A sensible tea party manifesto

On days when I go downtown I usually stop at the coffee shop for a small English breakfast tea. This costs $2.25, and I drop a quarter in the tip jar. Wailuku Coffee Shop stamps my frequent drinker card and every 11th cup is free, so my net cost is about $2.30 cents a cup.

Now a useful way to think of the national budget is in "Solyndras." One Solyndra is not quite $500,000,000, so that, for example, the USNS Choctaw County, the naval version of the Superferry, costs about three-tenths of a Solyndra. Wailuku Coffee Shop cups of tea are a useful way to think of the county budget.

A letter to the editor this week claimed that union labor would soon bankrupt the county, so that the unions should be destroyed. Is this true?

Not only not true but ridiculously upside down. Yet it is not hard to find people who think county taxes are too high. I'm lookin' at you, Council Budget and Finance Committee Chairman Mike White.

I recently paid my half-year property tax. Property tax is the largest source of county revenue, which needs to reach something over $600 million (about 1.1 Solyndras). We soak the hotels, but Council Member White, despite being a hotel manager, is not concerned about the high tax on hotels. He is worried about residential rates.

Really, Mike? I am paying $50 a month on a house the assessor thinks is worth around $500,000. For that I get police and fire protection 24/7, parks, a division to enforce zoning laws, the prosecutor, subsides for animal control and various other social services etc.

For $1.67 a day, less than I spend on tea.

Now there are other county services I pay for separately: The country's only opt-in opala collection ($2.08 a pickup for 2 pickups a week, which includes upkeep of an environmentally safe landfill); water ($15-$18 a month, or enough for around 4,000,000 cups of tea); and the vehicle and gasoline taxes, which keep the roads in (not very good) repair.

Vehicle taxes are around $250 per vehicle, and I haven't tried to calculate how much I pay in gas tax, but it isn't much.

So, trash, about 90 cups of tea; water, about 80 cups of tea; roads, maybe 1,000 cups of tea (I have 4 cars), and everything else, about 260 cups of tea. I hardly think that is an insupportable burden.

I have long wanted higher property taxes, if that will lead to a better life, for example by increasing funding for the Maui Invasive Species Committee. I was attacked by fire ants in Georgia when I was in junior high school and I still remember that and would pay a large amount not to have to worry about its happening again.

I get that many people on Maui struggle with housing costs and I see no reason to increase taxes on them. Mike White's low rates are appropriate for, say, the first $200,000 to $300,000 of real residential property. But taxes on more valuable homes should be higher. Much higher.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in a house worth more than $250,000 can afford it.

Bwahhhaa!

Hedline in the New York Times:

Citigroup Says It Has Fired 12 in Mexico Over Fraud

 Nut (and I do mean nut) graf:

Citigroup has not fired any employees based in the United States in connection with the fraud, though the bank’s internal investigation is continuing.

Too bad they (and US regulators) cannot find anybody to fire/indict at Citi for  behavior prior to October 2008.

High politics

If this story did not come from a usually trustworthy news source, I would have a hard time believing it.

About 40 percent of Punjabis 15 to 25 years of age were addicted to some kind of narcotic, and 48 percent of farmers and laborers are addicts, according to a 2011 government report.

It is difficult for me to conceive of a society with addiction rates that high (though I am not clear exactly what "addiction" means here; it has been demonstrated, for example, that people who are addicted to heroin can work steadily, as long as they do not have to spend all their time getting more heroin).

I had recently  read a persuasive argument for legalizing drugs, but am not yet convinced.

My argument, in simplest form, goes thus:

If a hit of crack cocaine/heroin/whiskey/name your poison costs less than a pack of cigarette, then what is it that prevents nearly everybody from using the poison? At least in America, when crack got down to $2, usage did not then become as common as chewing gum. (It is irrelevant to the proposition what comparison is used; when I first began thinking along these lines, a pack of smokes was around $3. Cigarettes are relatively higher now, but I don't see the smokers I know giving up. They try, lately by vaping. Most have ended up giving up  vaping, but a few now vape and smoke both. This applies even to those for whom buying tobacco means not eating regularly.)

The barrier is not religion or fear of the law, for the most part. A hundred years ago, when addictive drugs (except alcohol) were hardly regulated in the U.S., I don't think addiction rates got as high as 48% even in heavily addicted sectors.

It seems clear to me that a big factor in addiction is a personal propensity for risk-taking. I have a friend who used to be addicted to snorting coke. A spell in prison and a near-death overdose got her off snow but not off excitement. She started running up bills she could not pay, for the thrill of evading bill collectors.

Not appealing to me, but to some people.

It is also true that social pressure has a lot to do with it. Perhaps this is what happens in Punjab.

Book Review 322: One More River to Cross

ONE MORE RIVER TO CROSS: An African American Photograph Album, by Walter Dean Myers. 166 pages. Harcourt Brace, $40.


It is often said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, and there’s truth in that; but it is just as true that black middle class life is almost invisible to white America.

In “One More River to Cross” Walter Dean Myers has culled archives, junk stores and other places where old photographs hide and assembled an album that would be merely nostalgic if the faces were white. But most of them are not, which means that for many readers, an America they never knew existed looks out at them: A lean and tough-looking young cowboy, complete with bandanna, chaps, cartridge belt, Winchester repeating rifle, saddle and lariat -- and a head full of wild, long but (apparently) processed hair. Part Indian, too, maybe.

Nat Love, or Deadwood Dick

The selection is rich and broad, with laborers in cotton fields, a lynched man and a gangster, and at the other end of the social scale, celebrities like Duke Ellington; but there is a weight toward scenes of middle class aspirations, recreations and work.

Always work. Myers, a poet, accompanies the photographs with a sparse but effective text that returns again and again to work.

This is worth repeating, since in 2012 we had a presidential candidate of a major party who claimed humble people avoid work; and in 2014 we have a large fraction of his party rallying around the same losing (but comforting to them) message.

Book Review 321: The Shakespeare Legacy

THE SHAKESPEARE LEGACY: The Material Legacy of Shakespeare’s Theatre, by Jean Wilson. 211 pages, illustrated. Bramley. £19.99

When I was taught Elizabethan and Jacobean theater practices in the ‘60s, hardly any of the evidence had been found since around 1900. The Victorians had ransacked England for documents and “reliques,” and since hardly anything had been found since then, it was thought that everything that had survived had been found.

So we confidently reconstructed the vanished Globe and what went on inside it, on hardly any evidence. Professor Jean Wilson reminds us that all of the many reconstructions of the Globe’s “wooden O” are conjectural, including Sam Wanamaker’s full-size version built around 1989.

In that year, though, excavators came upon the foundations of the Rose theater, waterlogged, and a great surprise. Then followed a “debacle,” during which competing scholarly interests wrangled over what to do with them; while the government, since it was the era of Thatcher, was content to see them destroyed.

It is always so with rightwingers. They bleat endlessly about the superior ways of the past, but when there is a chance to study them, they flee in fear. That is because their past is even more of a fiction than the honest attempts of Kittredge and Chambers; real knowledge is always potentially a threat to their political superstructure, so they are careful to avoid or destroy it.

Nevertheless, though done in a less than proper manner, some evidence was recovered from the Rose and from a subsequent deliberate search for foundations of the Globe.

Wilson argues, however, that all along there has been hiding in plain sight a lot of evidence about what the theaters were probably like. This is important beyond the texts of the Renaissance plays; “The Shakespeare Legacy” is about theater management and technique, not about what the players declaimed.

There has been a more or less unacknowledged assumption that plays and players were outlaws of a sort (despite having a king as a sponsor), so that their status was outlaw, too. Wilson contends that they partook of most of the styles and attitudes of their time:

“We will learn far more by looking at structures such as Hunsdon’s tomb than by looking at Anne Hathaway’s cottage.”

Most of the book, therefore, examines tombs, builders’ books, furniture and the like.

Wilson is diffident, rarely asserting that anything she has found conclusively settles such old questions as, did the tiring-house facade project onto the stage or was it flush with the back wall?

One of her few flat statements is to knock down the idea that hall screens was used as convenient backwalls when players went to great halls for temporary playhouses. It seems to make perfect sense that they would, and when surviving halls are used nowadays, that’s what modern players do.

But an interesting thing about ancestors is that what seems simple and obvious to us  did not always seem so to them.

The rescue archaeologists discovered that the muddy arena of the Rose was treated with ash and clinker (from the abundant sea-coal fires), and then mixed with hazelnut shells dropped by groundlings, forming a pavement that after 400 years was still “like rock.”

But that raises a question. Did each groundling bring a nutcracker? It seems unlikely they had enough teeth to crack them that way. Or was it like my teenage years (long ago before self-opening beer cans) when not everybody carried a church key but in any group of three or more, you could count on at least one person who had one to share.

In my mind, at least, the picture of the ‘prentices listening to Shakespeare’s lines from Shakespeare’s mouth is changed by imagining them interrupting the delivery of Hamlet’s soliloquy to ask someone to pass the cracker.

Or perhaps it wasn’t that way. We don’t know. But we know more thanks to Professor Wilson.

Dropping the big one

So it seems we are to have a partisan congressional investigation of Benghazi, numero 8.

According to the New York Times, Democrats

 remain divided over whether to boycott the select committee. They are concerned that their participation would grant legitimacy to what they believe will be a partisan forum. But they also worry that if they avoid it they won't have the chance to counter GOP claims and defend potential witnesses — including Clinton, a possible 2016 presidential candidate.

Not being a Democrat, I don't get that. If I were a Democratic congresscritter, I'd be in the same mood as Clarence Darrow when he learned the opposing counsel in the Scope trial was going to be William Jennings Bryan. As T.H. Huxley allegedly muttered when Slippery Sam Wilberforce delivered his killer question at the debate on "Origin of Species": "The lord hath delivered him into my hands."

Rep. Trey Gowdy prepares to chair Benghazi committee

 If I were on the committee, I'd ask Hillary Clinton: "In your opinion, what has caused the 90% drop in attacks on American embassies since President Obama took office?"

I am sure there will be many other moments, too.  After all, if your opponent is working from the Fox News playbook, it will be really hard to lose.

Gun nuts on parade

I visited my granddaughters over the weekend, which meant exposing myself to parts of the culture that I normally don't have any contact with, like television. One thing I saw was going to be fodder for another gun nut post, which now must come later, because overnight an even better -- by which I mean, much worse -- example has come up.

NJ man shoots 11-year-old nephew dead while demonstrating laser sight on his forehead

What more can one say? Plenty, and the online commentariat is saying it. I have picked out a few of the most incisive ones but it is worth reading them all:

 More guns mean more people are safe. --The NRA--

and

 The NRA would say that if the eleven-year-old boy had a gun this would not have happened.

and

At least they arrested this guy -- they usually call this kind of stuff a "tragic accident."

and

 Criminal negligence is a funny thing. Kill someone outside your family and you could get life, but kill a family member and all you will probably get is sympathy.

and (based on the fact that the shooter lived in his mother's basement)

I was mostly making fun of him for being a loser who can apparently afford a gun collection (good-quality new guns ain't cheap), but can't afford to move out of his parents' basement.
I know times are tough for millennials, but, damn, that's pathetic.

I think after every similar episode, the national press should insist that Wayne Lapierre go on record and on camera to explain the NRA version of events. When Lapierre starts showing up every single day, then maybe the responsible gun owners of America (if there really are any) will start joining the don't-need-guns voters to draft some responsible legislation -- like repealing the Second Amendment.

But I am not hopeful because 1) Wayne Lapierre doesn't have the stones to defend his positions when they lead to shooting kids; 2) gun nuts are cowards who are afraid to go unarmed in places where the rest of us move about without a care, and that is why you cannot discuss anything with them; 3) there is an enormous financial sector that profits from stroking the penis substitutes that the gun nuts cannot live without.

Which brings me to the original post this was going to be. The hedline was to have read:

TONS OF GUN NUTTERS' LAUNDRY SOILED IN MASS NOCTURAL EMISSIONS 

 And the text would have said:

 The ultimate in vicarious wish fulfillment for gun nuts has come to "Animal Planet," a reality show called Rocky Mountain Bounty Hunters. 

I have not seen the show, only the promo, which explains all -- "Hunting men is the ultimate" (I do not have that exact but that was the sense of it; the picture explains the sentiment just as well.)

All the sicko gun owners will be watching and spasming into their BVDs, and Animal Planet will be raking it in. It would be worth watching just to learn who the sponsors are.

A fair idea of the intelligence of these menaces is given by the promo, which shows them sneaking up on a tent (presumably hiding a fugitive) across a broad, snow-covered meadow, wearing forest camouflage.

A commenter at survivalistboards.com claims to know the show is fake, which is no doubt true; but that does not change the intent of the producers or the intended audience.