The Journal & Courier has a sound opinion piece where it points out that we need to devote more of our resources to maintenance and repairs of infrastructure.

Infrastructure repairs are expensive. Maintenance is somewhat less expensive, but in many cases, preventative or rehabilitative maintenance has not kept pace[.]

When you have limited resources, there is a temptation to devote them to more noticeable things and delay maintenance for another year. You increase or maintain operating expenses and your capital fund suffers as a result. Delay maintenance long enough, and you’re looking at a catastrophic repair bill. It’s the whole “stitch in time saves nine” concept.

But, as a rule, we voters don’t reward politicians for keeping the lights on, the roads smooth, the sewers flowing, the trash picked up, and the water clean. Rather we raise holy hell when these things don’t happen, and pout when we’re asked to pay for them.

Indiana is 4th in the nation in terms of women who smoke while pregnant, trailing West Virginia, Missouri, and Montana. As a debt collector, it’s always a little frustrating when confronted with a smoker who can’t pay his or her debt. A pack-a-day habit is probably something like $125/month. But that’s just a financial matter where the people harmed are the smoker/debtor and the creditor.

I can only imagine the frustration of medical professionals confronted with pregnant women smoking. It’s a bad habit and a poor choice with cascading negative consequences for mother and future child. (It would be interesting to see where pro-life & pro-choice advocates fall on this particular issue and why – though, abortion is arguably a less pressing issue in that 17% of Hoosier pregnancies aren’t being terminated through abortion.)

The March of Dimes, which advocates for healthy babies, says if all pregnant women in the U.S. stopped smoking, there would be an estimated 11 percent reduction in stillbirths and a 5 percent reduction in newborn deaths. Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are up to three times as likely to die from sudden infant death syndrome as babies of non-smokers, according to the March of Dimes.

Other effects are more common and better known: Smoking nearly doubles a woman’s risk of having a low-birth-weight baby, slows fetal growth and increases the risk of preterm delivery.

There are an interesting couple of paragraphs talking about why Indiana has such a high smoking rate. Dick Conklin, of Tobacco Free Allen County, says it has to do with economics, family tradition and a belief in a fundamental right to smoke. I’m not sure why poor people are more likely to smoke – it’s probably more of a correlation than a causation – but it’s really the “fundamental right” thing that drives me nuts. I suppose I have the right to jam a knitting needle into my eye, but I’m not going to do it. And the issue of whether there ought to be legislation to stop smoking is distinct from the issue of whether any given individual ought to smoke or, in particular, smoke while pregnant, knowing what we do today and have known for quite some time about the risks of smoking.

So what is the mindset? “I have the right to smoke, so I’m going to stick it to all you liberal nanny-staters by poisoning myself and my fetus?” More likely, I think the mindset is that the person is addicted, doesn’t want to deal with the hard work of giving up the addiction, and doesn’t want to confront the problem in their own minds, so through the magic of fuzzy thinking, the “right to smoke” somehow allows them to short-circuit that mental process.

Yes, I should be working, but I had a trial scheduled for today that settled at the last minute, so I’m having trouble re-focusing my attention. I came across a post talking about how to get and play old DOS games, so I figured cool, old computer games would be a good thread.

My all-time favorite was probably Sid Meier’s Pirates! In high school, T and I spent endless hours playing this game, eating Pizza King Royal Feasts, and drinking cokes. Basically, you sailed around the Spanish Main plundering cities, finding buried treasure, and advancing your career by playing the Spanish, Dutch, English, and French against each other. To this day, my knowledge of Caribbean geography is heavily influenced by this game, and I probably think of places by names that are 400 years out of date.

Next in line was probably Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This was a morality tale wrapped in a fantasy game. The goal was to learn about and improve your character in the 8 virtues (honesty, compassion, valor, justice, honor, spirituality, and humility) and their relationship to the three principles of Truth, Love, and Courage while killing monsters and getting loot.

Other notables for me: Civilization, Zork, , Raid on Bungeling Bay, Leaderboard Golf, Leisure Suit Larry, Seven Cities of Gold, Montezuma’s Revenge, and Full Throttle.

The Health Care Reform Law (yes, the one that will destroy America as we know it and make the Founding Fathers cry) has provisions that take effect today. The National Conference of State Legislatures has put out a handy grid that itemizes the changes that will kill your grandma and whatnot. The fiendish measures destroying America today:

#No annual or lifetime limits on insurance policies for essential health benefits.

# Limiting rescission (the practice of canceling policies only after the insured gets sick) to cases of actual fraud or an intentional misrepresentation of material fact. (In other words, you have to pay to fix the broken leg even if the insured lied about having a bad cough 5 years ago.)

#For plans beginning after 9/23/10, coverage for preventive health services with no copayments and the service being exempt from deductibles.

#Extending coverage to adult children until they are 26 years old.

#No exclusion based on pre-existing conditions for children under the age of 19.

#Group plans can’t discriminate on eligibility in favor of higher paid employees.

Frankly, I don’t know how the Republic can survive.

The tone of this Associated Press article on nutty things Tea Party heroine Christine O’Donnell has said on camera was striking to me. It’s generally dismissive of using past statements to evaluate the woman.

You see, it’s not that O’Donnell talked about dabbling in witchcraft on the Bill Maher show in 1999, rather Maher is “digging up” clips. But this paragraph is what I really noticed:

Opponents have been unearthing unflattering age-old television clips. Her campaign didn’t immediately return a telephone message Saturday, but she has in the past dismissed previous comments.

So I guess there are no clips of modern vintage? And how many years is “age-old” in the AP style book? Is the War in Afghanistan about to become “age-old”? Will the inevitable hero worship of things Reagan supposedly did or said be described as “age-old”?

It’s just such an odd editorial choice.

Just a reminder that September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrr! Three sheets to the wind, mateys!

‘Tis a Day holy to the Pastafarians, for whom Pirates are divine beings. As Bobby Henderson pointed out in his letter to the Kansas Board of Education urging them to give equal time to the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster along side evolution and intelligent design, global warming is due to the decline of pirates:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

So, Talk Like a Pirate & Fight Global Warming!

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article on how wine leads growth in Indiana alcohol sales. Beer is still the overall leader, selling 124 million gallons to wine’s 10 million gallons, but wine has been growing at a bigger clip. (That’s even if you consider the fact that you’re likely not going to consume the same volume of wine in a sitting as beer.)

Some of the comments in the article track my experience as well. I have always been more of a beer drinker and will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future. But, in general, my interest in wine has increased. (It probably doesn’t hurt that my sister-in-law is a huge wine fan.) The availability is up and prices are not intimidating. I was pretty amazed at the selection in our local CVS the other day. And you can buy a decent tasting, non-headache-inducing bottle for $7-$8.

The article talks about the increase in alcohol sales even in the face of the recession. But, my recollection is that alcohol sales are historically recession-proof anyway. I was going to suggest that maybe as a society we are developing a more relaxed attitude toward alcohol. But, I don’t think that’s the case. Old timers in the legal profession recount times in their youth when the old timers in their day would fairly routinely drink a fair amount at lunch and whatnot. The crusade against drinking and driving has increased awareness of the dangers of drinking irresponsibly. So I’m not sure how you would explain the overall increase in alcohol purchases. Maybe it’s just that the available stuff has gotten so much better: more wines available, more craft beers available. It’s not just Budweiser and Paul Masson (no relation) wines. Maybe we’re drinking a little differently – not just swilling a lot of crappy alcohol to get drunk, but also drinking good stuff because it tastes good. (Or maybe I’m just projecting the change in my own drinking habits from my early 20s versus my late 30s.)

September 11, 2001 is slowly fading from current event into history. The wound of the moment seems to be scabbing over. Our reaction to the injury, unfortunately, seems to have become more of a chronic condition.

I, like most others who lived through it, remember that day fairly well. I remember being in the office when one of the staff members came in talking about it. So, we were all paying attention when the second one hit. Not much work got done that day. I recall refreshing various news sites on my web browser frequently. Personally, I got a lot of my information via the people on a bulletin board system called The Well. I also recall getting some insight into which cable channels were owned by the same company – since everyone was playing news feeds. Before that, for example, I’m not sure I had appreciated that MTV was aligned with CBS through Viacom. In retrospect, a lot of my 9/11 experience was through the media. And on that day, I think the major media did us a service. A lot of people were credits to their professions and humanity generally that day.

It was the reaction that mostly got us in trouble. I think we were all in something of an altered mental state following the attacks to one degree or another. I’m not a weepy sort of fellow, in general, but I remember crying a little bit on the drive home from work. The enormity of the day got to me, I guess. After awhile, though, I think the pressure to continue covering the story made the media a little stupid. And the pressure to “do something” made our politicians a little stupid. The terrorists had very little power over us that we weren’t willing to give them. Knocking down a few planes and killing, sad as it was, a relative handful of people was at the far reaches of their power to directly affect us. The rest was power we gave them through our reaction.

They were able to scare us and make us angry and afraid. Staying angry and afraid was something we chose to do. Saddling ourselves with war debt and casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were also choices. Things like Gitmo and the PATRIOT act were self-inflicted. Unlike, say, Germany or Japan in the 30s and 40s, al Qaeda lacked anything like the resources to impose its will directly on a significant portion of the population of any industrialized country, let alone ours. Rather, it had to do a bit of geopolitical judo, using our energy against ourselves. And they certainly got into our heads. For awhile it was wall-to-wall 9/11 this and 9/11 that. Politicians reflexively supported anything that could be framed as anti-terrorist and cowered away from anything that could be framed as pro-terrorist. Civil liberties took a back seat. War spending got a blank check.

We just ended one phase of our involvement in Iraq, but I’m sure our people (keeping with the conventional tradition of ignoring the effect on the Iraqis themselves) will keep dying there and, while our schools wheeze along and our infrastructure decays, we will continue spending gobs of money on Iraq-inflicted debt. We’re still going on in Afghanistan, with the goal being somewhat opaque, as far as I can tell. I supported the U.S. going into Afghanistan, but in retrospect even if it was better justified than Iraq, I’m not sure how useful the whole enterprise was.

Comparing the country today to the country ten years ago in 2000, pre-9/11/01, I don’t think the state of the nation has improved any. So, we’ve either stagnated or taken a step back. I can’t say that was all the work of the terrorists; we’re dealing with a lot of problems with roots that extend back a long way – e.g. the loss of manufacturing as the world catches up to the head start we got in the wake of World War II; our decisions during the 80s and 90s to engage in some profit taking of the wealth built up in the country during the 50s-70s. But our response to 9/11 acted as a force multiplier for those underlying problems. Now it feels like we’re in a hole, and it’s not clear whether we are digging out or digging deeper. Certainly I’ll be interested to see what things look like in another ten years.

Some cheery thoughts on this rainy Saturday morning; quite a contrast from the perfect weather the morning of 9/11/01 that was horribly interrupted by the planes striking.

In the State Treasurer’s race, challenger Pete Buttigieg hammered incumbent Richard Mourdock on the waste associated with a risky investment of state money in the, at the time, foundering Chrysler corporation compounded by spending gobs of money on a wasteful lawsuit. The loss to Indiana from its payout in the Chrysler Bankruptcy was about $6 million. It invested about $18 million and got about $12 million back.

Buttigieg points out that the State used pension and Toll Road Privatization money to pick up Chrysler debt at $0.43 on the dollar, a clear sign that an investment is carrying a certain amount of risk. I have outlined in the past why Mourdock was tilting at windmills when he challenged the Chrysler bankruptcy decision – among other things, there simply wasn’t a better deal available for creditors than that received through the bankruptcy court; and, even if there was, Indiana did not get to make that decision because it had agreed to turn over decision making on such deals to a committee of creditors in which Indiana was a very minor stakeholder.

Now, Buttigieg has uncovered information about just how much good money was sent after bad to pay for the lawyers necessary to tilt at this particular windmill. The State spent $2 million trying to recover its lost $6 million with marginal legal arguments:

Buttigieg, a South Bend businessman, said the billing records raise serious questions about Mourdock’s management of state funds. He questioned why Mourdock could not have used an Indiana law firm, and noted that the New York attorneys billed the state from $365 to $1,050 per hour, with paralegals and legal assistants billing between $205 and $295 per hour.

And, he said, the costs of the pricey lawsuit was born by the funds that had lost money because of the poor investments. The Major Moves Construction Fund paid more than $427,000; the Teachers Retirement Fund paid more than $1.5 million and the Indiana State Police Pension Fund paid more than $64,000.

I really can’t say I know anything about Mr. Mourdock. I’ve heard that he is a very pleasant individual. But this Chrysler business is a debacle. To me, it looks like a questionable but not outlandish decision to invest funds in the shaky Chrysler because of the discounted price of the debt that has been aggravated by an effort to grandstand, on the public’s dime, against the Obama administration and its involvement in the Chrysler bankruptcy. Had the Bush administration been involved in the Chrysler bankruptcy, my suspicion is that the State would have borne its losses quietly and not increased them by 33% to pay out-of-state lawyers wads of money to advance long shot legal arguments.