Kelly Soderlund has an article about writer A.J. Jacobs and his new book, “The Year of Living Biblically” in which he chronicles his attempt to live by every rule set forth in the bible. The article talks about, for example, his efforts to avoid menstruating women or sitting where they have sat as well as his having to purge mixed fiber clothing from his closet (keeping with the Biblical injunction against mixing wool & linen.)

This idea amuses me, not because I think the Bible lacks value as a spiritual guide; but because I’m annoyed by people who use the Bible as a pretext to indulge in their own prejudices. “We have to oppose the gays because the Bible commands it!” Yeah, well, the Bible commands a lot of crazy stuff. The Bible can be a guide to moral living, but there has to be some external guidance as well to help someone pick which Biblical commands are imperative and which ones are relics from a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds.

Someone around these parts mentioned this bit from “The Life of Brian” a few days ago, and the tea baggers partiers have been in the news lately, so it was on my mind.

All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?

This morning, I caught a bit of some right-winger or another on the extremely liberal MSNBC network that features 3 hours per morning of former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough. (Damn liberal media.) Anyway, the speaker was suggesting that if government would just get out of the way and stop trying to fix our problems, then our problems would more or less go away. See, government was the problem. (There were no questions, while I was watching at least, on how this theory of government being the problem squares with the lack of regulatory oversight turning into the AIG led financial implosion.) So, anyway, government should do nothing “for our own good.”

Curv3ball at The Poor Man Institute captures some of this in the call for sacrifice from the common man.

Because we’re in a recession, it would be irresponsible – naive even – for Obama to refrain from exacting a pound of flesh from average Americans. How long can he continue to deny reality? After all, in down economic times, we “all” have to make sacrifices. Like, say, slashing social security, medicare and unemployment benefits. Or raising taxes on the middle class, lowering minimum wage and laying off police officers, firefighters and teachers. That’s just off the top of my head. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Fear not, though. Those sacrifices will make the sacrificees better in the long run – reinforce their moral fiber and, ultimately, lead to true happiness! Struggle is good for the soul and the spirit! Everyone should do it! Almost.

All of this came together in my mind to remind me of the great line from Cool Hand Luke:

Captain, Road Prison 36: You gonna get used to wearin’ them chains after a while, Luke. Don’t you never stop listenin’ to them clinking. ‘Cause they gonna remind you of what I been saying. For your own good.

Luke: Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, cap’n.

Update Speaking of AIG – how is this for chutzpah? It is suing the United States Government for the return of $306 million in tax payments. (h/t I Like Pie, Spot!)

I am currently reading The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption by John Perkins about which Joe Queenan writes a brutal take down. It is a book I picked up at the airport, and I have some of the same reservations about the book expressed by Queenan.

In another forum and before I read Queenan’s review, I wrote:

The author strikes me as more than a bit self-aggrandizing and not necessarily reliable on all points. But, the book strikes me as reliable enough to get me riled up.

In particular, he seems to report pretty well on the con game run through World Bank and IMF getting third world countries to take on huge debt to finance projects that benefit local elites and foreign corporations and which get paid back by squeezing the poor and middle-class.

Ted Evanoff reports on a national study showing that Indiana trails the U.S. in average income for its citizens.

Income in Indiana rose 2.7 percent last year to $34,103 per person, trailing the nation’s 2.9 percent rise to $39,571 per person, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Tuesday.

Overall, the state ranked 39th. The highest income states were in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and far west. (Sounds mainly like the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 — coincidence?)

On an 80 – 12 vote, the House passed SB 388 concerning property tax levies for mental health services. According to the bill digest:

Permits a county that wants to impose a property tax levy for the first time after 2008 for a community mental health center or a community mental retardation and other developmental disabilities center to submit a first year budget for approval by the department of local government finance. Provides that the first year levy for the approved budget is outside the property tax levy limit. Increases the circuit breaker property tax credit that applies to property taxes first due and payable in 2009.

It now goes back to the Senate with amendments. The Senate can either consent to the amendments or attempt to resolve the conflict between the Senate and House versions in conference committee.

Jim Shella posted an entry about Gov. Daniel’s veto threat over any bill that reduces instructional time for public school students.

This has to do with Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett’s recent decree that “starting in 2009-10, he would not approve waivers that allowed schools to fall short of 180 full days of classes. . . . Many districts fall short with days in which students attend for a half-day and then leave while teachers attend training sessions or hold parent-teacher conferences.”

Bennett’s decree means that teachers will receive less training, school districts (a/k/a ‘taxpayers’) will have to come up with more money, or teachers will be obligated to commit more time to their job for the same amount of pay.

More school isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but the mandate should probably come with some provision for funding it.

Update More on Gov. Daniels’ veto threat and the Democratic amendment to HB 126 that prompted it. Specifically, the Democratic amendment allows for up to 10 hours of parent-teacher conference time for grades 1 to 6 and up to 12 for grades 7 through 12. It also allows for up to six half days per year for teacher training.

The Governor and Bennett issued statements about the importance of more time in the classroom for students, but say nothing about paying for it.

In my experience, media and government officials are reasonably comfortable with folks spinning for their cause — “advocacy” we call it in the legal business — but if they peg you as a liar, you’re probably sunk.

Jon Ketzenberger’s reporting on the Indiana Live Casino in Shelbyville seems to indicate the casino is doing the latter instead of the former. They claimed that Obama’s people told them to pull an ad campaign that used his “Change you can believe in” slogan and a likeness of Obama that was not authorized. This wasn’t true. They also claimed that Justin Timberlake would participate in the ribbon-cutting. He said he never made plans to attend.

Not exactly cultivating trust for the casino.

The random paths down which my curiosity take me often surprise me. In the past couple of days, I have done some cursory reading about the Peruvian Amazon Company and the abuses it committed in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Apparently, the rubber industry took off in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A lot of the available rubber trees of the time were located in parts of the Amazon with little-to-no government control or oversight. An entrepreneur by the name of Julio Cesar Arana arose to take advantage of the rubber boom with his Peruvian Amazon Company. According to one entry:

Starting in 1850 rubber became a hot new commodity in the industrializing countries of Europe and North America, and the Amazon’s monopoly on “black gold” tapped from Hevea brasiliensis trees scattered in the rainforest spawned what the contemporary Brazilian writer called “the most criminal organization of labor ever devised.” A Peruvian rubber baron named Julio Arana founded the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company and grew fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Bora, Witoto, Andoke, and Ocaina Indians on the Putumayo River, which forms the border between Peru and Colombia. Reports of systematic torture, an orgy of sadism, the perverted mutilation of men, women, and children, women being kept as concubines by the Indian and Barbadian muchachos or captains, of the rubber gangs, reached Roger Casement, who had exposed similar atrocities ten years earlier in the Congo. By the time Casement got there, three-quarters of the population on the Putumayo had been wiped out in the previous six years, and there were only 8000-1000 left.

One account I read described “Suarez of Bolivia” (I believe this is Nicolas Suarez Callau) keeping a harem of native women for use of him and his friends to create a reliable labor pool. Less spectacular was the process of a sort of de facto enslavement of rubber workers. They would have access only to company stores to buy supplies and staples. They would have to buy these things on credit and then could never seem to get out of debt through their labor collecting rubber.

When I read of episodes in human history such as this, I become more convinced of the proposition that there is nothing “natural” about natural rights. In the absence of an effective government, there are no rights. And unfettered capitalism, like an unchecked fire, certainly has the capacity to do more harm than good.

Roger Casement is also a name of which I had been unaware. He was a British civil servant who reported the abuses in the Congo and then Peru, was made a knight in 1911 for his efforts, but was subsequently hung for treason in 1916 due to his efforts supporting Irish independence and collaborating with the Germans during World War I.

Incidentally, I stumbled across this aspect of early 20th century history while reading about Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who ultimately disappeared in the Amazon – quite an interesting character.