Motus Mentis

Today was Election Day, and at the top of the ballot here in New York City were the candidates for our next mayor. For the fifteen or twenty of us here in Gotham who would prefer a relatively conservative hand upon the helm, there was a fellow by the name of Joe Lhota — while for the other eight million or so there was Bill DiBlasio, a towering, open-borders Marxist with whom I disagree on everything except our city’s latitude and longitude. He will almost certainly win, which is a very bad thing.

Down the ballot I voted for an assortment of other comparatively conservative candidates who will surely lose; I also gave assent to my neighbor Bernard Graham’s elevation to the State Supreme Court. (Bernie’s an intelligent, sensible man, I think, and it is hard for me to imagine that he is anything but fair and reasonable on the bench. No doubt many of those whom he has ruled against will disagree, but that’s just in the nature of things.)

There were also some referenda. One of them proposed to extend the retirement age for judges from 70 to 80. I was all for that: the more geezer-wisdom in our jurisprudence, and the more living memory of the way things used to be in America, the better, I say. (I also had in mind what sort of replacements Bill DiBlasio, once he begins his Long March through the city’s institutions, will be finding for any judges who retire. I wish I could have voted for them to remain on the bench until death, or beyond.)

Another referendum proposed to allow casino gambling in some poor upstate areas. I dithered about that one a bit.

On the plus side, the casinos will bring a lot of business to these penurious districts, employ thousands of people, and sluice a generous flow of simoleons into the public fisc. Also, the libertarian in me feels that it is better, ceteris paribus, for the State to let people engage in business ventures instead of stifling them.

On the other hand, gambling is a dangerous vice, and those who practice it are often those who are least able to bear its toll. The gaming industry also waters a shady garden of auxiliary peccancies: loan-sharking, drug-dealing, prostitution, racketeering, and so on. The “traditional” conservative in me feels that for the State to encourage all of this fosters moral and social decay, and preys on the misery of the weak.

So: here we have an issue that clearly pits libertarians against traditional conservatives. Having sympathy for both ideologies, I found myself conflicted.

What say you, readers?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a brief post about an idea, discussed by blogger and IT consultant Bruce Webster, that he calls the “Thermocline of Truth”. Mr. Webster describes it:

In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view.

In an interview published today at CNN, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius (who has, puzzlingly, yet to undergo ritual hypovehiculation) wants us to understand (!) that President Obama, than whom “nobody’s madder” about the most catastrophic U.S. Government launch since late January of 1986, indeed remained well above the thermocline — even as the software failed critical tests shortly before liftoff.

The Secretary also made clear that no one could be more frustrated than she, with the possible exception of Mr. Obama — who is, as we already know, “madder” than anyone else (or, at the very least, just as mad as the maddest of the rest of us, if we understand him to have chosen his words with customary precision).

Where, precisely, Ms. Sibelius herself had floated in the water-column’s temperature-gradient in the weeks leading up to the launch is not made clear. Congress would like to ask her about it, and wanted her to stop by on Thursday, but she was busy with more important matters. Next week, perhaps.

I don’t know what’s worse here: the brownshirt tactics of NPS rangers assigned to strong-arm old folks so as to make House Republicans look mean, or the awful fact that someone educated in America could accuse a person of “recreating”.

God help us.

While the nation keens and writhes over the theatrical Obamacare showdown/shutdown, Kevin D. Williamson, in an essay published earlier today, offers a sobering look at the larger problem: reaching a point where debt service plus “mandatory” entitlement spending exceeds total revenue — which rising interest rates could bring about sooner than you might think.

When that happens, it’s the Zombie Apocalypse, friends.

We read:

If you think that our politics looks polarized this week, imagine what it’s going to look like when the choices are a more or less identical partial shutdown of the government plus suspending most or all Social Security payments indefinitely, eliminating federal health-care benefits, and/or defaulting on our bonds and enduring the subsequent economic chaos. There are people in Congress, Senator Rand Paul among them, with serious if necessarily imperfect plans to help get us from where we are to a safer and more sustainable place, and the main obstacle to such reforms is not gridlock or special-interest lobbying or any of the usual suspects in Washington: It is the willful ignorance of the American people, who refuse to demand that their elected representatives act like responsible adults who can count.

It’s the people who elected and reelected Barack Obama and his team ”” and it’s the people saying “Don’t touch my Social Security! I paid into it!,’ along with the so-called conservatives in farm states who make like Pharisees every time they catch sight of an EBT card on the way to deposit their farm-subsidy checks. Everybody is talking this week about dysfunction inside the Beltway, but the problem, America, is you. None of that spending is free. And if you want a quantitative measure of the real long-term impact of that national immaturity, see those accumulating interest payments.

Read the rest here. Keep your powder dry.

Here.

This excellent metaphor comes to us (by way of Jim Geraghty) from blogger Bruce Webster, who coined it to describe a phenomenon that he observed, originally, while analyzing the ways in which large-scale software projects can fail. In this post, he notes that it applies also to the slow-motion catastrophe we call “Obamacare”. The post is dense with links, which are worth following.

Meanwhile, into the shutdown we go, it seems. There is much infighting on the Right over this (though there is no disagreement that this bill is a monstrosity that should be resisted tooth and nail for the sake of the nation). Many say that because fiscal conservatives in Congress will be blamed, fairly or not, for a shutdown, the better strategy is just to let Obamacare run its disastrous course, and make the Left own it. The problem, though, is that entitlement programs generate constituencies — and in a democracy, if those constituencies are large enough, programs become immortal, even if they increase the overall morbidity of the nation. Like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, we can see the baby cobras curled up inside the eggs, and know that once hatched, they can kill a mongoose, or a man.

The shutdown, however, will cause a great deal of pain, and likely accomplish nothing.