Not an easy read

This article from the Utne Reader is quite disturbing and not a read for the faint of heart. But it raises some important questions.

Are some people victims by nature?

Are some people made into victims by the way they're nurtured (or not nurtured)?

How can I raise my daughter (or son) to protest, to resist when confronted with evil; if necessary to fight tooth-and-nail, to fight even to the death if need be?

The woman who wrote this story had so little opinion of herself that her reaction to her rapist's prison sentence was "Twenty years? Just for this? Just for doing this to me? Twenty years is a really long time." It is almost impossible for me to imagine the life of someone whose first instinct when confronted by a mortal assault is to avoid being rude to her assailant. I don't want to be able to imagine it. I don't want my kids to be able to imagine it.

The author - a teacher - related a classroom exercise where she asked her students what they were taught by their parents that they didn't want to teach to their own kids. One student replied that she was taught always to be kind to everybody. The student had learnt, probably the hard way, that one shouldn't be kind to everybody. The teacher wondered why she hadn't learned that herself.

Jane. Byron. Listen up: You don't always have to be kind to everyone. In fact, there are some people in the world - just a very few - whom you should shoot dead if ever you encounter them under the wrong circumstances. I hope you never do encounter any of these people. If you do, please do not think you have to be kind to them. And please, please, always believe that yours is an invaluable spirit deserving of humane treatment. If someone treats you inhumanely, don't think for a second that it's something wrong with you. If you encounter this treatment, I want your first thoughts to be, "protest, resist, fight if necessary."

This story reminds me somehow of a Churchill quotation: "You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves."

Slavery, when externally imposed, is an institutional judgement that some person or group of people are less than human. It seems to me that the woman who wrote this article is living a slave's life, enslaved by her own opinion that she is less than human. It's too bad she didn't fight more effectively and whole-heartedly against that man; not because she might have prevented the rape (she might or might not have), but because she ought to have had a better opinion of her own worth.

Churchill was right. Better to perish than live that way.

DebtWatch: Weasel Words

Here on the Homestead we have always been debt-averse. We don't use credit cards. Our only debts are our home loan and a student loan, and we're working to pay these off at a much-accelerated rate. Recently we have started using the Dave Ramsey Envelope System to reduce our discretionary spending, and so far it is working wonders; freeing up more money to save for future goals and attack those debts even harder. We are a long way from being rich, and many of our goals still look difficult to achieve, but at least we don't have the constant feeling of speeding toward an imminent fiscal catastrophe.

Not so our Federal Government.

As is well documented by fiscal gurus like the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and their sobering IOUSA web video, our nation faces a debt-fueled economic catastrophe in the not-too-distant future unless we radically change our ways.

The largest contributor to our projected national debt is rising health care costs (and the subsequent effect on Medicare and Medicaid spending). One of the frequently cited rationales for health care reform is cost control.

Despite the lip service being paid to cost control, the health reform measures currently being considered will not effect meaningful cost control, as the chief of the Congressional Budget Office recently testified before Congress.

The CBO recently published a Long Term Budget Report that analyzes projections for federal spending, revenue, and debt through 2035 and beyond. They projected alternative scenarios, reflecting different legislative possibilities, but all of the scenarios have one thing in common: the federal debt grows faster than the nation's economy. This is unsustainable. Another common thread: the longer we wait to enact reform, the worse the problem gets.

As the health care reform debate intensifies, pay particular attention to "weasel words" - little qualifiers they throw in to make their statements technically true, but maintaining a misleading overall impression.

Here are a few I've heard from the Obama administration over the past couple of weeks, along with the plain-English translation.

"Deficit-Neutral:" We're still racing toward fiscal catastrophe at the same speed, but at least this bill isn't making things worse.

"Won't add to the deficit for the next ten years:" All the costs are being deferred. Please don't ask us what happens in year eleven.

How's that for Audacity? A massive, 1.5-trillion dollar "reform" plan, with a huge expansion of government power and control over our lives. It doesn't actually solve the problem, or even promise to do so. But at least we're getting a promise that this enormous new program won't make the problem worse... at least not until some other clown is in office to take the blame and deal with the mess.

And remember, these less-than-impressive goals are just the sales pitch promises for their wonderful new plan. Based on past Washington performance, I'd say the odds of this plan living up to the promises aren't all that strong.

Redneck Contraption No. 1

Every Hoosier homestead needs at least one Redneck Contraption. Some of the essential features of a Redneck Contraption: 1) Obscurity of purpose - it must be difficult or impossible to discern by observation the use for which the contraption is intended. 2) Eclectic construction - a proper Redneck Contraption is made primarily of stuff lying around. Farm or industrial leftovers are particularly favored as Contrapting Materials. 3) Location - must be prominently displayed on the property, preferably in the yard or driveway. Alternatively, may be located adjacent to a barn.



The above is a fair example, if I do say so myself. The purpose was to build a garden composter. These things can be purchased, but tend to the pricey. We wanted one that would be sufficiently high capacity, allow tumbling, and high up in the air for easy unloading into a wheelbarrow.



This picture illustrates some of the pros and cons this project revealed about building things out of plastic barrels. The original idea was to use an old-fashioned steel 55 gallon drum, but the plastic ones are more available. Also, the steel drums tend to be used for more toxic liquids, like petroleum products and solvents. This barrel previously contained a cleaner for food preparation equipment.

PROS: This kind of plastic cuts easily with a sabre saw. It's easy to drill with spade bits or regular drill bits. The material doesn't melt or gum up your bit or blade. It will take self-tapping wood screws and seems to hold them fairly well so far. I did find it a lot easier to drive screws when there was a very small guide hole than trying to use the screw to drill its own hole.

CONS: The only major complaint so far is that this material gets awfully flimsy once you start cutting out pieces of it. I had intended to use plunger locks to keep this closed, but the door was so flex-y that they didn't hold the door closed. The chest hasps shown here do a better job of holding the door in place and preventing it from opening when the tumbler is rotated door-side down. The extra holes around the hasps are from where I had previously mounted the plunger locks. This picture also shows how warped the plastic has become - the door and the hole it was cut from obviously do not match up very well any more.



Baby Jane inspected the garden. Both she and it are growing dramatically now. She looks dubious about the Contraption.



The Homestead Fam: Adrianna, Jane, Byron, and Charlotte the Fearsome Wonder-Dog.

Palin Bashing Pile-On

H/t to Chicks on the Right for sending up this ridiculous Maureen Dowd column.

For an overall look at the phenomenon of Palin-bashing, and Dowd's attempt in particular, it's hard to top what they say here. Tam had an interesting take, too, comparing the Palin-Bashing to Orwell's official state-sponsored hate object, Emmanuel Goldstein.

But there's one passage of Dowd's drivel that really needs an additional comment.

“Several told me, independently of one another,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ — and thought it fit her [Palin] perfectly.”

As anyone who's gone to medical or nursing school can tell you, perusing the DSM-IV can be extremely misleading. The diagnostic criteria for psych disorders - particularly personality disorders - read like a laundry list of personality flaws, human weaknesses, and annoying habits. Anyone who's read the DSM without wondering whether at least one or two of the diagnoses apply to him- or herself is a spectacularly arrogant and unreflective soul. Even - or perhaps especially - for the arrogant and unreflective, it is easy to flip through the pages and find a perjorative-sounding diagnosis or two for anyone whom one considers personally disagreeable.

The idea, therefore, that a bunch of liberal journalists and their friends could wander uninformedly through the DSM-IV and come up with a diagnosis for Sarah Palin is hardly newsworthy, let alone diagnostically reliable.

Besides, I thought that being mentally ill was a highly admirable disability among lefty circles? If Sarah Palin really were mentally ill, wouldn't that put her in a Protected Class of Special People Who Cannot Be Criticized? In fact, being female and disabled should make Palin uniquely qualified for high office, at least by Dowd's standards.

Just for fun, I picked up a DSM-IV and tried to find a diagnosis that doesn't apply to Dowd. Still looking...

Security Theater gets wrists slapped

The federal department of Thousands Standing Around got scolded by a judge for investigating stuff beyond the scope of their authority and their... er... competence.

Here's a nice image to make us all feel safer:



h/t to SIGForum.com member and all-around safe guy a1abdj.

Even WaPo Gets It?

That bastion of hard line, extreme right wing, small government fiscal conservatism - the Washington Post - has apparently become concerned with the nation's dangerous levels of debt.

This:

To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO's most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 -- roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.

and this:

The principal cause of long-term fiscal distress is the aging of the U.S. population, coupled with rising health-care costs -- which, together, will drive spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to new heights. Unchecked, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from almost 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035 -- and to more than 17 percent of GDP by 2080.

are points with which regular readers of this blog will certainly be familiar.

The WaPo notes that His Hopey-Changiness has so far responded to this threat the same way his predecessors have: issue statements decrying deficits and debt, while simutaneously spending his way to yet more debt. Strong words for The One from His True Believers in the legacy media.

It is, needless to say, concerning, that having reached the brink of economic ruin primarily by making expensive health care promises to an increasingly aged, obese, health-resource-intensive population, we are about to embark on a massive new program of expensive health care promises to an increasingly aged, obese, health-resource-intensive population.