The fat guy wins!

This is not about President Obama or Democrats or Republicans or Wall Street fat cats. I mean, perhaps the election was about these things and perhaps not. That’s not Hit Coffee material. What is Hit Coffee material is that outgoing Governor Jon Corzine tried to win an election by making fun of his opponent’s weight and he lost.

The notion of Instant Replay is somewhat controversial in football. On one hand, you have the importance of accurate calls. If the video cameras catch something the refs missed, then shouldn’t that be corrected? On the other hand, you have pure pragmatism. There are all sorts of things that the refs always miss. There are plays that are simply too close to call. A three-and-a-half hour game could easily be stretched to five or more hours with too liberal an instant replay rule. Coaches could use replay challenges as defacto time-outs, which is precisely what happened when the NFL first tried instant replay (they’ve changed the rules since). So the leagues came up with their rules. Nobody is really satisfied with them because, well, what it would require for them to be satisfied with them changes from week to week and play to play depending on whether the rules favor their favored team or the opposing ones.

Several years ago, there was an NFL playoff game between the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo where what appeared to be a forward lateral was thrown in a play that determined the game in favor of Tennessee. The refs did not call a forward lateral and though it appeared to be one in the replay, it was not deemed conclusive to reverse the call. And so the Tennessee Titans went to the Superbowl. Bills fans remained bitter and many suggested that they should reverse the result or if they win the Superbowl there ought to be an asterisk or somesuch. Titans fans argue that it wasn’t a forward lateral to begin with or, if it was, it doesn’t matter because that’s just how the ball bounces sometimes. Both stances have their merits. Teams should not win because the refs make a mistake. But there is also a point where you have to move on and accept that life is not fair.

However, one would imagine that had the circumstances been reversed, Bills fans would have been talking about moving on and Titans fans about the importance of the rulebook. There’s really no question about this. That doesn’t stop each team’s partisans from getting on their soapbox and saying that it isn’t about this particular game it’s about fairness or being an adult and accepting the unfairness of life.

Of course, sports are a multibillion dollar exercise in frivolity. It doesn’t reach the same importance as, for instance, public policy. Or the makers of public policy.

The Massachusetts State Legislature recently enacted a law allowing the governor to appoint a temporary senator until the next special election. The All Important Factor in this was that Massachusetts should not be denied representation between now and the election simply because a senator died. Several years ago, the same legislature passed a law denying the governor the right to make appointments and creating special elections with the All Important Factor being that appointments are anti-Democratic. Of course, that there was a Republican governor in office the same year that there was a good chance of a vacancy being created back then and that there is a Democratic governor and an important vote coming up in the senate now is hardly a coincidence. But in each case, they dressed it up as a matter of principal. Democracy, on one side, and pragmatism on the other. Both are valid arguments.

Republicans, of course, point out the inconsistency and charge that the change of heart is {gasp} politically motivated, but they themselves have rather suddenly embraced Democracy when it’s prudent. In 2002 in Texas, when they won the state legislature, suddenly it was undemocratic to have a majority-Republican state represented by more Democrats than Republicans. Throwing all of their supposed allegiance to tradition in process out the door, they created new districts that, quite astonishingly, lead to more Republicans in congress. But… they did have a point about a Republican state being represented by Democrats in congress. And the Democrats had a point about the bald partisanship involved as well as the dangers in changing congressional districts at the drop of a hat. But neither position was particularly in-keeping with their philosophy so much as it was politically expedient.

There are times when abstract philosophy and political expediency meet. For instance, even setting aside partisan factors, it is extremely likely that Democrats would support as many recounts as possible to get the “most accurate” result. Likewise, Republicans are, in general, more likely to say that if somebody didn’t fill out their ballot correctly they forfeited their own vote. So when the 2000 election hit, everybody lined up in their “proper” formation. When it was inconvenient, of course, the Democrats had no problems tossing unfavorable ballots and Republicans had no problem accepting a Supreme Court verdict they would have abhorred if it had gone the other way. And these reversals were genuinely considered fair and proper. Sure, in some cases it was cynicism, but there were two valid sides to this argument and each side found it pretty easy to clutch to the side that was most convenient for them and believe it.

The list really goes on and on. Parties out of power suddenly gain all kinds of new respect for the Filibuster while parties in power suddenly feel reverence towards pragmatic democracy. Consensus and democracy are both important concepts. Protests that are scary and immature when your side is in power are suddenly importantly protected free expression when your side is out of power and vice-versa. Protests are both immature and importantly protected free expression. The entire notion of freedom itself is constantly under review. When talking about smoking in bars, some people will wax philosophic about the importance of freedom. Then, in a discussion about insurance companies, the exact same person will demand that the government step in and sort everything out to make things fair for the “little guy”.

It’s a lawyer’s job to defend his client in court. He is expected to do this (within certain parameters) whether he believes in it or not. An uninterested party, the judge or a jury, are supposed to take both sides into consideration and come to a conclusion on whose interpretation of justice, facts, and the law is correct.

I used to be a political blogger and I used to discuss politics quite frequently with anybody that would listen. I still follow politics closely, but rarely discuss it anymore. The main reason for this is that almost everybody that is anxious to talk about politics is a lawyer at heart. They are discussing things with you to Make Their Case and that’s pretty much it. The balancing of valid points of view is rarely given much heft. The notion that there are competing ideals that provide a solid basis even for views that you are ultimately unsold on is extremely hard to establish. Instead, the right and wrong of a situation come down, more than anything, to allegiance to political party and political philosophy.

Not that there’s anything wrong with partisanship. It’s a rather necessary function of democracy. Just as lawyers are a necessary function of our court system. What exasperates me, though, is that the legal maneuvering seems almost never to end. And the uninterested observers are actually apolitical “moderates” and “independents” who are among the least educated and least thoughtful voters out there. And even in cases where they are neither of these things, they typically “hate politics” and are always in search for some “middle ground” that doesn’t even exist were it not for two sides pulling the rope feverishly. So you’re left to talk politics with the lawyers, and that’s as much a cross-examination as it is any sort of actual discussion. Where the stakes are more important than a Titans-Bills football game, but the discussion ultimately isn’t.

-{If your response to this is to say “It’s really the people that disagree with me that do this. The people on my side rarely do.” or a quest to prove that even though both sides do it the other side is much worse, please don’t bother.}-

The notion that all men are created equal and that results are determined by effort, discipline, and so on is what my former boss Willard referred to as “one of the great noble myths.” The subject came up shortly after two of my coworkers, Edgar Braughton and Charlie Belcher, were let go. While I had, up until that point, always known that raw intelligence varied from one individual to the next, and that there were people we euphemistically called mentally handicapped that biologically lacked the intelligence that most people have, I never fully appreciated the wide spectrum of intelligence out there until I met, worked with, had to checked the work of, and eventually had to team-lead Edgar and Charlie.

Edgar and Charlie were not mentally retarded in the obvious sense. There were some questions about Edgar, but a lot of those were attributable to a speech impediment on his part that gave the false sense of retardation. Willard, too, had a speech impediment, but is among the smartest of the guys that I know. Edgar could easily have been in that category if he were, well, less dim. But he was the dimmest bulb in our shop. Charlie was a little bit smarter, though not much.

Edgar’s and Charlie’s job was really what I would call straight-forward. For much of the teach, it was mundane. Tedious. Perhaps the hardest part of the job was staying interested in the job enough to do it right. It required an attention to detail, though as Freddie demonstrated you could get away with a lot of inattention if you were simply fast. So really, all you needed was some combination of careless speed or slightly more time-consuming accuracy.

Most of the OSI Team did not have a whole lot in the way of external motivation. I was one of only four longish-term OSI Programmers that was married or in a committed relationship though the only one without children. Simon had kids to support but they were his girlfriend’s kids and he was not under any legal obligation to support them. The other two married OSI Programmers were Edgar and Charlie. On top of that, Edgar had a whopping four kids with a wife that didn’t work and Charlie had a chronically ill wife whose medical bills (by his own telling of it) were considerable. Further, they had less in the way of marketable skills than did many of us and therefore needed the job at Falstaff more than the rest of us did. In other words, these were two people that had the most motivation out of any of us.

And yet, despite all of this motivation, they simply could not get the job done. They could not get it done quickly. They could not get it done right. We tried vigorously to teach them how to do it. We patiently worked with them and looked over their shoulder and tried over and over again to teach them. They had the background that suggested that it wasn’t beyond their grasp. Edgar had a couple years of coursework from DeVry and Charlie a degree from the local vocational school. So it wasn’t completely alien to them. Charlie had a bit of an attitude problem, but his problems far surpassed that.

At the end of the day, despite each of their motivations and despite the easy nature of the job, it was simply beyond their grasp to do it right. Though I had always known of variable intelligence, it just never fully occurred to me that something as simple as that job would quite plainly be beyond people that were able to otherwise live independently. We may squish and squeak and slide a bit and say that they didn’t have the right kind of intelligence. There may be some truth to that in that I could see (maybe, possibly) Charlie being successful at fixing cars or something else that melded one’s mind with one’s hands. But the job itself is so easy to achieve basic competence with that it seemed to me and others that even if your real skills lay elsewhere, it’s not something that somebody shouldn’t be able to at least do right. It’s not an easy job to excel at… but to do? There isn’t a reader of Hit Coffee that couldn’t figure it out in a week.

Of course, Hit Coffee has a self-selected audience. It primarily appeals to people of a pretty basic level of intelligence. To people that like to think about things. People with college degrees (which I think all of you that I know about have) or at least the intelligence to get one. And some of my surprise at what should have been bloody obvious is that I have for most of my life been surrounded by such people. I went to an upper-crest high school. Then I went to college and hung out with the Honors College crowd. My career is mind-based. And even those I knew from outside my circles tended to be self-selected. The people I knew that went to more working-class schools tended to be the smarter people there (I met many of them through a computer network). The warehouse workers at my first job that I talked to tended to be team leads and the odd young man or two that were simply working their way through college. In that sense, it’s no surprise that my relatively sheltered existence lead to a sanguine view of the strength of human intelligence.

And so I gradually had to accede the notion that even within functioning individuals that don’t require special care and that didn’t ride the short bus and weren’t ill-educated and that weren’t just lazy, there can be some pretty basic limits as to what they are capable of. These limits include things that I would have been capable of doing in the seventh grade. Maybe earlier.

A lot of people come to this realization. Some wash it away with notions that it was really how people like Edgar and Charlie were raised and educated that are the problem. That’s historically what I’d done. Even though there were always people that couldn’t do things that I considered pretty basic and that in some cases it might take more attention and tutoring, that they could get there. A lot of whether someone accepts it or declines to accept it depends on ideology. To the extent that it dovetails with what they already believe about people (that, say, poor people are poor because they’re less intelligent), they believe it more readily than others where it presents some uncomfortable truths that contradict the way that they see the world.

For some people, it adds a stronger element of libertarianism because it adds more a sense of justice to the segregation of the haves and have-nots. For me it does slightly the opposite. If people that are at the bottom of the economic latter are so because they made less of an effort or made poorer life choices, I have far less sympathy than someone that is stuck manning a convenience store with little hopes of making it into management simply because they were born with fewer neurons firing quite as vigorously as the next guy. In fact, it almost starts to make a socialist out of me in that I believe that people that lack brain-power (assuming that they work somewhere doing something!) are deserving of, if not everything that their sharper peers that contribute more to society, as respectable a standard of living as we can afford. In short, it makes the notion of wealth redistribution bother me less. It makes the wheat-and-chaff of capitalism overall less appealing.

On the other hand, my experiences at Belle Rieve, that occurred at the same time, which come to think of it included a number of people that probably wouldn’t have been able to do OSI programming work, counteracted this somewhat by demonstrating pretty clearly the dangers of subsidizing lifestyles that aren’t going anywhere. It may be too much to expect them to get jobs that pay well, but it’s pretty important that they work. If idle minds are the Devil’s Workshop, idle lives partake in a never-ending buffet of counterproductive habits. Further, on the subject of crime-prevention, if people that live among the poor are not just limited to those that made poor lifestyle choices, trying to keep those zones as free as possible from crime becomes all the more important.

But mostly, it gives me a little more sympathy for those that haven’t made it. Not enough sympathy that I want to move back to Belle Rieve or that I would raise children where we lived in Estacado or where we live now, but enough to feel a sense of sympathy rather than simply frustration when I bump into them on a daily basis.

-{Note: The setting of most of this post is Deseret, where 90% of the population is white (96% including white-Hispanic). The racial aspects of IQ are discussed at length elsewhere and I would prefer them not be discussed here. This post is about IQ. Not about IQ and race. Not IQ and immigration. Or welfare mommas. Or about how people that are not like you or don’t think like you are ruining our country.}-

-{Ed note: I wrote this post a loooooooooong time ago. Over a year ago, in fact. I know this because when I think I want to spike a post I forward-date it a month or a year. Well, a year later and it was still sitting in my queue and it slipped by me. So anyway, this was mostly a venting session aimed at the failings of democracy. Not sure how interesting you will find it. Click “More” to see the content of the post.}-
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For the purpose of this question, a “term” is defined as the span of time between a president’s taking of the oath and their leaving of the office. So, for instance, the four years for which Kennedy was elected to serve counts as two terms. Kennedy’s only term and Johnson’s first term.

Presidential terms are traditionally four years in length to the day. There are, of course, some exceptions to this. Twenty presidential terms have been of lengths shorter than one year four years. Eight of those terms were cut short because of a president’s death. Nine because of a Vice President ascending to the office to fill out a term after a death or resignation. So the question is this… to which three presidents did the three remaining terms belong and why were these terms less than four years in length?

Clarification: Presidential terms are usually cut short (in other words, do not last a full four years) because a president has died or a vice president takes office and is only serving the remainder of that term (unless re-elected in his own right). There have been three instances where terms were shorter than four years for different reasons than death or VP ascendancy. Who were the presidents whose terms were cut short and why were they cut short?

Transplanted Lawyer (self-declared atheist) brings up the story of the American Atheists trying to stop the Utah Highway Patrol’s desire to put up a white cross next to places where officers have been killed. He doesn’t think that it’s a good idea because it’s something that does not elicit an iota of general public support. And it risks backlash of the sort where the court can declare a cross a “secular symbol”… which is what the courts actually did. TL isn’t pleased by that result:

There you go — a ruling that the cross is now a secular symbol of death and mourning. Which means that not only can it go up on roadside memorials, it can go up on the walls of courtrooms, city halls, and the Utah Legislature because it can be called a “memorial” to fallen soldiers, 9/11 victims, or anyone else that no one with the remotest bit of political sense would dare attack. Good job protecting the wall of separation of church and state there, American Atheists!

There are two great ironies here:

1. The white crosses in the state of Utah are almost certainly secular in nature.
2. The Utah Legislature would have almost certainly no desire to put the cross everywhere, even if they could.

If a state in the south were to argue that the white cross is a secular symbol, I would probably scoff. Actually, not just the south. Almost any state. Any state except Utah, that is. And maybe Idaho. Why? Because Utah happens to be the only state in the continental United States that I am aware of where the dominant religion (or denomination, depending on how you look at it) does not recognize the cross as a holy symbol. Utah is, of course, predominantly Mormon. Mormons are particularly active in positions of authority such as police departments and government because they are united and civilly active. So it stands to reason that most of the people behind the push for the white cross are Mormons. And Mormons do not recognize the cross as a holy symbol.

Their churches do not have crosses. Their temples do not have crosses. Necklaces around their neck do not contain crosses. In short, Mormons don’t do crosses. So if Mormons (or Utahns) want crosses on the side of the road, it is almost certainly secular in nature.

What’s bizarre is that someone in the American Atheists must know this. Or if they didn’t know if off the bat, the Utah branch of the ACLU might have given their erstwhile allies a heads up. I had to check, but there is an ACLU in Utah, though I couldn’t find anything on American Atheists of Utah. Somebody, somewhere must have told them that this was not the fight to pick. Even if knowing that crosses are not a Mormon thing and that the crosses are religious in content if not in intent, surely someone, somewhere must have looked at this case and known that it was a fool’s quest. Right? Or are these people so insulated that they don’t know any Mormons to inform them of the whole cross thing or that suing cops wanting to honor their fallen brethren is a bad idea?

In short, to the extent that this case drew my attention, it actually convinced me that white crosses are a secular symbol. Had this taken place in South Carolina, I would have doubted it very strongly. And if you would have told me that someone was suing the state of Utah because of some improprieties involving Church and State, I would almost certainly give the plaintiffs the benefit of the doubt. This is the case that convinces me that Utah isn’t always wrong on Church/State issues and that the cross is indeed a secular symbol, at least in it’s white-by-the-road form.

I don’t think that’s what the American Atheists were going for…

The commentariat over at MamaPundit are outraged at a law that requires drug tests and (if applicable) intervention in cases of:

(1) No prenatal care;
(2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation;
(3) Incomplete prenatal care;
(4) Abruptio placentae;
(5) Intrauterine fetal death;
(6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause;
(7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause;
(8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or
(9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

In the minds of the commenters, this law was obviously written by men with little or no understanding of pregnancy. Or by pro-lifers looking at a back door towards obtaining control over a pregnant woman’s body.

There are things to object to in this law. I for one and unenthusiastic about how the vague language of the law could be interpreted so that a doctor is liable if the woman does not seek help. And the question of how the state should intervene in the cases of drug use on the part of mothers during pregnancy is pretty rocky terrain filled with potential disagreement even among people who usually agree.

The odd thing about the post and the comments is that they focus at least in large part on the criteria used. This is odd to me because if this law was drafted by a bunch of men without a clue as to how pregnancy works, they obviously consulted doctors. It reads almost line-for-line what Dr. Wife describes as indicators of drug use. And if a woman has the above, chances are that she’s already being tested. And if a test comes up positive, there is already a mechanism in place to inform the authorities. The whole bit about meetings and attendance checks is new, but by and large on the doctor’s end it’s codifying what is already done.

Further, if a doctor has a patient that has the above indications of having taken drugs and does not run any tests because the mother lies and says that she does not do drugs, the doctor is liable for malpractice if something goes wrong. The notion that “Oh, well the patient assured me that she did not do drugs” isn’t going to cut it. I personally would not bet much money that the lawsuit of a mother that did drugs suing the doctor for something going wrong that can be traced back too the drugs would get very far, but it doesn’t have to get very far for the doctor to be professionally negatively impacted.

The concern of MamaPundit and her allies is that they’re targeting women that don’t seek prenatal care because the medical establishment wants to gain more control over the process and/or because they want the money that they get with prenatal visits. Sure, sometimes there are women that for one reason or another did not seek prenatal care, but the most frequent reason that a woman wouldn’t seek any is if she has antagonistic attitudes towards the medical establishment or she doesn’t want to be tested because she knows it will come up positive and social services will be informed.

In the case of the former, it’s unlikely that the law is going to apply to the woman anyway because women that don’t trust the medical establishment for prenatal care don’t suddenly trust them when it comes to delivery. In the case where a woman wants to go it on her own but changes her mind when problems occur, chances are she’s going to get a full work-up anyway and that’s going to include the drug test.

The in the case of the latter, well that’s the case that it turns out frequently enough to be to make a drug test worthwhile. I have heard this story over and over again. A woman knows if she goes to get prenatal care that she will be tested and then social services is likely going to get involved. Presumably, she puts off prenatal care in hopes that she can get it out of her system prior to delivered. All too frequently, that never happens and so the woman has put the fetus’s health unnecessarily at risk in two ways.

But what about cases that fall between the cracks of the above? Do they happen? I’m sure that they do. But the worst-case result is a test that comes up negative. I’m not entirely sure what the downside is here except for hurt feelings. The further stigmatization of having a miscarriage or having an unconventional approach to childbirth.

That’s hardly the goal, though. Doctors need to know these things in order to know what risks to keep an eye out for. Drugs and alcohol during pregnancy are known to increase risks. Doctors need to know what these risks are. They can be sued for being insufficiently thorough. Then, once the baby is born, it’s no longer a part of her and it gets health care independent of her and there is, of course, the question of whether or not the baby should remain in her custody..

Interestingly, according to Clancy, few women object to getting drug tests and almost none consider it remotely the imposition that MP’s commenters do. I was a little surprised by this, to be honest. Mothers that come up negative aren’t offended and mothers that come up positive and don’t want to fess up spend more time trying to explain why there might be false positives than arguing that nobody has a right to ask for a sample.

In January, the New York Times had a story on some of the data-mining that credit card companies are doing to “manage risk.” American Express was accused of, admitted to, then later denied using people that shop at particular merchants as the basis to cut someone’s credit down to size. Citibank is looking at mortgage data. CompuCredit got in trouble for slashing the credit of anyone that had the nerve to see a marriage counselor recently got a flat tire repaired. That latter part I guess is because if you’re too cheap to get the tire replaced, you must be hard up and a bad credit risk. I guess I’m lucky that last time I had a tire problem, it was beyond repair. Or I’m lucky not to be a CompuCredit customer.

I have no doubt that when it comes to a lot of these things do make you statistically more likely to be a problem in the aggregate. Marriage counseling, after all, is a step on the road to divorce sometimes. A part of me is sympathetic to the idea that lenders should be able to use whatever criteria they want because they should be free to lend however much they want to whomever they want. Free country and all that.

But that doesn’t do a thing to get me any less pissed off at this sort of thing.

It’s one thing to discriminate against people that have done something to suggest that they personally are a risk. Even there I have some problem with it insofar as it can misrepresent the service that they provide. When my ex-roommate Hubert got into a jam because his wife unwisely needed medical attention at a time when money was tight, despite their good record with their credit card companies they saw their interest rates skyrocket and credit lines dissipate because they were suddenly racking up a lot of expenses and weren’t able to pay everything off right away. Suggesting that you offer a certain amount of credit at a certain rate provided that you never actually need it and then pulling the rug out from under when they do is dishonest.

But some of the above is even worse because it largely involves things that you have absolutely no power over. Theoretically, Hubert and his wife could have had more money saved up, could have borrowed from friends and family, or something like that. But to have a house in a neighborhood where your neighbors are falling on tough times? Do we need to start asking for the credit ratings of our neighbors before we buy a house? Or cases where somebody is doing the prudent thing. Penalizing people for shopping at places where you can get things cheap? Should I really need to be concerned that the money I save by getting a tire repaired rather than replaced could come at the cost of my credit? Then the other thing is that we don’t even know what they’re looking. We have no way of knowing what we’re doing wrong. We don’t even know that we need to choose between going to a thrift store and keeping our credit lines. We’re expected to play by certain rules without being told what these rules are.

Worse yet, these things don’t just affect how much credit you have at any given time. They are materially important. From what I understand, if you have a creditor that closes your line, it hurts your credit rating. If you carry any sort of balance, your credit rating definitely gets hurt because you’re suddenly using more of your credit line than you were before your wings got clipped. A hurt credit rating means that you will pay more for the next house you buy than you otherwise would. It means that your car insurance rates might go up. There are places that run credit checks before they will hire you. There comes a point when it stops being about their right to define the terms of the money that they lend or how they evaluate your creditworthiness and it starts being about your right to not pay a price for the life choices you make that don’t adversely affect others.

I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. Or if there is one. Disclosure is important, but vague disclosures like “We can cut your rating for any reason or no reason at all” don’t cut it. Even vague proclamations like “We can cut your rating if we don’t like your haircut” don’t do it if you don’t have any idea of what sort of haircut they would prefer you have. And I still object to “You have our services until you need them.”

But I would start with disclosures of greater specificity than we currently have. And more notice that they’re going to do whatever it is that they’re going to do so that they can plan more ahead of time for what’s coming.

Web’s mention the other day of our rail system reminded me of two pet peeves of mine. The first is arrangements that get to rotate between profitability and public good whenever it’s convenient for them. The second is the absurd lengths that some places will go in order to be considered “World Class”.

It is by far the most ambiguous, empty goal that a city can have. Colosse has it, as did Santomas and I’ve read many articles in other cities talking about it. It’s essentially a blank check. It’s saying that we have to spend all of this money on stuff until we’re New York. And since Colosse will never be New York, the spending need never end! When you can’t justify something on the merits, you simply say it’s necessary to become World Class and suddenly all of the big pockets will spend money on campaigns to make people vote for a bond to make it happen.

There are honestly some drives that have been undertaken under the rubric of World Class that I liked and supported. Colosse’s temporary (and since lost) success at cleaning up downtown and making it a place to go was pretty cool. Mixed feelings about the sports stadia and smoking banss. Not so much on the light rail or some of the public park initiatives or so-called “Smart Growth”. Doesn’t matter, though. I support or oppose things things on the basis of whether or not they are good for the city. Others disagree with me and that’s fine. But any time you make any sort of headway opposing any initiative or that, you’re told that if you love the city you have to support it because if we do this the we can sit at the cool kids table with New York City and London.

Except that first it’s futile. Cities like Colosse will never sit at the cool kids table. Santomas gets to sit there on the basis of charisma and not stature and definitely not because of the light rail system that it doesn’t even have. The only way Colosse gets taken seriously is by being its best self. Taking what makes it successful and expounding upon it. Taking what is unsuccessful and correcting it. Bringing in business thus jobs thus people. Good government. Livability. Clean air.

Available jobs will bring in ten times as many people as will a little toy train that runs from one place most people can’t afford to live to another place that most people can’t afford to live. Pollution and crime will drive far more people away than the absence of that fourth greenbelt around the downtown area. The “World Class Cities” are barely even growing (if they are at all). Colosse is. Santomas is. Phoenix is. Boise is. The cool kids will only take the Colosses of the world seriously when they have to. Bike trails (while nice!) won’t do that. People and money will.

Sheila Tone has an interesting post on Econoholic about Nadya Suleman, otherwise known as the Mother O’Eight:

Come on sisters, where are all your usual snide remarks about “clown car vaginas?”

The difference is that Nadya Suleman is a single mother on public assistance. So we’re not allowed to be mean to her. If she were a married fundie like the Duggar mom (deft switcheroo, Richaro) she’d be fair game.

Why the hostility? Perhaps it’s because the married, employed Tones are in the process of carefully planning our second, and last, child. We have a 30-month-old. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be a mother, if and why I’d want a second child. And, oh yes, I spend a lot of time working. And a lot of time soul-searching. What’s my purpose in life? Am I a worthy human being? Having a kid turned up those voices, and added “Am I a worthy parent?” to the chorus.

I had to work hard to find which portion to blockquote. Read it all. I chose that portion because it gets to the nub of one of the things that interests me most about this discussion, which is to say the difference in reaction to different situations. Some liberals are saying that if Suleman were a Christian couple like the Duggars, they’d be applauded as the Duggars are. That this is really a classist issue and, owing to Nadya’s last name, possibly a racist one.

But Sheila points out that there are a number of differences between the Duggars and Ms Suleman. Which is one of the things that bothers me about the sort of “If circumstances were different, you’d be saying something different” gotcha attitude that infects blogs from to time. Yes, when circumstances are different, people render judgment. That Suleman will not be remotely able to care for her children, as the Duggars do, makes it something of a different situation. That Suleman used technology and had them all at once – which increases risks to their health and makes caring for them more difficult – matters. There are plenty of reasons to approve of the Duggars and disapprove of Suleman. There are fewer reasons to do the inverse. Those reasons usually come down to “But they’re icky Christians!” and that the Duggars will inflict bad ideas into their kids (this is, of course, in marked contrast to the wonderful ideas that Suleman will pass on… if she has time to).

Truthfully, though, I don’t approve of either the Duggars or Suleman. I don’t know what the “right” maximum number of kids to have is, but it’s clearly fewer than fourteen. An acquaintance of mine, the second of seven, said that once you reach five or so you start running into a situation where the older siblings raise the younger siblings. So on one hand, that seems a good a place as any. It could be said that helping to raise a sibling could be a learning experience for the older siblings, but from my mother’s stories on raising her sisters they can often lose more than they gain from the proposition.

Clancy and I have talked a bit about the Suleman situation. She takes something of a harder line. I feel sorry for Suleman, though I should note that I feel sorry for her at a comfortable distance wherein I am not affected by her actions and compassion is extremely easy. Clancy, like Sheila, has to deal with the consequences of irresponsible behavior every day at work. And as a woman, Clancy (like Sheila) has had a lifetime of experience trying to do the responsible thing in terms of procreation and is less inclined to have much sympathy for someone so clearly reckless. Objectively, it’s hard to disagree with her.

I am a little softer on irresponsible reproduction than are Sheila and my wife. I do see a sort of right-of-reproduction (God willing) in at least a limited fashion. The first child because of the right to reproduce and the second because children need siblings. Had Suleman had the octuplets because she desperately wanted a child, couldn’t afford multiple attempts and so stocked up on her single attempt, and had a moral reason not to abort… I might be willing to chalk it up as an epic lapse in judgment rather than a lapse in morals. But that she already had six that she was not able to take care of on her own and thus knew that she was enlisting her parents in something they didn’t want makes me disinclined to forgive any further pregnancies because her tubes should be tied.

I noticed on the news that they’re investigatinng the fertility clinic, which is something that Clancy and I have been discussing. There aren’t laws, but there are (obviously ignored) guidelines that if followed prevent this sort of nonsense. If there is a positive result in all this, hopefully it is a clamping down on this to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. We shouldn’t even have to be discussing this because it shouldn’t be legally permissible (assuming that it is).

Addendum: Sheila has followed up with a post on three ways to discourage welfare mothers.