weeping in a cocktail dress.

Lord have mercy on us all.

Soros is a love-to-hate guy on the right. It was interesting to try and place him in the Dorothy Thompson essay Who Goes Nazi? More interesting because he actually did have that experience, and by his own statements, what happened to him as a young Hungarian Jew at the end of WWII influences his politics today. He believes that what he sees from George Bush and the Republican Party reminds him of the Nazism he experienced then, and has worked to keep such people out of power.

Central Europeans who went through the end of WWII, especially if they are Jewish, are accorded immediate credibility in discussing such matters. Yet Soros was only 13 – not an age where his impressions of what sort of people were persecuting him have any meaning. Bush is showing similarity to Nazis in what way, exactly, that a 13-year-old would have any understanding of? I grant that he feels intensely that the madness should not be repeated (how could he not? The persecution part would certainly be understandable to children even younger) but what are the political and economic policy equivalences he works from? I submit that these are imposed retroactively. Feelings are not facts. It is rather like the elderly Polish gentleman who handed me anti-semitic tracts in the park one day. He had seen the “Jewish Communists” overrun his village as a boy. Yes, I should believe him. He had seen it. He was there. That was why he hated the Jews.

On the subject of how money works now, and what the possible consequences of policies are, however, Soros clearly speaks with enormous authority. If he is a free-marketer who nonetheless believes that market fundamentalism is a dangerous policy, that deserves attention.

His philanthropy versus his business ruthlessness gives us a mixed ethical picture. This is a man who has given more of his own money than almost anyone in history in support of causes nearly all Americans would approve of: the Solidarity movement in Poland which helped bring down the Iron Curtain; the Rose Revolution in Georgia; universities in Central Europe; government transparency in horribly corrupt countries. Yet he is also the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992 with an intentional attack on the British Pound, shrugging this off as merely a matter of how the game is played. He destabilises governments, and we mostly don’t mind because they are governments we’d just as soon destabilise anyway.

It is clear he does not desire money for its own sake, nor power for its own sake. He wants to influence the world in directions he thinks good. But the package of contradictions may give some explanation how he can fund dishonest and manipulative political actions “for our own good.” He can make a strong case that it is for our own good, and the shortcomings of individual organizations he supports are not much worse than others of similar type. There is the combined arrogance and selflessness of the crusader, it seems.

Leave aside the libertarian argument that people should be allowed to do as they wish, even if they are wrong, and the American argument that free people eventually get it right. I agree with both of those principles, but the latter is an article of faith, and the former is highly dependent on it. If people are going to mostly get it right, and efforts to control them are largely going to make things worse, then of course the libertarian and American values should prevail.

But what if it’s no longer true? What if the speed and international nature of current finance can indeed destroy things quickly enough that market principles that apply to bakers and barbers are swept away with the tide? What if world markets can be made freer – as Soros believes – but that there is an upper limit to that freedom, requiring a strong central international government to curb excesses? Don’t answer that for the moment. There are too many other variables I have not begun to mention.

For the moment, let’s just look at the phrase “strong central international government,” spoken by a person who has enormous influence in the world. I long ago sent my Hal Lindsey and Salem Kirban books to yard sales. I still have occasional contact with Christians who are “into prophecy,” and see end-time events in the most banal of occurrences, but I have little interest in the subject myself. But as with all the implanted chip, eye-scanning, and thumbprint technology that we’re going to increasingly use to gain access to our computers, hold our medical records, and automatically deposit and deduct from our accounts – that would cover a lot of the waterfront for buy-and-sell - that “international government” phrase just creeps me out. Especially coming from a powerful insane person.

Yes, I know it’s supposed to be the anti-Soros people who are the paranoid insane ones, but he’s on record comparing George Bush to Hitler and Yasser Arafat. He claimed that getting rid of Bush was the most important focus of his life and he’d spend his whole fortune on it. It’s one thing to be opposed to someone, and think their policies are damaging, or not trust them, but calling them Hitler? The most important focus of your life? Those are ravings. Powerless people make those exaggerations in order to be heard, but risk being seen at nutcases for it. If he actually believes that, then he’s a paranoid insane person, even if he is brilliant at identifying market vulnerabilities.

Unless of course, he doesn’t really believe it and is just trying to manipulate a new market, that of political rather than financial power. That would be considerably worse than being paranoid, though. Or an arrogant anyone-in-my-way-is-Hitler mentality, which would also be worrisome.

Refining my earlier post Regulate Congress, I am preferring this more specific analogy. When you go to your prescriber, there is an explanation of any new medication, usually on a 2-sided sheet. Or perhaps, the prescriber gives you the verbal description and your pharmacist gives you the sheet. If you throw the sheet away after reading, you can go on the net and find a similar printout.

We need something equivalent for legislation. What are the expected benefits? What are the potential side effects? There is an advantage with this analogy that everyone is familiar with the idea. Also, it rhymes. Most important of all, it forces lawmakers into a mode where they have to think in terms of exceptions, rare occurences, and delivering services. Just think if they had to write In rare circumstances (footnote reveals: in Rockford Illinois and the Norfolk Virginia) this legislation has been shown to increase personal bankruptcies.

But there are so many pieces of legislation passed. Hopefully, not any more.

But some legislation is so complicated it can't be summarised. Tough noogies. That's the kind of crap every other industry has to go through all the time. Just do it.

As Texan99 pointed out, why would Congress ever pass such a thing that hampered them so much? I think we are starting with the states, and looking at constitutional conventions to make this happen.

Chaplaincy services has a display, a collage dedicated to world religions. They don’t rank them, but as advertisers know, there is prominence of placement, if color and size of print are the same. Eye level is the area of greatest prominence, and people tend to view from left to right, as in reading. This is especially true if eye level is also the top row. The center position of a poster, or slightly above it, is second-most important.

I don’t think this is a value ranking in their eyes, but a show-we’re-culturally-sensitive ranking. Culturally sensitive people don’t actually rate Islam that highly, but they are careful to make sure there is no suggestion of slight. That the UU’s and Bahai made the list at all suggests there is some advertising going on.

Top row, eye-level: Unitarian Universalism, Native American Spiritualities.

Second row: Islam

Third row, which is also the center: Buddhism, Hinduism

Fourth row: Wicca, Bahai, Judaism

Bottom row: Taoism, Christianity

Forty years ago the display would have been different. First difference – it might not have been there at all. Christianity would have been broken into Roman Catholic and Protestant parts, Eastern Orthodox unnoticed, despite a fairly large Greek population in NH. Judaism would have been on with some similar prominence. Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism would have been included only as exotic extras, to show that someone had taken a world religions course.

Twenty years ago, hmm. This is a pretty multi-culti place, but I don’t know whether it would be closer to the 1970 version or the 2010. I think it would have been the big five, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, all placed so that there could be no implied preference.

A woman speaking for the Environmental Defense Council claims, in a very serious and accusing tone, “maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.” I’m guessing they don’t have that first hand. I wonder what Saturn is saying these days. Or the Sun. We’d better check in with Old Sol.

Julian Assange of the Guardian thinks the warlogs leaks will be good for the world because it will increase "transparency."

This is roughly equivalent to patting yourself on the back for exposing a William & Mary basketball bench player as academically ineligible just before their game against Kentucky. No, actually my analogy is too mild. It’s more like exposing the fact that a black man had been illegally sleeping in boxcars just before the Klan lynched him in 1920.

Workers Comp attorney on the radio makes the comment that “Inurance companies aren’t in the business of paying claims. They are in the bsiness of making a profit for their stockholders.” That’s rather like saying restaurants aren’t in the business of serving you food, they’re in the business of making profits so they can pay salaries.

Same routine, but done better than the 3 Stooges did it.

I couldn't get it out of my mind. Had to put it in.

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/9pQii1L8fGk&hl=en_US&fs=1]

I know that folks expect those of us on the scene to provide inside information on candidates - things you might not hear elsewhere. For those of you out-of-state who want to follow national Senate majority issues, the betting at this point is that she will fill the seat occupied by the retiring Judd Gregg, beating Binnie and Bender in the primaries, and Hodes in November. But it's still only July. Her Wikipedia entry really does cover the basics without a lot of bias. As state Attorney general, she argued Ayotte Vs. Planned Parenthood of New England before SCOTUS, which agreed with her unanimously. She went to Villanova, a quality law school that's not an Ivy - which is becoming important to conservatives who believe that there's more intellectual diversity, and hence more original thinking, outside of the Ivy League.

For those in-state, hoping that my contact with the AG's office because of my line of work will give me some inside scoop, I don't have much to offer. She mostly stuck to prosecutions, rather than being a conservative activist looking for ways to kick liberals in the groin. Which is as it should be. She didn't try to politicise any of the highly-charged cases from the mental health side. I don't think she was particularly interested in our little corner of legal issues. The attorneys who dealt with her seemed to regard her as quite good, not someone who would make them crazy when they tried to explain situations to her. I heard neither that she was some brilliant legal scholar about to set the world on its ear nor that she was a fool.

I'm still hesitating to vote for any lawyer, but it won't kill me to make an exception here.

Rich Ashooh: I know an older brother slightly, and an older sister quite well. She is extremely intelligent, both in the quick-witted and grind-it-out senses. The whole family is. I don't know Rich at all. He grew up Melkite Catholic, but I don't know whether he still attends. He worked for NH Sens. Gordon Humphreys and Warren Rudman in Washington before going to work for BAE. Those are all good credentials. Rudman was an especial deficit-hawk, even by NH's extreme standards, so that's a good lineage.

Wish I could tell you more.

Update: I should say more about Ovide Lamontagne, who I also like.

Somewhere around 1980, I worked on a psych unit that had the TV going pretty much steadily from 7AM - 11PM. Patients could watch what they liked - there weren't that many choices - and staff would adjudicate disputes. So someone was watching 700 Club or something similar, where a very exciteable man was describing the new school curriculum they were going to use somewhere. It had "Jesus Across The Curriculum." They were going to work Jesus into the history lessons, the math lessons, the English lessons. A coworker, who had gone through 13 years of private Catholic school, groaned. "I got so sick of that. You couldn't just learn about anything for itself. It always had to have Jesus pulled in somehow."

I had mixed feelings. Still do. We had only one child then, a toddler, but eventually my sons went to varying amounts of public vs Christian schools. In simplest form, there are ways in which Christian viewpoint fits naturally into teaching, some ways it doesn't. Additionally, there is an overall ethic of study which includes Christian virtues. But some places, it's just forced. And if you have ever seen some of these curricula, you would know that it not only theoretically could be shoved in inappropriately, it has been.

Fast forward to 1996. When my oldest son was looking at colleges, one of the ones he wanted to visit was Sarah Lawrence. He liked their method of instruction, the seminar-conference. It does sound attractive for some types of student. So. We stop off in Bronxville on our last stop before home on our college-visiting trip. Jonathan is in being interviewed, and I am sitting in a comfortable waiting area reading the course catalogue. In the introduction, I read that every course taught at the school is required to address the issues of race, gender, class, and a few other things. Sweet Jesus, don't let my son like this school, I thought.

You could call it Marxism Across the Curriculum, but that would be extreme, and not entirely precise. You could call it Liberalism Across the Curriculum, but that would be too mild. No matter. It is, in much the same way as a Christian school, the religion of the tribe injected into every part of the teaching, whether it fits naturally or is forced.

SLC is a private school, they can do whatever they want and aren't answerable to me or anyone else about it, other than their own community. I just want to make clear exactly what is happening. When Codevilla refers to the Ruling Class being instructed in highly similar viewpoints from Boston to San Diego, he is referring to this. In every era the young elite are instructed into the norms they are expected to hold when they later come to rule. This isn't necessarily evil, nor is this static in any society. But it is usually suffused with the religion of the elite, or what attitude they should have to the religion of the nation.

The youth pastor was moving on today, and gave a short exhortation about the high school mission trip to Benton Harbor, MI. Nice young man; a friend of my oldest son. He smiled that he was again going to mention social justice, as he did every time he spoke. He quoted Micah 6:8 about doing justice and loving mercy.

Hmm. The trip to Benton Harbor, where they painted houses, did vacation Bible camp, and otherwise hung around being helpful, was certainly about mercy, or kindness, or charity. And a good thing, too - we should see more of rich teenagers being bundled off to help poor people. But "justice?" How do we get to the concept of justice there? The rich teenagers in NH hadn't taken anything from the poor people in Benton Harbor - hadn't wrecked their stuff, vandalised the neighborhood, scammed them on the street, or taken their jobs. There wasn't an injustice that needed to be righted. Justice would mean that the people of Benton Harbor have a right to demand that someone come in and paint their homes and teach their kids Bible stories.

That is, unless you are smuggling in the idea that the poverty of one is a direct result of the wealth of another. It's the only way to get to the idea that charity is only giving people something that is already rightfully theirs. Charity is a gift, not a redress. Justice is something a person can rightfully demand from others.

The word justice has a meaning. It is a useful concept, and not one that should be toyed with, because there is justice that the poor have a right to demand in our society - the right to be treated the same before the law, even if they don't have connections or haven't paid a bribe; the right to buy and sell, the right to be in public places, the right to speak, or vote, or cling to their guns and religion even if the president disapproves, just like anyone else. When someone is trying to change the meaning of a word, it pays to perk up one's ears and ask why.

Not that this youth pastor is conscious of any attempt to redefine the word, of course. He's not part of any conspiracy or devious attempts to deceive others. He's just caught in the rather vague set of associations that it's a good thing for people who have things to share them, and some people have had hard luck, and Christians should feel obligated to help others, and African-Americans are the best example of people who didn't get a fair shake while rich white kids are the best example of those whose life has been more than fair. So it all sort of fits in together, you see. Besides, everyone puts these types of ministry under the category of "Social Justice." It's right there on the denominational website as a dropdown and everything.

Yes, everyone is starting to call these things social justice, it seems. The idea has become fully embedded in the thinking of folks of uh, certain political persuasions. We can now slide back and forth between the meanings as is convenient, so that when someone - oh, I don't know, someone with a national plan to require kids to volunteer at some approved good work in order to be given a high school diploma - can manipulate words so that a voluntary gift becomes a rightful demand that the government can impose. Because it's justice.

We discussed a similar redefining of terms when I reviewed the book True Patriot. Patriotism had a common meaning which everyone understood. One might validly claim that patriotism is not the highest virtue, or that it is a virtue only when combined with other virtues, or when the patria-object is itself worthy of affection. But the word means love of country, both in behavioral and symbolic acts, such as enlisting in the military or flying the flag. You can say that merely flying the flag and doing nothing else for one's country is cheap patriotism, or maintain that love of the environment, or rights for women, or love of all God's people is a superior virtue, and that's fine, too. But the word has a meaning, and when people are trying to intentionally redefine it, we should be suspicious.

It goes by degrees, each perhaps sensible enough in itself. To say that patriotism is "wanting what is best for my country" can mean something quite close to the original. But it can also, with no change of words, mean something quite far away from the original - the idea that "I only love my country when it looks like I want it to." Justice can slide into fairness can slide into equal fortune can slide into equal luck can slide into the idea that any inequality is in fact injustice.

Akafred used to be active in the lobbying group the Business and Industry Association of NH. Lat Friday, he described a frustration he had with the legislative process in NH, where some people want to get their name on bills and similar legislation is introduced in successive sessions of the legislature. The follow-up legislation is often brought forward before we've had a chance to see how the last legislation worked. People want to strengthen some provision, or add in another sector that is being regulated, or "take the next step" in getting to their ultimate goal of remaking part of our culture in the direction of their personal vision.

Needless to say, this is often a lot of wasted effort.

In my line of work, we keep a chart on each patient, and keep that chart for years in archives, showing what we have done and how well it worked. We also enter patient information into several databases, to other government agencies who are monitoring the services provided. There are regulations that require us to report to various entities, in clearly understandable form, what we have done. We complain about it of course, because it takes time away from actually doing the work we are reporting about. But there is some sense in it. It's called accountability, and it's better to have it than not, inefficient as it is.

Thirdly, if we are proposing a course of treatment for a patient, we are required to give them certain information, especially if it is a medication. Notably, we have to provide it in language and terms they can understand, so they can make an informed decision.

So why not require the same thing of Congress? For every piece of proposed legislation, Congress should be required to inform us, in language we can understand, what the last ten years of legislation on the subject have been, how well each has worked, and what the side effects were. Like every other industry in America, Congress should be required to report to the citizenry in various ways.

I am not being cute here. Yes, Congress "reports" to us in one important way, in that the legislation is written down for anyone who wants to go and look it up. So too has the research on all medication always been available to anyone, if they wanted to subscribe to medical journals or spend hours in the library. So what? That is a form that isn't very user-friendly, and has been deemed by government regulation to be inadequate for informing patients.

It sounds like a lot of extra work, and growth of government. But if they have to spend more time creating reports to the US citizenry, in as many languages as they like, exactly what they are doing and what the potential side effects are, I call that money well spent. It might also give them a picture of what it's like for the rest of us doing our jobs, having to fill out forms and giving reports where none of the checked boxes quite fits your words, and you worry that you will be giving a "wrong" anser if you don't put it in the form they're looking for.

HB1775: Legislation to require all manufacturers of baseball hats to report where each of the component parts come from, where it was assembled, possible allergens, certification that no copyright infringement is involved, and a tax on the sale of each cap, proceeds to go to Little League development in each of the countries involved in manufacture.

HB1776: Legislation requiring all manufacturers of laws to report what lobbying groups were involved in design and manufacturer, safety reports on all earlier versions of the legislation, possible negative effects on various sectors of the economy, with a tax on each congressional office, proceeds to go to civics education in every American 8th grade. The report must be in understandable language, so that citizens can give informed consent for the procedure.

If the minority party, which didn't vote for the previous legislation, is required to submit its report as well, an element of competition is introduced. If one party tries to hide what was in previous legislation or misrepresent what the effect was, the minority has an opportunity to do its own evaluation. Let's see who makes their report easiest to understand with that in place, eh? If they issue thousand-page reports obscuring details and spinning everything, sue the bastards until they issue reports at an 8th-grade reading level.

This will likely require a constitutional amendment, frankly. The IRS has provided unclear and complicated explanations for years but can't be stopped. Yet. If Congress had to produce a 20-page pamphlet for every piece of legislation it proposed, explaining how the last things they did worked and what the possible downsides of this new idea is, it would take time away from them dreaming up other things they want to fix about the stuff that we do.

I wonder if there is any connection between people disliking free-market economics and the impression that they personally would do less well under that system?

An unfair question to ask, perhaps. All of us tend to favor whatever system we think favors us, and in extremer cases we could scarcely expect otherwise. Also, once we have developed such a theory, we could spend a decade counting only the confirming evidence for it, and be absolutely convinced over time.

But in came to me while reading Codevilla's story about Laurence Tribe and Elana Kagan.

Well, the fair thing to expose the theory to some pushback would be to look for the opposite. Try to think of people who favor more protected and redistributive systems who would likely do much better in a free market. Try to identify people who are intense free-marketers who would likely have better lives under a system where income was leveled more.

Help is not a shower you can just stand under.

Joe Romanowski, RN, Concord, NH

In vaudeville (and burlesque, and English music hall) there was a comic bit known as a rave-off. The most familiar example from my childhood was "Niagara Falls! Slowly I turned..." by the 3 Stooges. They used the bit several times, and there are other versions on YouTube, including one by Lou Costello and Sid Fields.
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/zdGzugQIBKk&hl=en_US&fs=1]

In the British versions, the upset person was more likely to do something silly than to get violent, such as stand in a bucket. Monty Python used this a few times.

Many of us have lines like this, that If I hear anyone say just one more time... we fear what we might do next. I have many, especially at work, but one main one. "I just want him to get help."

We admitted a young man Wednesday, typical for us: polysubstance abuse; a bully to his family; history of head trauma from abuse, fights, and risky behavior; kicked out of school, fired from all jobs. His girlfriend broke up with him and later that day he started texting his mother that he was suicidal, but not answering her calls. She sent the police, who eventually found him and brought him to the ER, where he played cat-and-mouse games about whether he was still suicidal or not. They sent him to us. These guys are always outraged to have been sent to the "loony-bin," and contemptuous of the other patients. Their narcissism does not allow them to admit they are anything like them, and they declare they would rather be in jail.

All this, as I said, quite typical. But notable here is that after his interview I said ruefully to the rest of the team. "I'll call mom. I can predict exactly what she will say." And I was right. Yet it occurred to me that I knew this empirically, from having seen it so many times, but didn't have a clear explanation why the mothers of thes men always say the same things.

She told me he couldn't return home because he had shoved his sister. I agreed with her. She described how he had threatened suicide and been enraged in front ot the grandchildren (who of course also live there), so he couldn't live there. I told her we supported this. She described incidents over the years how he had been abusive and threatening with other family members, that was why he couldn't return home. I stressed that I agreed with this.

She wanted to tell me his history, so that we would understand him better. I'll bet you can guess. His father had been an alcoholic, and had abused his mother. He had abused her in front of him. Why, one time...and then another time...and he even... he eventually abandoned the family, and has nothing to do with them. Except he keeps popping back into the story as it unfolds.

But her boy, now, sometimes he was the sweetest boy you could ever know. Very helpful, very generous. But he had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd (always that phrase), using drugs. This girlfriend of his, she's no good. She plays head games (always that phrase) with him and it gets him all upset.

So, I tell her we likely won't be holding him long, only until the crisis is past. We've found that long hospitalizations don't tend to help much, and often even make things worse. This amazes her. After all she went through to finally get him some help, we're going to put him out on the street. (Always that phrase.) Several other themes consistently recur: we should find him a group home of some kind. I always ask innocently "Do you mean an unlocked facility? Do you think he would stay? Or would he go out and drink and use drugs...or the girlfriend come over..." Oh no, then, this would be someplace he had to stay. We'd have to make him stay and "get therapy." (Always this phrase).

Well, I ask her what she means about him getting therapy. Does she mean group therapy, or a job coach, or coping skills, or substance counseling... No of course she doesn't mean those, she means therapy, and she is amazed that I don't know what she's talking about. She means talking with a counselor so that he can get all this anger out. (Always this phrase.) I suspect the reasoning, such as it is, goes something like - you think about something that happened to you that is sad, and you cry about it, then you feel better. A good therapist, doing real therapy, helps you find other sad things you may not have thought about, including the key sad thing that is ruining your life. Then you cry about that and feel better, and you have this breakthrough. This is why people say that therapy is very, very, hard and call it work - because you get sad and you cry. Or something. Maybe it isn't even that well thought out.

Some observations:
1. Mom wants someone to take charge of her son's life and make him do what is good for him. This is a pretty understandable fantasy, which most parents have when their children go awry. It happens in the movies and on testimony Sunday all the time. That the son has no interest in anyone taking charge of his life doesn't get factored in.

2. Mom has a permeable boundary between her own anger at the boy's father, and the anger she thinks he should feel toward him. Which he probably does already, but somehow that breakthrough hasn't happened.

3. The first step is to stop using drugs, which the son isn't interested in. But Mom often defends his need for prescribed abusable substances - especially if they are the ones she herself is taking - which in exactly the right doses, if we would only invest the time in figuring out by keeping him in the hospital, will remove his need to take street drugs.

4. She will have him back home. In fact, she will probably even pick him up, because the hospital has so mistreated and misunderstood him that she has no choice now.

An interesting possibility to consider: How would conservatives feel about a candidate who ran somewhat as a centrist, then tacked much harder to the right once elected? We complain about liberals doing that, especially in the age of Obama, arguing that it isn't fully honest, not quite the straight bat, to pretend to be one thing for campaign purposes, then become another after election. What if the shoe were on the other foot?

We are used to all candidates tacking to the center a bit, partly to allay the fears of independents who fear bringing in an extremist. But presidents have been about as advertised in my lifetime. Carter looked more conservative when he ran in 76, but much of his move to the left came after his term was up; Reagan never hid his conservatism, and if anything, was a bit more moderate than his campaign rhetoric; Bush 41, much the same; Clinton's campaign strength was as an anti-conservative, which implied a liberalism that was never fully there; Bush 43 ran as a somewhat more conservative version of his father, and governed less conservatively than that; Obama tried to position himself to the center on some issues, and some folks apparently bought that, but it was pretty clear from early in the campaign that he was a man of the left. He has turned out to be a man of the further left, with the occasional centrist surprise, so there is perhaps a fair accusation of deception.

But what if McCain, known to be conservative in some ways but center-right in many others, turned hard right after being elected? He might explain with some fairness that the economic situation was dire enough that mild conservatism was insufficient, or might joke that Vice-President Palin was more persuasive than expected, but wouldn't there be much complaint for the left that he had run a false-flag campaign? And wouldn't they be at least partly correct?

This is not an entirely hypothetical question, because that is exactly what is happening in the UK just now. David Cameron ran as a safer, milder version of Toryism, suggesting that he would attempt to move the country rightward in a cautious, steady fashion. But with the economic crisis, he has become not merely a Tory of old, another Thatcher, but going well beyond that, and quickly. In a style that echoes some Rahm Emanuel, he is determined not to let this crisis go to waste, and is aiming high.

Perhaps the times require it, and I certainly approve of his policies, as little as I know in depth. But we should always wonder what we would do if the shoe were on the other foot, not only in politics, but in every aspect of our living. Here's a chance to rethink what we really mean and what we really think is fair and what is deceitful.

I don't yet know my answer.

One of the lessons one learns from working with sex offenders is greater focus on the main thing. Because sex offenders arouse such strong emotions, it is very easy for the public to get distracted by the need to punish them. This is probably left over from our long hunter-gatherer and village history, when incarceration was not feasible, and punishment or banishment were the only choices.

But the main point is the safety of the society. If you punish sex offenders horribly, but let them back in contact with vulnerable targets, you haven't accomplished much. While if you were to drop them onto a remote but luxurious island and gave them plenty of fun stuff but didn't let them back in contact with potential victims, you have accomplished a great deal. The criminal is not the point. The protection of society is the point.

With that in mind, Theodore Dalrymple's essay on prison terms.

My uncle again.

I see the Christian doctrine as oriented towards the least among us Whether charity is dispensed throught churches or welfare departments makes no difference. You see it as a left- right issue apparently. I do not.

Ignore for the moment all the theological discussion that Jesus's followers, presumably in a position to understand what he said - or we could hardly call him a good teacher - describing the faith otherwise, and whose actions cannot remotely be interpreted as "let's make the government, if not the Romans then at least the Jewish authorities, act in a socialist way. That's our mission."

Let's play along. What if there were an entirely non-religious network of folks. Imagine them as loosely-organised, motivated by some general desire to help others in an overall way. They live among us and meet semi-regularly, reinforcing some values of wanting to not only keep the poor from starvation, but help people find jobs, give them advice, set an example, help even the less-poor, or people who have other problems besides food.

There are problems for the recipients with this. They feel embarrassed or thought-less-of. The help is unreliable. Busybodies snake in. You get cut off if people feel you spent the last money on stupid stuff, or didn't make an effort on the job they found you.

Contrast this with a system where people are sent checks by a remote federal government because by law, they deserve them. Anyone who has dealt with those receiving government checks can tell you that this can erode even good character. Listening to people complain about checks that haven't arrived, or benefits that were cut off, or things they feel they should have, does not inspire compassion for the poor. It inspires contempt, because mostly encounter the ruined ones, not the decent ones. But what we expect, we come to feel we deserve. Just human nature. And we feel we have earned things that we really haven't, like Social Security. Plus, you get more crime concentrated around housing for the poor, with no way of getting out of the neighborhood unless you give up your subsidy. And you still have busybodies. But at least no one tells you what to do with some aspects of your life, and you don't have to go to any public place to be looked over at tut-tutted at. You're a free American, and no one will tell you to stop drinking or using drugs. No one will tell you that your choice of men is ruining your life. You will get badgered about nutrition classes and birth-control, and asked a lot of questions about your family-and-partner history, which will be stored on a government computer forever. But they mean well.

Let me head off the arguments right away that 1) the churches didn't take care of the poor adequately, which is why the government had to step in. We have the same percentage of poor people. The major driver for reducing poverty has been technological improvement, like rural electrification and cheap cars. And 2) that most people are on welfare very temporarily. I'm not just talking about welfare, but even if I were, it is also true that most people were only on private charity for a brief time.

Let's let those societies play out independently in our minds for a bit. Do the work yourself here. Think of examples in history where the various methods have been tried. (That is not entirely a set-up question. While I have a favored answer here, the results are mixed, and that is also instructive.)

Update: I forgot to mention, there is also a very different effect on the givers.

See also one of my favorite articles on charity

I have decided that reform is good, but comprehensive reform is the single worst thing you can do to solve a problem. You don't try to reform your children that way, or your house. Or if you do, you fail. I think folks can pretty readily see that trying to reform your spouse, or your business, or your town in that way would be disastrous.

But people who work in government love this. And here, this is definitely not a left-right issue. Conservative officials fall into this as often as liberals, though both do it less than that vast field of bureaucrats who run most of the government.

This stems directly from the idea that the government is supposed to fix everything, and the impression many advocates have that if their part of the problem isn't being addressed in the current bill, it is a huge insult and a demonstration that the society doesn't find their issue important. Intolerable!

Immigration? So, I understand that building the fence will only solve 15% of the problem of people coming in. Well fine, then, let's do that and move on to the next thing. One bill. Nothing comprehensive. People who have lived here a long time deserve citizenship? Okay then, pick a high standard, one you know you can get enough votes for. Ten continuous years, continuous employment, have to pay some penalty? Seems good enough to me, but we can debate that. Sure, lots of us will be ticked off that some people broke the rules, but really, we'll all get on with life. And all the problems of proof, and people on the margins, or whatever? Doesn't matter, because there will be people just on the edge of qualifying no matter where you draw the line, and we'll go on fighting about that. How about employers skirting the law. Fine, them too. Identify some factors that create the biggest problem and fix that - we know what industries are the problem.

But when you go comprehensive, everyone gets to be first in line. Ever see what happens in those cultures where they don't know how to stand in line and something is delivered free? That's what happens with comprehensive legislation. And in the chaos there is actually more opportunity for crooks, manipulators, and scam artists.

Why would legislators want to put up with this confusion, then? It's an opportunity for horse-trading, to get their small (and sometimes sketchy) causes put into the mix, to feel that they have done some good for everyone, whether they have or not. Consider those people throwing the food off the back of the truck in an impoverished area. The decent people find it heartbreaking, because they can only do so much, and they are unable to make everyone go fairly.

But others like it. It doesn't bother them at all. Not that all politicians are as sociopathic as those distributors, but that there is a kick to it, and it attracts that sort, and the longer you do it the more fun it gets.