We’re coming on a hundred years since the race to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Caroline Alexander, writing for the National Geographic, has a worthwhile article on Amundsen. (h/t Barry).

I’m sure it’s overblown because it makes such a compelling narrative, but I like reading about the distinctions between Amundsen and Scott’s approach which many have ascribed to their respective national characters. The English value the heroic struggle of the amateur. The Norwegians the pragmatic success of the professional. For Amundsen, the goal is getting to the pole in the most efficient manner possible. For Scott, honorable failure is preferable to succeeding in the wrong way.

I tend to be a little skeptical of this because I don’t know that Scott was necessarily aware of a more efficient manner of reaching his goal. But, a lot has been made of Scott’s trudging through the ice and snow with ponies as opposed to Amundsen’s skiing across the terrain with dogs pulling sleds. Amundsen is particularly maligned for coldly calculating the dogs necessary to pull the weight of supplies and then killing the dogs and using them for food as the other supplies were consumed.

Amundsen’s approach was clearly more successful. He got to the pole first and without major incident. Scott slogged his way through his “first rate tragedy” only to find that Amundsen had beat him. Then, he slogged most of the way back only to run out of supplies and get pinned down by a blizzard, just 11 miles from a supply depot, and die.

Afterward, Scott’s reputation was posthumously elevated to that of a national hero. Amundsen lived on, financially strapped and increasingly embittered.

A side-note about Amundsen that I found interesting in Ms. Alexander’s article:

[I]n May 1928, when Nobile’s airship went missing over the Arctic, Amundsen hastened to join the multinational rescue effort, pushing friends to finance a rescue plane. He was poised to get married, and his determination to be involved suggests that, as an essentially solitary man, he was running from this commitment.

The reason I took particular note of this was because I am currently reading King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild which describes Henry Morgan Stanley’s Congo expeditions. Hochschild suggests that Stanley’s engagement to Alice Pike took place immediately before his departure on a multi-year expedition because of his essential fear of women. (She got married to someone else while he was away.)

One of the standard tropes in political commentary is that “both sides do it” false equivalency. If you don’t see it, then you’re partisan. Part of the proof of this is that you never see that “your” side is as bad as the “other” side. Of course, that’s a chicken and egg issue. One would think you’d pick the side that you perceive as behaving itself more.

A problem is that there is very little in the way of indisputable objective criteria to judge who is behaving worse. If you could just put the bullshit on a scale at the end of a political campaign and give the office to the person that comes out lightest; we wouldn’t have this problem. Journalists, who we many times want to serve as referee, are wary of serving this function. They know they are in for a world of abuse from the side that doesn’t get the call. As the Boss said, they end up cringing like a dog that’s been beat too much and spend half their life just covering up. In other words, we get “he said, she said” faux balance. “Candidate Smith says the sky is made of bees. Candidate Jones disagrees.”

False equivalency encourages abuse. If you’re going to get blamed just the same as the other guy, no matter what you do; what’s your incentive for restraint? If you’re trying to beat up the other guy, and he’s trying to kill you; you’re going to lose. With no referee to call foul, you might as well bring your AK-47 into the ring. After all, the other guy is cheating too; he’s coming at you with a folding chair.

I saw a headline to the effect that a bunch of Ball State students got arrested for underage drinking. Just wondering if we should dial down the drinking age or if we think that making kids sneak their drinking for awhile builds character somehow.

In my house, growing up, drinking in high school was a hanging offense (unless you asked Mom or Dad and drank with them – a glass of wine at age 16 or 17 was o.k. under direct supervision.) Once you hit college, drinking was pretty well taken for granted. Part of this might have been that we lived right next to the Ohio state line where, when my older brothers and sister turned 18, it was legal.

So, put me in the lower the drinking age to 18 camp.

Ed Brayton passes along a Wall Street Journal report on an extremely generous interpretation of the tax break for parsonages. Apparently a $400,000 second home was tax exempt in the case of Phil Driscoll’s home in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Mr. Driscoll, who won the Tax Court ruling, leads Mighty Horn Ministries of Greensboro, Ga., which had income of more than $6 million from 2005 to 2009, according to tax filings.

Mr. Driscoll turned to the ministry after a popular music career that included playing a trumpet solo on the last “Ed Sullivan Show” in 1971 and composing for Joe Cocker and the band Blood, Sweat and Tears.

In 2005, a federal grand jury accused him of diverting ministry funds for personal expenses. Prosecutors said he used ministry funds from 1996 to 1999 for luxury cars, funeral bills for his mother and other personal items.

The report also mentions the $6.2 million home of Kenneth Copeland.

Philosophically, I question the propriety of offering tax breaks to any religion simply for being a religion. More appropriate would be tax breaks commensurate with the charitable works performed, regardless of whether the works were religiously motivated or otherwise. But, as a practical matter, I can’t get too worked up about what I believe to be the typical situation – church groups of modest means that put aside some property to house their minister who is not lavishly compensated.

But the Copelands and, I suppose, the Driscolls of the world make it clear that such breaks can be abused to where it looks like corrective action is necessary. If the tax code needs to keep the exemption, we should probably further complicate it by specifying one house per congregation and set a dollar limit of some sort.

Per Hunter, it’s like Jesus said:

[T]he poor are poor because they lack virtue. If they were virtuous, after all, they would not be poor: QED.

[A]ny help to the poor will only coddle them. They should attend church, and feed their souls; if they are virtuous, God will feed them himself. Poor people get divorced, but rich people do not. Poor people are ignorant: if God truly loved them, he would pay for their education (because of course the rest of us should not.) Poor people are not hard workers, unlike the better off: any layabout can pick crops for ten hours a day. Poor people tend to be born out of wedlock, which makes them bastards, which makes them impure.

Above all, poor people are depraved, and should certainly not have their lives made more comfortable and sustainable at our expense. If they cannot feed themselves, they should die. If their children need medical care but the poor have not saved enough money for it, those children should die. If they cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, if they cannot stay in school instead of giving it up in order to earn enough money to eat, if they cannot go to Harvard like the rest of us and educate themselves, damn them, then they are not worth saving. We should tell them to work harder, we should tell them to go to church, and we should tell them to stop getting divorces: after that, our hands are tied.

Clearly, poverty is righteous punishment for immoral behavior, and it would be presumptuous of humans to interfere.

In seriousness, a lot of times, moral behavior is economically advantageous behavior. We should encourage people to be diligent and industrious. But, that’s not the whole story and that’s not the end of the story. Sometimes, people are in financial trouble for reasons that are not immoral. And, just because you can plausibly fix the blame on the person for their own condition, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are justified or even sensible in washing your hands of them.

Health insurance and medical care loom so large in our lives today. Maybe I’m just projecting – but I don’t think so; I think a good chunk of the population spends some non-trivial amount of time worrying about this issue. Prices on insurance keep rising; prices on medical care keep rising; and, it seems like – actual health consequences aside – we’re Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; only instead of the pit of hell, it’s financial ruin.

Their foot shall slide in due time. Deuteronomy 32:35.

Anyway, the latest waymarker on this forced march is reflected in the City of Richmond’s efforts to grapple with its budget. Its proposal:

The city of Richmond’s administration plans to carve out spouses from health insurance coverage for city employees for the 2012 budget.

City director of human resources Sue Roberson told the Richmond Common Council that that is the administration’s plan in moving forward with preparation of next year’s budget.

. . .

The plan would combat increases in health insurance costs for the city that are expected to climb by 21 percent in 2012.

Among other things, we need to disassociate health care from employment. It’s bad for employers and, I think, it’s bad for employees. It’s probably bad for the economy as well if, for example, employees that could better use their skills elsewhere or go out on their own as entrepreneurs are discouraged from doing so because they are chained to health care benefits their employers increasingly begrudge them.

Becker and Posner have some interesting thoughts on income inequality, envy, and whether the inequality is deserved or not deserved.

I have seen more references to David Barton than is usual lately. Mostly I come across his name when Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars debunks one of Barton’s offerings. But now I’m reading about him in other places. For example, Tipsy notes a squabble between Barton and Ann Althouse.

There is an almost hermetically sealed, alternate intellectual universe where the half-truths and fabrications of guys like Barton are taken, almost literally, as Gospel. They strive to portray Founding and pre-Founding America as a place where there was not a notion that a wall should exist between (Christian) Church & State; and where other religions may have been tolerated but not equal in the eyes of the government. (See “Dominionism“) Chris Rodda has undertaken to debunk a good number of these in her “Liars for Jesus” (pdf). But, as historian Paul Harvey notes, such debunking is necessary but not sufficient because Barton is simply playing a different game than historians.

Barton’s intent is not to produce “scholarship,” but to influence public policy. He simply is playing a different game than worrying about scholarly credibility, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. His game is to inundate public policy makers (including local and state education boards as well as Congress) with ideas packaged as products that will move policy.
. . .
Barton’s success at withstanding the phalanx of professional critics comes because he taps into a long history of “Christian Nation” providentialism.

In short, perhaps the best way to understand Barton is as a historical product of Christian providentialist thinking, one with significant historical roots and usually with a publicly convincing spokesman. He is the latest in a long line of ideologically persuasive spokesmen for preserving American’s Protestant character.

Barton is the intellectual descendant of “Parson” Weems, Lost Cause historians, and William Jennings Bryan. (Harvey notes that Bryan’s Christian Nation bordered on socialism, in sharp contrast to the coldly libertarian one envisioned by Barton.) Harvey goes on to argue that the “debate” about the Founders view on religion is mostly fictitious — at least as argued against Christian Nationalists. The “godless” view of the Constitution recognizes that the Founders were, by and large, religious people. They just did not believe that religion should have any special privileges at the federal level. Harvey concludes:

The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy” akin to the global warming “debate.” On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. The “other side” is a group of ideological entrepreneurs who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism. In their drive to create a usable past, they show little respect for the past as a foreign country.

Guys like Barton are looking at the past, not for its own sake & not to understand it, but as a tool to achieve a predetermined purpose. And what’s the point? To influence politicians and policy. And it’s working. Mike Huckabee likes Barton so much that he joked that he wanted every American to be forced to listen to him at gunpoint.

And I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced, at gunpoint no less, to listen to every David Barton message and I think our country would be better for it.

G.O.P. Presidential frontrunner, Michele Bachmann, wants Barton to teach “Constitution classes” to new members of Congress.

Bachmann and Barton have a long relationship going back to Bachmann’s time as state senator. Barton was invited to Minnesota to help Bachmann with legislation on school history standards, she’s appeared his radio show numerous times, and she and Barton have conducted tours in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate to tea partiers how religious the Founding Fathers were.

And, the other likely G.O.P. Presidential nominee not named Mitt, Rick Perry, used Barton as a textbook expert. Using Barton’s mythical story of the Founding is argument by appealing to (fabricated) authority. They want a present where their view of Christianity dominates government policy; so, they want to create the illusion that there was a happier time in our past where our country embraced their policy views so that they can further argue that we should “return” to that embrace and, thereby, return to that happier time. This is necessary since, often times, the general public is a little skittish about embracing those views on their own merits. (See, e.g., a wife should graciously submit to her husband.) This is the sort of thing that gives rise to Stephen Colbert’s quip that reality has a known liberal bias.

The Guardian has an interesting article from a chapter of history about which I had previously known nothing. In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold was the UN Secretary General when his plane went down over northern Rhodesia on his way to peace talks about a rebellion in the Katanga region.

According to the article, the plane crash was chalked up to operator error at the time. But, it appears that the investigation was suspiciously cursory and that there is fairly good evidence that the plane was, in fact, shot down. Hammarskjold had pissed off just about everyone in the world already; and these peace talks were particularly unpopular in some quarters.

The investigation led Björkdahl to previously unpublished telegrams – seen by the Guardian – from the days leading up to Hammarskjöld’s death on 17 September 1961, which illustrate US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region.

Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed at the general assembly vote due the following year.

Looks like maybe some truly hardball politics was at work there. Anyway, nice, long article for those of you interested in such things.

That didn’t take long. It looks like the Region’s Ken Allen is first out of the gate with a Fairground lawsuit.

This does not give me confidence that I was wrong when I offered predictions about how this was going to shake out.

“This was a terrible tragedy that could and should have been prevented,” Valparaiso attorney Kenneth J. Allen said in a news release. “The responsible parties must be held to account.”

Translation: Your Client Is Evil. Pay Me.