Now, I don’t know about you, but I want my spaceflight tax dollars going toward kick-ass stuff, the sort of stuff that would make a seven-year-old boy’s jaw drop. Going to the moon? That was cool. Going to Mars? That would be even better. A giant telescope that gives us amazing pictures of deep space? Pretty damn impressive. But most of the Space Shuttle’s and ISS’s science experiments did little to live up to the gigantic price tag of each mission. Head over to NASA’s website and take a look for yourself. There’s some great stuff there. One of the first ones I saw listed was about “Skeletal Development in Embryonic Quail.” Okay, I understand that people’s bones weaken in space and that animal studies about bones in microgravity could be useful, but do we really need to spend the money to send quail eggs into space?

The problem is that since the Apollo program there has been no real direction in the American space program. The space shuttle was supposed to cut the costs of putting things in orbit, but it didn’t. It makes sense that a reusable ship could cost less than a disposable rocket, but that never worked out. And beside, for cargo purposes, there’s no way a human-carrying spaceship could ever be cheaper than something without people. It’s not so bad if an unmanned rocket blows up. It’s really bad when Challenger explodes or Columbia disintegrates. It’s one thing to take on the added expense of human spaceflight when it involves something as significant as landing on the moon or Mars. It’s another when it involves routine, boring flights to and from the ISS, which is itself a giant waste of money. It’d be one thing if we were parking something in orbit so that we could use it as a starting point for manned missions to the moon or Mars. Every now and then, presidents talk about sending men to Mars. But these are nothing more than distant, empty promises. We’ve spent billions of dollars but are hardly closer to getting humans to Mars, which at this point has to be our long-term goal for human spaceflight. We’ve been in orbit, we’ve been to the moon, so Mars has to be the next step. The space shuttle has done little to advance that goal. So while everyone else mourns the end of the program, I say to Atlantis: Come home safely, then good riddance.

1) Build huge levees to contain the water.

2) Create outlets where water can be released from the river.

There are a few other possible solutions, but those are the two major ones. Unfortunately, each has its drawbacks. Levees force a river through a narrower path; the only place for the water to go is up, causing the river to get higher, so that the levees must be built taller, and so on. Along the Mississippi, the building of levees has historically been combined with a practice of shutting off almost all of the natural distributaries of the river. It doesn’t take an expert hydrologist to figure out that closing off places where water flows out means more water downriver.

Using outlets of some sort—diversions into other rivers, spillways, or simply flooding large areas of low-lying land—can damage the property or livelihood of whoever owns the land that is deliberately flooded. In some cases—for example, the Bonnet Carré Spillway—only a small amount of land is used. The Bonnet Carré is roughly six miles long and two miles wide; it empties into Lake Pontchartrain. Though the spillway is used for recreation purposes when not in use for flood control, there are no land owners to appease. Thus, it is fairly low-risk (from a political standpoint) to open it up. Sending dirty river water into the lake does annoy the environmentalists and the fishermen, but all things considered it’s not going to piss anyone off too much.

However, the two other major outlets along the Mississippi present a much greater risk to property when opened. One of them is the Bird’s Point-New Madrid Floodway in Missouri. A so-called “fuse-plug” levee is designed so that it can be blown up, allowing the river to flood more than 200 square miles of farmland. As you could probably guess, the farmers don’t really want to see that floodway opened. In fact, they took the Army Corps of Engineers to court to prevent it, but were unsuccessful.

Farther downriver is the Morganza Spillway, which runs from the town of Morganza along the Mississippi and guides water into the Atchafalaya Basin, with guide levees some 20 miles apart channeling water toward the gulf. The Atchafalaya Basin is a huge swamp surrounding the Atchafalaya River. Levees surround the basin, and ring levees surround some of the towns inside of it, but opening the Morganza means there’s going to be lots of flooding within the basin, and many homeowners are at risk.

Obviously I sympathize for the people in the Atchafalaya Basin. But I steadfastly reject the idea that we shouldn’t have opened the Morganza Spillway. Opening the Morganza is a last-ditch strategy, and one that is rarely called for. In fact, the only other time it was ever opened was 1973 (contrast that with the Bonnet Carré, which has been opened ten times). And the people know that they are living in a floodway, albeit a seldom-used one. Because it is so large and so rarely used, there is some development within it, as opposed to the smaller, more frequently-opened Bonnet Carré. And while one hopes that the Morganza will be opened as rarely as possible, when it is opened, that is only because it is in the best interests of the state and the nation as a whole.

The Mississippi River from Baton Rouge through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico is a vitally important corridor of industry, with refineries galore, petrochemical factories, and four of the country’s thirteen largest ports. Flooding along this stretch of the river would be bad, of course, but there is a far greater risk involved, one which would have been heightened by not opening the Morganza. That risk is the possibility of the Mississippi changing its course to follow the Atchafalaya.

Rivers in their natural state will roam all over, depositing sediment to new places, meandering back and forth, forming oxbow lakes and different channels. Water runs downhill, and it wants a steep path. Right now, the path along the Atchafalaya River is much, much steeper than the path along the Mississippi. If Mother Nature had her way, the fury of the Mississippi would roar down the Atchafalaya, reducing the flow of the Mississippi to a relative trickle.

So what’s stopping this from happening? The Old River Control Structure, named for what people called the “Old River.” Formerly part of the main course of the Mississippi, the Old River was bypassed when steamboat captain Henry Shreve (namesake of Shreveport) cut off a meander of the river to create a shorter path. The Old River then connected the Mississippi with the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers to the west. (Lots of details about this are available here.) Water could flow in either direction depending on the relative levels of the river, but by the mid-20th century it was clear that if nature remained unchecked, the Mississippi would switch its course to the Atchafalaya. Thus, the Old River Control Structure was built. Completed in 1963, it allowed the Corps of Engineers to control the amount of water flowing into the MIssissippi and Atchafalaya, and it was decided that 70% of the flow should go to the Mississippi, with the other 30% going to the Atchafalaya. It’s done its job so far, but in 1973 the structure was damaged by that year’s flood. In 1986 the Auxiliary Structure was completed to alleviate pressure on the rest of the system.

So what would happen if the Mississippi shifted its course? It would be a horrific disaster. Let me put it this way: I grew up scared of The Big One, the powerful hurricane that would strike New Orleans. Now I’m more scared of the failure of the Old River Control Structure. The most direct effects would be felt in the Atchafalaya basin, with massive flooding, damage to bridges and pipelines, and so forth. But the long term effects on Baton Rouge and New Orleans would be worse. The cities’ major source of fresh water would be gone, with water from the gulf turning the river into a brackish estuary. Shipping would be disrupted—remember how I said we have four of the largest ports in the country? Factories would be devastated, and life as we know it would be gone. The nationwide impact would be enormous. The energy, chemical, and food industries would be directly affected, while the interruption of the ports’ normal operations would affect giant swaths of the American economy—imports from Latin America and Asia, exports of grain traveling from the Midwest. Just as New Orleans is vulnerable to hurricanes, it is vulnerable to the vagaries of the Mississippi River. But the city’s value makes it worth defending from both of those threats. Given the significance of the Old River Control Structure, it is obvious that the Corps made the correct decision in opening the Morganza.

For additional reading, I suggest these links:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
A brief discussion of the possibility of course change.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146?currentPage=all
A lengthy article about the river, its history, and the people who call the Atchafalaya Basin home.

I also highly recommend John M. Barry’s book Rising Tide, which you can probably find fairly cheap at a bookstore. (I think I picked mine up off a discount shelf at Barnes & Noble for $5 or so.) It focuses on the 1927 Mississippi River flood, delving into the history of man’s attempt to control the river and the competing theories about the best means of doing so; it also discusses the upper-crust of New Orleans society and Senator LeRoy Percy’s role in the politics of Mississippi. Barry’s website features this essay about the importance of New Orleans.

Hopefully that finally settles the years of idiocy coming from the “birther” movement, a group of buffoons who have steadfastly insisted that Obama is somehow not a citizen, with most of them suggesting he was born somewhere outside of the United States. Part of this skepticism came from the fact that the previously released version of Obama’s birth certificate was this one:

That, of course, is obviously a printout of an electronic version. It did not satisfy the birthers, even though this was the standard document released when people needed a copy of their birth certificates. Also, there were birth announcements published in the local Hawaii papers, so any conspiracy would have to be as old as Obama himself.

The birther movement had its ebbs and flows. It was an issue during the presidential campaign, even though the McCain camp didn’t choose to make an issue of it. But somehow it gained steam to the point where huge numbers of Republican and conservative voters either thought Obama wasn’t born in the US or were unsure. In 2010, a lieutenant colonel in the US military refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan out of his conviction that Obama was not eligible to be president and thus was not legally entitled to act as Commander-in-Chief. And most recently, possible presidential candidate Donald Trump has been stirring the birther pot.

How the hell can such an absurd belief gain widespread credence? It is absurd that we as Americans cannot agree about facts. I don’t expect us to all have the same opinions. Reasonable people can disagree about political positions. But there are basic facts, well-researched and well-documented, that are simply, plainly, completely true. Obama’s birth in Hawaii is one of these things. If you don’t agree with his political views, fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But sticking to a stupid belief in the face of tons of directly contradictory evidence? That’s just stupid. Hopefully the newly released document shuts the idiots up.

Finally, there are two sidenotes to this story that I find rather amusing. First of all, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was a US territory at the time. Then there are a whole bunch of technicalities to deal with based on exactly how the US Constitution applies to those territories. One law professor even suggested that due to a quirky loophole, McCain wasn’t born a citizen and thus was ineligible to be President. (Details here.) It’s quite a strained argument, the professor later backtracked on it, and I don’t agree with it at all; but it’s ironic that in a campaign that focused so much on Obama’s citizenship there was a case to be made that his opponent wasn’t eligible.

The second sidetone is that I found that whole hullabaloo completely irrelevant anyway. The Constitution demands that the President (and Vice-President) be “natural born citizens.” Unfortunately, there’s no precise definition supplied. However, it is well established that there are two different types of rights to citizenship: either jus soli, based on being born within a country, or jus sanguinis, based on the citizenship of one’s parents. United States nationality law allows for citizenship to be acquired in both ways. There are certain residency requirements for the parents (to prevent a situation where you could have many generations of Americans living in a foreign country with none of them ever having set foot on American soil), but in Obama’s case these restrictions wouldn’t apply. Even if he had been born overseas, he’d have been a citizen (by jus sanguinis) from birth. (Likewise, McCain would be a citizen from birth by the same principle.) Now, the Supreme Court has never issued a decision on what “natural born citizen” means, but in my opinion the only plausible decision is that it means a citizen at birth, whether by jus soli or jus sanguinis. Thus, it doesn’t matter if Obama was born in the country or not. If you think that “natural born citizen” should only apply to people born in the United States, consider this thought experiment: a husband and wife (she’s seven months pregnant) live in Buffalo and take a trip to Niagara Falls. While on the Canadian side of the border, she suddenly goes into labor, is taken to a Canadian hospital, and gives birth to a healthy, albeit premature, baby. After a few days, the baby is well enough to leave the hospital, whereupon he returns to Buffalo and grows up. Would it make any sense to say that the baby can’t become President of the United States? Of course not.

The obvious first reaction from politicians and people of all political views was shock, dismay, and sadness at this horrific crime, which was obviously the work of a mentally unstable individual. But it wasn’t long before partisans of the left and right started lobbing accusations (whether justified or not) at the other side. Many people have called for a re-examination of the harsh rhetoric often used in American politics. Perhaps the most criticized was the map that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had posted in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections; that map targeted vulnerable Democrats with crosshairs on their congressional districts. Now, thankfully we live in a country where the right to free speech is cherished, and people who want to use questionable rhetoric or take shocking stances can do so. But just because we can use such rhetoric, should we? Many people have suggested that harsh political rhetoric, demonization of one’s political opponents, etc. may very well trigger the mentally unstable to commit acts of violence they otherwise would not have committed. Perhaps that’s true. Jack Shafer at Slate, however, takes another approach:

“Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.”

To a certain extent, I’d agree—after all, the word “hates” is in the title of my blog.** The risk of an insane person being driven to murder by indirect vitriolic political rhetoric is small enough and the consequences of swinging too far in the direction of squelching free speech are great enough that we should continue to defend people’s rights to express their political views, even when they do so in a manner that some or many or most or even almost all of us find distasteful. I should also point out here that we have no idea whether the shooter*** was influenced by any particular politician’s speeches or writings; from what we know his politics were a collection of fringe views, but I doubt we will ever establish any sort of link between a particular phrase he may have heard and the crime he committed. And in any case, it is ridiculous to lay the blame for this crime on anyone other than the person who committed it.

However, I think that much of the discourse in this country, violent or not, is greatly objectionable on other grounds. There is a tendency, whether we use that word or not, to see people of differing political views as “enemies.” In my years of Catholic school, one of the things that got drummed into my head was the importance of the dignity and equality of every human. Those who disagree with us are humans first and foremost. No division—neither race nor religion nor sex nor nationality nor political philosophy—is ever remotely as important as our shared humanity. People will always disagree with each other about how to best govern our cities, our states, our countries, our planet; but when we slip into an us-versus-them mentality and treat those who disagree as less than human, everyone suffers. Is it that hard for Democrats and Republicans to view people on the other side of the aisle as decent people, as fellow Americans, as people who want a better country even if they disagree about how to get there? Now, I’m not saying that all political views are created equal, or that truth is just a matter of opinion. I detest relativism as much as I detest anything. There are plenty of views, both mainstream and fringe, both left and right, which I consider ridiculous, ill-informed, ludicrous, flat-out wrong, and unworthy of a place in the national discourse. (People are, of course, entitled to those views.) But when we attack perfectly reasonable opinions that just happen to differ from our own and view the proponents of those opinions as idiots, we polarize the society and make it easier for the truly ridiculous and idiotic beliefs to come to the forefront.

The polarization of the news media has not helped in this regard; there are so few outlets that even feign a rigorously non-partisan approach independent of political ideology. Does anyone in this country’s media (or anyone in this country at all, media or otherwise) have the absolute respect and trust of the entire country, the entire political spectrum? No. It thus becomes practically impossible for anyone to issue a call for unity, for civil discourse, for common sense. Jon Stewart may have tried with the Rally to Restore Sanity, and I commend him for the effort, but as balanced as his approach was during the rally, it’s clear from pictures I saw taken by those who attended that the crowd drawn was a left-of-center one, as you might expect from the left-of-center tone of the Stewart/Colbert TV shows. Too many people dismiss anything said by people of other ideological affiliations. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are the people who draw viewers and thus make money for their respective networks. Media personalities are more or less forced to pick sides, so they do****; and even when a sensible person like Jon Stewart steps up and says sensible things, his audience is largely his base, not the public as a whole, since he’s spent years as a left-of-center media personality. To a large extent, this is very unfortunate; first, that people in the “news” business, which should involve a great deal of objective reporting and presentation, are ideologically pigeonholed, with anything they say viewed through the lens of their political beliefs; second, and more importantly, that people refuse to acknowledge common sense when it comes from someone who doesn’t share many of their political views. Everything that occurs nowadays is immediately spun to present whatever argument anyone wishes to make, and even saddening events such as the Arizona shooting are exploited for political gain. Liberals decry conservative rhetoric they believe inflamed the shooter; conservatives accuse liberals of spinning the events for their own purposes; liberals attack conservatives for attacking liberals for using the events to gain a political advantage, and so on ad infinitum. People refuse to agree on facts; and far too few people are concerned with digging up what the facts are, content to stay comfortably within their own ideology and refusing to acknowledge any challenges to their beliefs. When left and right—I hesitate to use those terms as they are a gross oversimplification of politics, but they’ll do for now—retreat into their own sheltered existences, with their own news networks, their own magazines, their own blogs, and so on, they too often fail to tear down the stupidity within their own ranks, and that stupidity can grow to alarming levels. (For example, the birther movement, which is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve seen in my life.)

As I said before, it is silly to blame overheated rhetoric for the Arizona shooting. We should be criticizing it on a much more direct level: such inflammatory words denigrate and demonize political opponents and fail to recognize our shared humanity, mistaking differences of opinion for evil and enmity. Couple this with a refusal to recognize facts and truth, and you have a recipe for a caustic, toxic political environment.

* There are well-established exceptions, of course: go to Wikipedia’s article on freedom of speech in the United States for more details.

** I do want to point out however, that it’s “things kevin hates,” not “people kevin hates,”; and when I do talk about a group of people I hate, I’m usually just picking out a specific objectionable behavior. Hating people is bad, okay?

*** I thought about calling him the “suspected shooter,” but let’s be reasonable. There may be a presumption of innocence in the American legal system, but there isn’t one on my blog.

**** Sure, Katie Couric or some other network news anchor is regarded as more or less moderate and non-partisan, but the networks are no longer relevant. Who gives a crap about Katie Couric anyway?

I don’t really care to turn this into a vegetarianism or animal-rights debate. And since Palin, Sorkin, and I all eat animals, it doesn’t need to be. (If you’re a vegetarian and want to object to the episode on the grounds that animals should never be killed and eaten, go right ahead. But not on this blog.) Sorkin says he doesn’t “relish the idea of torturing animals.” From the footage shown on the episode, it doesn’t look like torture to me. Close-up on Palin, “Bang!” goes the shot from her gun, then cut to the animal to see it fall down. By the time the hunting party walks over, the caribou is long dead. If I had to choose between that death and the death of the average factory-farm-raised cow or chicken, I’d take the caribou’s death. (And if I had to choose which life to lead, it’d be the caribou, by far. Wandering across Alaska beats standing in my own shit any day of the week.)

Sorkin goes on to call the episode a “snuff film.” He also says that Palin wasn’t “killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion”; instead, she was “killing it for fun.” He says that in spite of the fact that Palin repeatedly mentions how the caribou meat will stay in her freezer all winter and feed her family; when the camera peeks into her freezer, she points out various packs of caribou and moose meat. Does Sarah Palin really need to hunt for meat to provide for her family? Of course not. She lives in a suburb of Anchorage. She’s got a Pizza Hut and McDonald’s and Wendy’s in her town. But in no way does Sorkin explain how it’s morally preferable to eat at a fast-food chain or buy ground meat from the supermarket instead of hunting your own meat. Does Palin clearly relish the opportunity to shoot a caribou? Absolutely. She talks several times about the joys of hunting, shooting, and killing. Does this satisfaction make her actions morally reprehensible? Not at all. I would go so far as to say that killing a caribou that lived its entire life in the wild, then skinning it, carving it up, and processing the meat yourself is morally superior to thoughtlessly tossing a pack of ribs or chicken breasts into the shopping cart at the grocery store, given the many questions and complaints that have been raised about the treatment of animals in the American food production system.

Furthermore, Sorkin even claims that he “can’t make a distinction” between Palin’s hunting trip and Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation. This smacks of either ignorance, disingenuousness, or both. Surely a man of Sorkin’s intelligence is smart enough to distinguish between a single shot through a caribou’s chest and evidence of horrific mistreatment and deaths of dogs involved in the Vick case.

He also calls Palin a “phony pioneer girl.” This, I wouldn’t disagree with. In the episode, Palin is unable to tell east from west during the morning in the Alaskan tundra. For a supposed outdoorswoman to not know her directions is way worse than to slip up and get North and South Korea confused. She also misses the caribou several times and has to use another gun; however, it is revealed later in the episode that the gun’s sight had some sort of malfunction, explaining why she missed high on her first several shots.

Finally, he levels the accusation that this was “the first moose ever murdered for political gain.” First of all, it’s a caribou, not a moose; just more ignorance from a typical limousine liberal who doesn’t know anything about the world outside of New York and LA. Second of all, of course it was for political gain! As Sorkin points out, Palin knew PETA would get upset. She knew it’d be a chance to get people to take her side. But everything politicians do is for political gain. Whether it’s carrier deck photo ops, books about hope and dreams and audacity, kissing babies, shaking hands, or anything else, politicians are always looking out for themselves. That’s nothing new. But again, this additional benefit of her hunting trip does not corrupt it, just as the fact that she takes pleasure in hunting does not make it an immoral activity. If I had to play armchair psychiatrist, I’d suggest that Sorkin isn’t exactly comfortable with the morality of his meat-eating. He wants to divorce himself as much as possible from the idea that the meat he eats was once a living, breathing animal. If you don’t want to “volunteer to be the one to kill” animals, that’s your choice. I’ve never hunted either, and I don’t have any particular desire to start now. But your squeamishness is not something that should be forced upon everyone else. After all, if no one wanted to kill animals, you wouldn’t have any meat to eat, would you, Aaron? You’re a talented guy. I thought The Social Network was a great movie. I watched Sports Night when it first aired on ABC. But maybe you should leave the blogs alone and stick to screenwriting. Because on this issue, despite your protestations, you’re a hypocrite.

The reasons to get rid of the penny are numerous. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious one is that it costs more than a cent to make a penny. 1.7 cents, in fact. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) In other worse, the government is just throwing away money. Furthermore, they then passed a law to make it illegal to melt down pennies for the cost of the zinc and copper. Sounds like a dumb law, right? There would be no need for it if the penny were made out of something else (steel, say) that costs less than one cent per penny. But Jarden Zinc Products, the company that makes the blanks the pennies are made out of, won’t have any of that. They hired lobbyists to fight a Congressman who tried to outlaw pennies.

This is special-interest politics at its worst. On a controversial issue, there’s bound to be lobbyists on both sides of the issue. Smoking companies go up against health advocacy groups; oil companies against environmentalists; and so on. Sure, Big Business may have more money, but at least there’s an opposition. In this instance, there’s one company with a lot to lose; and on the other side, there are 300 million Americans whose lives would be marginally improved in little-noticed ways, ways so marginal that no one has any real selfish incentive to take the time to fight the zinc lobby. The government would save hundreds of millions of dollars; people would save time that cashiers spend counting out pennies. It may not seem like it takes very long for the Wal-Mart cashier to count out four pennies; but imagine a second or two multiplied by the billions of times a year people pay cash and get pennies in change. It’s a massive waste of time. (Sure, a lot of people have switched to credit and debit cards; but if anything, that’s just another argument in favor of abolishing the penny.)

The fact of the matter is that’s simply absurd to keep a coin when inflation has whittled its value down to roughly nothing. What could you possibly buy for a penny? And if you did buy something for a penny, you’d have spent an awful lot more than a penny (in terms of both time and money) to get to the store. Even if you’re at the store already, it’s not like a store could find something worth a penny to put in a supermarket check-out lane. It’s stupid to spend millions of dollars a year to make billions of worthless coins.

Now, my point here is not to criticize the guy who goes into the convenience store maybe once or twice a year when the Powerball jackpot is $250 million. If you spend $2 a year on the lottery, you may be losing money—the odds are against you in virtually any** situation—but you’re never going to miss $2 a year. On the other hand, those millions of dollars would be really nice to have if you do luck out. SInce losing $2 a year is essentially equivalent to nothing, but winning a huge amount of money (even at odds of almost 200 million to 1) is really, really awesome, it’s not a bad deal (from a life perspective, not a strict financial perspective) if you play on very rare occasions. My point here is to criticize the people who spend $5 or $10 or $20 or more a week, every week, in the hopes of winning the big prize.

Money like that adds up. $20 a week is more than $1000 a year, which is a fairly significant sum—unless you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, but I’m thinking that neither of those men needs to play the lottery.

And let’s think about this logically: who is most likely to play the lottery? People too dumb to know any better. In other words, the poorly educated. And given the high correlation between education and financial well-being, what group of people is most likely to be poorly educated? The poor.

And do the stats back this up? Absolutely. You can google “lottery demographics” yourself, but if you’re lazy and want to take my word for it, you’ll find that blacks, people who didn’t graduate high school, and people with the lowest incomes are the ones who spend tons of money on the lottery. It turns out that the percentages of people who play are fairly similar across all demographics, but the poor and poorly-educated are the ones who spend vastly more money (as a percentage of their income) on lottery tickets. And in many cases, the lowest income brackets spend more money per capita (even in absolute terms) than the wealthier brackets.

Now, in many cases lotteries fund worthy state programs, perhaps related to health care or education. Many of these programs may benefit the poor; they may even be primarily designed to benefit the poor. But to fund these programs with a program that depends on tax dollars (lottery revenues; the lottery is a voluntary tax) largely collected from disadvantages populations in simply moronic. It leads to what is called regressive taxation. Regressive taxation is taxation paid at a higher proportion by the poorest people in a society. (The opposite is a progressive tax, where the rich pay a higher percentage; when everyone pays the same percentage of income, it’s called a flat tax or a proportional tax.)

It should seem pretty obvious that regressive taxation is a bad thing. And that’s just what the lottery is—a regressive tax. Just because it’s voluntary doesn’t make it any better.

Now, one might argue that if people are stupid and they want to gamble their money away, they should be allowed to. And to be honest, I sympathize with that argument. The poor high school dropout who drops $20 a week on lottery tickets is only hurting himself, and it’s a free country. But just because gambling should be legal doesn’t mean that the state should be in the gambling business.***

Here’s an anecdote: my father used to sell life insurance in poor neighborhoods and drive around collecting the payments. In 1992, when Louisiana came out with the Lotto, business dried up. People who were spending a few bucks on a small life insurance policy (to cover burial expenses and such) spent that money on the lottery instead.

I’m sure there are plenty of similar stories out there. For that matter, I’m sure there are plenty of other gambling horror stories that don’t have anything to do with state lotteries. Regardless of your opinion on whether gambling should be legal, I think it’s clear that the government needs to get out of the lottery business.

* I was unable to dig up the numbers for Mega Millions, but I’d assume they’re similar.

** Obviously, with a large enough jackpot, you’d have a positive expectation on your purchase. But the larger the jackpot, the more people play, and the more likely a split jackpot becomes. And you still have taxes to worry about. I’m not going to bother with the math, but my guess is that you’d need to see a jackpot close to a billion dollars.

*** I realize that states usually negotiate deals with casinos (and other companies involved in non-lottery gambling) and reap enormous taxes as a result, giving the state benefits similar to those that might be earned from a lottery. But I think there’s still a distinction between a state that allows a free market for gambling companies to operate, and a state that runs a gambling company itself. I don’t mind a casino making money, even if the state gets a cut (as taxes). I do mind the state, acting in my name and the name of every other citizen, orchestrating what is essentially a scam that preys on the poor and stupid in the name of benefiting society.

At this point I don’t really know how to feel. Should I pissed off at BP? Yeah. The government? Yeah. Maybe this is the work of a company cutting every corner it can, regardless of the risks. Maybe it was just a freak accident. (I think the former is more likely, but that’s besides the point I want to make). What I am pissed off about is the fact that for far too long we in Louisiana have run the risks and taken so much damage from the oil industry without being fairly compensated. For years Louisiana and the other states with offshore drilling got completely screwed out of oil royalties.* We got nothing.** States with inland oil and gas production? A 50/50 split between the state and the feds. What is wrong with this picture? Sure, there’s an argument to be made for giving the federal government some of the money; Americans have a right to enjoy all of our natural resources, not just the ones from the state they happen to live in. But we are the ones bearing the negative externalities while the federal government reaps the benefits. We are the ones who have had our wetlands ripped apart by subsidence and canals. We are the ones with Cancer Alley. And we run the risk of a spill like this.

So why the hell did this happen? In what may be the worst Supreme Court decision I’d never heard of until a few days ago, 1947′s U.S. v. California, the Supreme Court said that the federal government owned the offshore areas, not the states. (It doesn’t make any sense to me either.) In response Eisenhower made the issue an important part of his 1952 campaign, and in 1953 Congress passed the Submerged Lands Act, which gave the states ownership over land up to 3 miles from shore. (I assume that means Louisiana profits from drilling inside that range, but I’m not sure. And I’m guessing that the majority of our drilling is way offshore, well beyond the three-mile limit.

The ironic thing is that just weeks before the explosion and spill, a bill was passed to give states a share of the royalties. (Mobile’s newspaper has a nice article here detailing the benefits for Louisiana.) It had been an issue for years; there’s a 2008 press release from Senator Mary Landrieu’s website detailing her support for earlier bills. Obviously, the expansion of offshore drilling was and is controversial—even more so after the BP spill—but giving us a decent share of the royalties should have been a no-brainer, even if having to wait until 2017 and only getting 37.5% of the royalties is a bit obnoxious. The money will go into a coastal protection and restoration trust fund. Just think if we’d have had billions of dollars in coastal protection and levees before Katrina. Would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? There is so much oil off our coast that we should be ridiculously wealthy, Persian Gulf-style (minus the deserts and the fundamentalists). Instead, our money’s been getting siphoned off to Washington D.C. and then who knows where else, and all the while our coastline fades to blue.

* Alaska made a sweetheart deal at statehood and got 90% of their royalties. Fuck those bastards.

** I had to use italics and bold to make my point.

(Skip to 3:01 to see the song; the first half is the similar “We Are What We Are.” That part is included for the many of my readers who enjoy drag queens and fancy costumes.)

So certainly, there’s a bit of irony that a noted conservative is starring in one of theatre’s most first and most prominent cries for gay rights. (Note: I have no idea whatsoever what Grammer’s specific views are on gay rights, gay marriage, or any other particular issue, but he’s made his support for the Republican Party quite well known.) But he’s an actor, isn’t he? That’s his job.

If you’re a conservative, you could take two views: you’re fine with it (he’s got a right to make money and play whatever role he wants) or you’re not (starring in a play with such a sympathetic depiction of homosexuals makes him a traitor). If you’re a liberal, you also have two choices: either you’re fine with it (how well he plays the role is important—his political beliefs shouldn’t matter) or you’re not (it’s despicable for an outspoken conservative to be appearing as a gay character in such a prominently pro-gay play).

Now, I’ve yet to see any conservatives bash Grammer for taking a gay role, though it wouldn’t surprise me if such people were out there. But when this popped up on my newsfeed, the person who posted it and the friends of his who responded to it took a negative view. One (perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not) suggested that Grammer is actually a repressed homosexual. Another said that “Kelsey Grammer is your typical Republican Right Winger. They will DO or SAY anything to make money. They will contradict their own beliefs to win hearts, fool minds, and pretend to be open minded….Often the hypocrisy is stunning to behold.” I can also presume the author of that comment (I don’t know him, I just see a name and a profile picture) is a liberal who takes issue with Grammer’s failure to adhere to standards of ideological purity (regardless of the fact that Grammer and the commenter are on different sides of the aisle). In other words: stay on your own damn side of the political aisle and never engage in any sort of behavior that deviates from your own political views. I for one think it would be pretty silly to demand that every actor must share the political views of the character he portrays, but I guess some people feel differently.

What this story reminds me of is the controversy that surrounded Prop 8 in California. Prop 8 would have restricted “marriage” to opposite-sex couples, while still allowing same-sex couples to have almost-equivalent domestic partnerships. One of the donors on the anti-gay marriage side was Scott Eckern. He just happened to be the artistic director of California Musical Theatre, a theatre company in Sacramento. When word got out to the theatre community that Eckern had backed Prop 8, a firestorm of rage erupted from plenty of notable gays and supporters of gay rights in the theatre community, including Marc Shaiman, Susan Egan, Jeff Whitty, and others. Various people called for boycotts, protests, and so forth, and given the controversy, Eckern resigned. After his resignation, a number of the people who had been critical of him backpedaled somewhat, especially since Eckern was hardly the extremist that many of the right-wingers are: he said that he supported domestic partnerships (just not gay marriages—in other words, his position was roughly the same as Obama’s was at the time), he had a lesbian sister, he was troubled by the hate-mongering the right had stirred up in the Prop 8 campaign. Time Out NY theatre critic Adam Feldman had two articles on the controversy; Feldman noted his liberal sympathies but also had problems with any calls for a blacklist, and pointed out the problems of a theatre community that is too far tilted to the left.

On the one hand, I can see where the hardline pro-gay rights people are coming from. They believe that people who oppose gay marriage now are just as wrong as the people who supported segregated water fountains and lunch counters in the 1950s. Why shouldn’t those people be berated, blacklisted, and boycotted?

Now, anyone in the theatre (or in other arts, or journalism, or whatever) should be pretty damn supportive of free speech. I’m sure that none of Eckern’s detractors would argue that he doesn’t have a right to his views. The wonderful thing about America is that even the total fringe lunatic extremist hateful bastards—the white supremacist neo-Nazis, the terrorists, anyone—have a right to voice their opinions. The good thing is that the rest of us don’t have to listen to them. I think most of us would agree with the quotation, “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”** Certainly we must support everyone’s right to free speech (and we must also support that anyone has a right to criticize, boycott, or protest anyone else’s speech). But where do we draw the line to say, “I don’t agree with you, but I’m not going to demonize you and do everything I legally can to attack your position”? I probably wouldn’t want to work with or for a member of the KKK who made his political views quite well known, but does that mean I shouldn’t want to work with or for someone who disagrees with me on health care reform? Abortion? Whether to increase local sales taxes a half-percent? It seems to me that blacklisting a theatre’s artistic director for having a different view on gay marriage crosses the line. If you want to disagree, that’s fine; but clearly, that line has to be drawn somewhere unless you are only going to associate with people who think the exact same way as you do and share all of the exact same opinions.

I see this as a symptom of a larger societal problem: thanks to FOX News, left-wing blogs, talk shows on both sides of the spectrum, and so forth, the public is becoming more and more fractured. Paul Starr provided some good commentary on the subject a few months back in The Atlantic. He focused mainly on the media, but I’d like to look at the average citizen. It seems like more and more people associate only with like-minded people. And this is true on both sides of the spectrum. When that happens, when people start to demonize the people who don’t think the same way, our country is torn apart. People make it into “us” versus “them.” They fail to see the common humanity that they share with their political adversaries. It just leads to reinforcing unchecked stupidity and irrational extremism.

A while back signs started popping up around New Orleans with a simple message: “Think that you might be wrong.” Implicit in that message is the concept that the people you disagree with might be right. It’s a message that deserves our attention.

* Why does Variety insist on calling musicals “tuners”? Seriously, WTF.

** This is often attributed to Voltaire but, according to Wikipedia, was coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall.

Some background: the US has a Senate and a House of Representatives. As you may or may not remember from your 10th-grade American History class, this was a compromise between the states with small populations (who favored an equal number of seats for each state) and the large states (who favored seats based on population). Eventually Roger Sherman masterminded the Connecticut Compromise, which led to our bicameral federal legislature.*

As you might expect given the bicameral nature of England’s Parliament, the colonies usually had a sort of bicameral legislature, with a representative assembly and a council of high-ranking government officials. (To be honest, I’m pretty much going off the wiki page here as I have no particular recollection of the nature of colonial governments beyond hazy remembrances of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. And apparently, according to wikipedia, Pennsylvania didn’t have a bicameral legislature until 1790.) Now, the need for a bicameral legislature at the federal level is clear: the US Constitution provides for a federal government with a certain amount of deference to the individual states, with the equal representation of the Senate protecting the smaller states from being overrun. One could certainly take issues with this approach, but it’s definitely justifiable.

However, there’s no real federal impulse within a state, so having two houses is just silly, even in theory. People have made arguments on similar grounds to the ones made at the federal level, suggesting that a big city would have too much influence on the rest of the state, but a state isn’t a federation, and no sovereignty is shared between state and county or state and city in the same way that power is shared between the federal government and the states. A state is just a mass of people. Obviously a small town will have different interests from a big city, but that doesn’t mean that small towns should have outsized power in the same way that small states do.

Secondly, this notion was completely blown away (rightly or wrongly) by Reynolds v. Sims, a 1964 Supreme Court decision which, following on the heels of Baker v. Carr, ruled that state legislatures (and both houses) had to have districts proportional to population—the famous “one man, one vote” principle. In other words, having a bicameral legislature became completely and utterly pointless.** It adds extra cost and complexity—why do I need a state representative and a state senator? The extra salaries for the politicians and staffers are unnecessary. Bills can pass through one house, then get hung up in the other one. It’s just plain wasteful.

Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to take away their jobs, so a massive wave of unicameralism is unlikely to sweep the nation. But it’d be nice if it did.

* I was just thinking that there should be a sequel to 1776 called 1787. I’d go see it.

** In theory, I suppose some sort of party-based proportional representation, with one house operating like current houses, and the other with every party receiving votes based on its proportion of the vote. But I see no reason why Democrats and Republicans would allow any breach of their two-party system.