It’s Tuesday, October 4th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!

First up, the latest, as well as one of the greatest, from Stephen Hayward, courtesy of PowerlineBlog.com and Tom Bakke:

This Week’s Applied Hayek: Socialism vs. “Socialism”

I’m back in Ohio today for my Monday class for the honors students at the Ashbrook Center, and though tonight’s class is devoted, for the second week in a row, to examining property rights in detail, I am transfixed today by a portion of The Constitution of Liberty that isn’t part of the assigned readings—Hayek’s chapter on “The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State.”  It is astounding how well this 1961 book reads as the perfect commentary on Obama and his social philosophy.

Critics of Obama like to call him a “socialist,” but his acolytes push back and say, “this isn’t socialism—look at us!  We’re bailing out the banks and car companies rather than nationalizing them!  We’re working with the private sector!  Even Obamacare relies on private insurance companies!”  Leaving aside Obama’s “crony capitalism” or what might be called, in less pejorative terms, “corporatism” (which is a fancy value-free name for something that looks like Swedish social democracy), Obama’s defenders are right: Obama isn’t a classic “state ownership of the means of production” socialist.  But Hayek was way ahead of them.

It is worth reading the entire chapter, but here are a few of the most relevant excerpts:

The great change that has occurred during the last decade is that socialism in this strict sense of a particular method of achieving social justice has collapsed.  It has not merely lost its intellectual appeal; it has also been abandoned by the masses so unmistakably that socialist parties everywhere are searching for a new program that will ensure the active support of their followers.  They have not abandoned their ultimate aim, their ideal of social justice.  But the methods by which they had hoped to achieve this and for which the name “socialism” had been coined have been discredited.  No doubt the name will be transferred to whatever new program the existing socialist parties will adopt. . .

And that program, Hayek notes, is what we today call the welfare state, or “social democracy.”  He continues a couple pages later:

But, though the characteristic methods of collectivist socialism have few defenders left in the West, its ultimate aims have lost little of their attraction.  While the socialists no longer have a clear-cut plan as to how their goals are to be achieved, they still wish to manipulate the economy so that the distribution of incomes will be made to conform to their conception of social justice.

From here Hayek goes on to describe the exact predicament we find ourselves facing with the arrival of Obama:

The current situation has greatly altered the task of the defender of liberty and made it much more difficult.  So long as the danger came from socialism of the frankly collectivist kind, it was possible to argue that the tenets of the socialists were simply false: that socialism would not achieve what the socialists wanted and that it would produce other consequences which they would not like.  We cannot argue similarly against the welfare state, for this term does not designate a definite system.  What goes under that name is a conglomerate of so many diverse and even contradictory elements that, while some of them may make a free society more attractive, others are incompatible with it or may at least constitute potential threats to existence.

And then, almost as though in 1961 Hayek could anticipate the individual mandate of Obamacare, Hayek warned:

If, instead of administering limited resources put under its control for a specific service, government uses its coercive powers to insure than men are given what some experts think they need; if people thus can no longer exercise any choice in some of the most important matters of their lives, such as health, employment, housing, and provision for old age, but must accept the decisions made for them by appointed authority on the basis of its evaluation of their need; if certain services become the exclusive domain of the state, and whole professions—be it medicine, education, or insurance—come to exist only as unitary bureaucratic hierarchies, it will no longer be competitive experimentation but solely the decisions of authority that will determine what men shall get.

Okay, that was one long sentence, but you can fill in your own blanks, going beyond Obamacare to the nationalization of student loans, etc.  But finally, Hayek isn’t just concerned with the economic effects of this kind of social policy.  He notes the serious political consequences of this kind of rule:

It is sheer illusion to think that when certain needs of the citizen have become the exclusive concern of a single bureaucratic machine, democratic control of that machine can then effectively guard the liberty of the citizen.  So far as the preservation of personal liberty is concerned, the division of labor between a legislature which merely says that this or that should be done and an administrative apparatus which is given exclusive power to carry out these instructions is the most dangerous arrangement possible. . .  It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with that they regard as the public good.

Amen, Freddie!  There’s lots more great stuff here (and I’ll share more in the days and weeks ahead), but that’s enough to today.  Except to add that I recall that Hayek said he was inspired to write The Road to Serfdom partly by reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and these passages of Hayek’s remind of nothing so much as Tocqueville’s chapter on “What Sort of Despotism Democracies Have to Fear,” in which Tocqueville warns that despotism could be imposed that would have all of the surface trappings of liberty.  Behold, Obamacare and its progeny.

Which brings to mind two quotes:

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”  Abraham Lincoln

“Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master.”  Dwight D. Eisenhower

Meanwhile, as the WSJ details in today’s “We Get The Government We Deserve” segment, Team Tick-Tock continues to break new ground, including updating….

The Definition of Insanity

Why no one wants to repeal a program that everyone knows is a fraud.

The Obama health-care plan passed 18 months ago, and its cynicism still manages to astonish. Witness the spectacle surrounding one of its flagship new entitlements, which is eliciting some remarkable concessions from its drafters.

The Health and Human Services Department recently shut down a government insurance program for long-term care, known by the acronym Class. HHS also released a statement claiming that reports that HHS is shutting down Class are “not accurate.” All HHS did was suspend Class policy planning, told Senate Democrats to zero out Class funding for 2012, reassigned Class’s career staffers to other projects and pink-slipped the program’s chief actuary. Other than that, it’s full-speed ahead.

HHS is denying what everyone knows to be true because everyone also knows that the Class entitlement was not merely created to crowd out private insurance for home health aides and the like. Class was added to the bill because it was among the budget gimmicks that Democrats needed to create the illusion that trillions of dollars of new spending would somehow reduce the deficit.

Benefits in the Class program, which was supposed to start up next year, are rigged by an unusual five-year vesting period. So the people who sign up begin paying premiums immediately—money that Democrats planned to spend immediately on other things, as if the back-loaded payments to Class beneficiaries would never come due. The $86 billion or so that would have built up between 2012 and 2021 with the five-year lead is supposed to help finance the rest of ObamaCare. The Class program would go broke sometime in the next decade, but that would be somebody else’s problem.

Opponents warned about this during the reform debate, and people on HHS’s lower rungs were telling their political superiors the same thing as early as mid-2009, according to emails that a joint House-Senate Republican investigation uncovered.

In one 2009 note, chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster—a martyr to fiscal honesty in the health-care debate—wrote that “Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant Federal subsidies to continue.” He suggested that Class would end in an “insurance death spiral” because the coverage would only be attractive to sicker people who will need costly services. It could only be solvent if 230 million Americans enrolled, which is more than the current U.S. workforce.

An HHS Office of Health Reform official, Meena Seshamani, rejected Mr. Foster’s critique because “per CBO it is actuarially sound.” But of course CBO only scores what is presented to it, no matter how unrealistic. Despite this false reassurance, later even one HHS political appointee took up Mr. Foster’s alarms, writing that Class “seems like a recipe for disaster to me.”

In February of this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finally admitted the obvious, testifying at a Congressional hearing that, gee whiz, Class is “totally unsustainable” as written. By then Class had become a political target of vulnerable Senate Democrats looking to shore up their fiscal bona fides, despite voting for it when they voted for ObamaCare.

Bowing to this political need, Mrs. Sebelius has repeatedly promised to use her administrative discretion to massage Class’s finances until it is solvent. But given that the office doing that work has now been disbanded, this evidently proved impossible, as the critics claimed all along.

All of this would seem to make repealing Class an easy vote for Congress, but, this being Washington, it isn’t. Since the CBO says Class’s front-loaded collections cut the deficit to the tune of that $86 billion, HHS has to pretend that the program is still alive to preserve these phantom savings.

Some Republicans are also nervous about repealing Class because, under CBO’s perverse scoring, they’ll be adding $86 billion to the deficit. Others would prefer not to repeal any of ObamaCare until they repeal all of it, on grounds that some of it might survive if the worst parts go first.

So an unaffordable entitlement that will be a perpetual drain on taxpayers may continue to exist because of a make-believe budget gimmick that everyone now admits is bogus. Congress can’t reduce real future liabilities because it would mean reducing fake current savings.

This is literally insane. It’s rare to get a political opening to dismantle any entitlement, much less one as large as Class. House Republicans ought to vote to repeal it as soon as possible as an act of fiscal hygiene, forcing Senate Democrats to vote on it and President Obama to confront (even if he won’t acknowledge) the fraud he signed into law.

Quite insane; but unfortunately, business as usual on Capitol Hill!

And since we’re on the subject of Team Tick-Tock’s predilection for deliberate deception bordering on outright fraud, here’s the latest on the blossoming Solyndra scandal, courtesy of Guy Benson in Townhall.com:

Hindsight is 20/20, sir, but invoking that excuse in the context of Solyndra is a complete head-fake.  The reason this story has legs beyond typical griping about government waste is the reality that multiple red flags were raised and ignored before the waste took place.  In light of Obama’s spin, a cursory review of the timeline is in order.

In 2009, prior to Obama taking office, Bush-era Energy officials unanimously rejected Solyndra’s loan application.  Weeks later, Obama OMB number-crunchers warned that the deal stunk to high heaven, and cautioned against going through with it.  The loan was fast-tracked and approved after multiple White House visits by billionaire Solyndra investor and Obama donor George Kaiser.

In 2010, White House officials and outside supporters sounded the alarm that a planned presidential visit to Solyndra’s headquarters could blow up in Obama’s face because of the company’s deteriorating finances.  These concerns were “brushed off”, and the photo-op happened anyway.

In 2011, after Solydra defaulted on its loan, White House budget officials recommended letting the “green energy” company fail rather than re-structuring its loan because the former course of action would save taxpayers up to $168 million.  The loan was re-structured, and was constructed to ensure that Solyndra’s private investors — like George Kaiser — would recoup their losses before taxpayers in the (inevitable) event that the company went bust.

Objections were raised at every step of this process, yet poor, politically-motivated decisions ensued in each case.  This disastrous nature of these decisions are not merely evident “in hindsight.”  The whole enterprise was a slow-motion, real-time debacle from day one. People did not “feel it was a good bet,” Mr. President.  Many people within your own administration felt it was a very bad bet, but your political team placed it anyway, and doubled-down at every opportunity.  With our money.  That’s not bad luck.  That’s not hindsight.  That’s a scandal.

And like Rosie O’Donnell’s waistline, growing bigger….every day!

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens explains why he finds The Obamao worthy of the title….

The President of Contempt

To Barack Obama, America is lovable in proportion to the love it gives him in return.

 Nixon was tricky. Ford was clumsy. Carter was dour. Reagan was sunny. Bush 41 was prudent. Clinton felt your pain. Bush 43 was stubborn. And Barack Obama is . . .

Early in America’s acquaintance with the man who would become the 44th president, the word that typically sprang from media lips to describe him was “cool.”

Cool as a matter of fashion sense—”Who does he think he is, George Clooney?” burbled the blogger Wonkette in April 2008. Cool as a matter of political temperament—”Maybe after eight years of George W. Bush stubbornness, on the heels of eight years of Clinton emotiveness, we need to send out for ice,” approved USA Today’s Ruben Navarrette that October. Cool as a matter of upbringing—Indonesia, apparently, is “where Barack learned to be cool,” according to a family friend quoted in a biography of his mother.

The Obama cool made for a reassuring contrast with his campaign’s warm-and-fuzzy appeals to hope, change and being the ones we’ve been waiting for. But as the American writer Minna Antrim observed long ago, “between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt.” When it comes to Mr. Obama, boy does it ever.

We caught flashes of the contempt during the campaign. There were those small-town Midwesterners who, as he put it at a San Francisco fund-raiser, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them.” There were those racist Republicans who, as he put it at a Jacksonville fund-raiser, would campaign against him by asking, “Did I mention he’s black?” There was the “you’re likable enough, Hillary,” line during a New Hampshire debate. But these were unscripted digressions and could be written off as such.

Only after Mr. Obama came to office did it start to become clear that contempt would be both a style and method of his governance. Take the “mess we have inherited” line, which became the administration’s ring tone for its first two years.

“I have never seen anything like the mess we have inherited,” said the late Richard Holbrooke—a man with memories of what Nixon inherited in Vietnam from Johnson—about Afghanistan in February 2009. “We are cleaning up something that is—quite simply—a mess,” said the president the following month about Guantanamo. “Let’s face it, we inherited a mess,” said Valerie Jarrett about the economy in March 2010.

For presidential candidates to rail against incumbents from an opposing party is normal; for a president to rail for years against a predecessor of any party is crass—and something to which neither Reagan nor Lincoln, each of them inheritors of much bigger messes, stooped.

Then again, the contempt Mr. Obama felt for the Bush administration was merely of a piece with the broader ambit of his disdain. Examples? Here’s a quick list:

The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust to Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high-profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, petty as well as serious, of Gordon Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nicolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street “fat cats” who “caused the problem” of “10% unemployment.” The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and everyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television’s Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, “tried rich and tried poor and like rich better.” (Now showing in Section #2 of our home page as “Video Clip of the Day”.)

Now we come to the last few days, in which Mr. Obama first admonished the Congressional Black Caucus to “stop complainin’, stop grumblin’, stop cryin’,” and later told a Florida TV station that America was losing its competitive edge because it “had gotten a little soft.” The first comment earned a rebuke from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, while the second elicited instant comparisons to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. They tell us something about the president’s political IQ. They tell us more about his world view.

What is it that Mr. Obama doesn’t like about the United States—a country that sent him hurtling like an American Idol contestant from the obscurity of an Illinois Senate seat to the presidency in a mere four years?

I suspect it’s the same thing that so many run-of-the-mill liberals dislike: Americans typically believe that happiness is an individual pursuit; we bridle at other people setting limits on what’s “enough”; we enjoy wealth and want to keep as much of it as we can; we don’t like trading in our own freedom for someone else’s idea of virtue, much less a fabricated concept of the collective good.

When a good history of anti-Americanism is someday written, it will note that it’s mainly a story of disenchantment—of the obdurate and sometimes vulgar reality of the country falling short of the lover’s ideal. Listening to Mr. Obama, especially now as the country turns against him, one senses in him a similar disenchantment: America is lovable exactly in proportion to the love it gives him in return.

Hence his increasingly ill-concealed expressions of contempt. Hence the increasingly widespread counter-contempt.

And….increasingly….contempt may be too kind a term.

Next up, Jeff Foutch forwarded this Stephen Moore’s must-read interview with oil-man Herman Hamm that appeared over the weekend in the WSJ:

How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia

Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on America’s oil future and why OPEC’s days are numbered.

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”

“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can’t come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You’d expect an oilman to make the “drill, baby, drill” pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation’s fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: “No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels.”

If he’s right, that’ll double America’s proven oil reserves. “Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska,” he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its “proved reserves” of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.

“We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years.” And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America “there are 10 million royalty owners across the country” who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. “The wealth is being widely shared.”

One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC’s erosion of market power. “For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil,” he recalls. “They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust.”

Today OPEC’s market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. “Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse.” When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That’s why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.

The other reason for America’s abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques. “Horizontal drilling” allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet. Mr. Hamm was one of the pioneers of this method in the 1990s, and it has done for the oil industry what hydraulic fracturing has done for natural gas drilling in places like the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast. Both innovations have unlocked decades worth of new sources of domestic fossil fuels that previously couldn’t be extracted at affordable cost.

Mr. Hamm’s rags to riches success is the quintessential “only in America” story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma “the son of sharecroppers who never owned land.” He didn’t have money to go to college, so as a teenager he went to work in the oil fields and developed a passion. “I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling.”

He became a wildcat driller and his success rate became legendary in the industry. “People started to say I have ESP,” he remarks. “I was fortunate, I guess. Next year it will be 45 years in the business.”

Mr. Hamm ranks 33rd on the Forbes wealth list for America, but given the massive amount of oil that he owns, much still in the ground, and the dizzying growth of Continental’s output and profits (up 34% last year alone), his wealth could rise above $20 billion and he could soon be rubbing elbows with the likes of Warren Buffett.

His only beef these days is with Washington. Mr. Hamm was invited to the White House for a “giving summit” with wealthy Americans who have pledged to donate at least half their wealth to charity. (He’s given tens of millions of dollars already to schools like Oklahoma State and for diabetes research.) “Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they were all there,” he recalls.

When it was Mr. Hamm’s turn to talk briefly with President Obama, “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this.”

The president’s reaction? “He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'” Mr. Hamm holds his head in his hands and says, “Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing.”

Washington keeps “sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: ‘Why aren’t you creating more jobs,'” he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. “These delays kill projects,” he says. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is now tightening the screws on the oil industry, requiring companies like Continental to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules. “I could go to jail because a local operator misreported the production in the field,” he says.

The White House proposal to raise $40 billion of taxes on oil and gas—by excluding those industries from credits that go to all domestic manufacturers—is also a major hindrance to exploration and drilling. “That just stops the drilling,” Mr. Hamm believes. “I’ve seen these things come about before, like [Jimmy] Carter’s windfall profits tax.” He says America’s rig count on active wells went from 4,500 to less than 55 in a matter of months. “That was a dumb idea. Thank God, Reagan got rid of that.”

A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental’s crime was killing one bird “the size of a sparrow” in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. “It’s not even a rare bird. There’re jillions of them,” he explains. He says that “people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions,” which he views as “completely discriminatory” because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration’s beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.

Continental pleaded not guilty to the charges last week in federal court. For Mr. Hamm the whole incident is tantamount to harassment. “This shouldn’t happen in America,” he says. To him the case is further proof that Washington “is out to get us.”

Mr. Hamm believes that if Mr. Obama truly wants more job creation, he should study North Dakota, the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%. He swears that number is overstated: “We can’t find any unemployed people up there. The state has 18,000 unfilled jobs,” Mr. Hamm insists. “And these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year.” The economy is expanding so fast that North Dakota has a housing shortage. Thanks to the oil boom—Continental pays more than $50 million in state taxes a year—the state has a budget surplus and is considering ending income and property taxes.

It’s hard to disagree with Mr. Hamm’s assessment that Barack Obama has the energy story in America wrong. The government floods green energy—a niche market that supplies 2.5% of our energy needs—with billions of dollars of subsidies a year. “Wind isn’t commercially feasible with natural gas prices below $6” per thousand cubic feet, notes Mr. Hamm. Right now its price is below $4. This may explain the administration’s hostility to the fossil-fuel renaissance.

Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties.” That’s more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he’s wrong by half, it’s a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn’t just about jobs and economic revival. It’s also about repairing America’s battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.

One couldn’t do this much damage to America if they tried….or unless they WERE trying!

And in the Environmental Moment….

Climate Experts Meet to Discuss Epic Texas Drought

….a confab, which in terms of its incipient ineffectuality, comes in only slightly less useless than The Obamao’s innumerable “jobs” initiatives and the proverbial….

And in today’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” segment, courtesy of Carl Polizzi, we learn that a Alabama….

Company will load loved ones’ ashes into ammunition

A pair of Alabama conservation enforcement officers think they’ve come up with the perfect way for avid hunters to honor their loved ones for eternity. Officers Thad Holmes and Clem Parnell have launched Holy Smoke LLC, a company that will, for a price, load cremated human ash into shotgun shells, and rifle and pistol cartridges.

It’s the perfect life celebration for someone who loves the outdoors or shooting sports, Parnell says.

“This isn’t a joke. It’s a job that we take very seriously,” he said. “This is a reverent business. We take the utmost care in what we do and show the greatest respect for the remains.” The company, launched in July, shipped out its first two orders on Sept. 16 – one from Florida and one from Kentucky – Holmes says.

For $850, one pound of ash will be loaded into 250 shotgun shells. The ash is mixed in the cups that hold the shot, not the powder. The same amount of ash will fill the bullets of 100 standard caliber center-fire rifle rounds or 250 pistol rounds. For the rifle and pistol ammunition, the ash is put into the tips of hollow-point bullets with the cavity sealed with wax. Any remaining ash is shipped back to the customer, along with the loaded ammunition.

“Some people have been concerned that a small amount of ash will remain in the animal that is shot with the ammunition, Holmes said. “But it’s just carbon, and a small amount at that. You don’t have anything to worry about.” The process takes about 48 hours from the time the ashes are received, Holmes said.

“The people we use are all experienced reloaders and know exactly what we want them to do, he said. “Only one bag of ash will be opened at a time, and the equipment will be thoroughly cleaned before the next set of remains is loaded.

Tim Godwin, a Montgomery landscaping company owner and avid hunter, says he sees no problem with the practice. “People have had their ashes sprinkled in rivers and the ocean, there have been ashes spread out of airplanes,” he said. “If you love hunting or the outdoors, this really isn’t much different.”

People should take care in with how the meat that is shot with this ammunition is handled, cautions Robert Chapin, a toxicologist who worked for 18 years at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The animal should be killed quickly by the shot, to prevent any possibility of spreading the ashes in the animal’s blood, he says. The area around where the animal was struck should not be consumed.

That is….unless you don’t mind digesting a little bit of Dear Old Dad!

Finally, in News of the Bizarre, this just in from the Pelican State:

Louisiana Hospital to Ban Odor of Smoke on Workers’ Clothes

Two thoughts come to mind: first, are we the only one thinking the biggest problem facing most Ragin’ Cajuns ain’t third-hand smoke?  And as The Lovely Jenny noted, what’s next: a ban on breaking wind?!?

Magoo