What if?

The descendants of the Vikings figured out a thing or two.

Not so long ago, I, along with lots of good folks and a very impressive coalition,  spent a good bit of time and effort trying to get the state of West Virginia to pass legislation creating a Future Fund. This would have involved setting aside a portion of state severance tax revenue, allowing it to build, and using the interest as a permanent source of wealth for the state.

The bill passed in 2014. Ish. Unfortunately, it was sabotaged in the House of Delegates (at a time when Democrats held the majority in both houses) and basically made unworkable for the foreseeable future. Since there, there's been a political earthquake or three and a big dip in coal production and gas prices.

I'm still hopeful that the Future Fund can be made workable at some point. And I can't help thinking about how different West Virginia would have been today if one had been set up years ago.

Case in point: Norway. When that country experienced an oil boom, those socialistic Vikings were smart enough to set aside a portion of their revenue for pensions and public expenses. Apparently they were smart enough to figure out that this stuff you take out of the ground doesn't grow back (at least for several million years).

Today, that fund is worth $1 trillion. Yes, that would be the number with 12 zeros. It's worth about $190,000 for each resident of Norway.

I know there's no way WV's version would  have been anywhere near that even if we started decades ago. But we would have been in better shape than we are now.

From Vikings to Quakers

I've been amusing myself lately by blogging about the Vikings, those fun loving Norsemen of old who liked to swill mead and plunder monasteries. I was even more amused to learn a while back of a connection between Vikings and Quakers, two groups most people don't usually associate together.

It turns out that the North Midlands of England, where Quakerism was strong in its early years, was also the place with the most Viking colonists back in the day. In David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in American, the author quotes historian Hugh Barbour as saying,

"...in the central region of the North, the Pennine moorland, where Quakerism was strongest, the villages were mainly Norse in origin and name, and Norse had been spoken there in the Middle Ages. From the Norsemen came the custom of moots, or assemblies in the open at a standing stone or hilltop grave, which may have influenced the Quaker's love for such meeting places."

I enjoy the thought that the great great great....grandfather of an earnest Friend might have been a berserker back in the day. I guess it's more proof that Odin has a sense of humor.

POVERTY AS A CHILDHOOD DISEASE is discussed here.

TWO FROM COAL TATTOO. Here's a post from my friend Ken Ward about the future central Appalachian coal. along with one on the new book about Massey Energy and its former CEO Don Blankenship

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A bitter disappointment

El Cabrero has recently listened to and enjoyed a series of lectures on the Vikings by Michael Drout. I must admit, however, that I was bitterly disappointed to learn a couple of things.

First, it turns out that they may not have had horns on their helmets. That was kind of a downer. But I was positively crushed to learn that they didn't really drink from the skulls of their enemies. I mean, heck, the only reason I started doing that was to be more like them. Guess I'll revert to ordinary drinking vessels...

More musings on the Norse to come. Unless Ragnarok happens, in which case we'll all be kind of busy

SPEAKING OF VIKINGS, here's a great NY Times op-ed on why austerity kills. It turns out that the descendants of the Vikings in Iceland managed to deal with their economic crisis without inflicting wholesale misery on ordinary people.

MORE AYN RAND WHACKING here.

STRANGE HUMAN/ANIMAL INTERACTIONS here.

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A little Viking advice

What better way to make it over the hump of the week than by cracking open a little Viking wisdom. Below, please enjoy some of these old Norse proverbs:

It is better to be a living man than a dead one. The living man can have a cow.

Brawl with a pig and you go away with his stink.

The slumbering wolf does not get the ham.

It is the still and silent sea that drowns a man.

Everybody got that?

MORE AUSTERITY BASHING here.

WORDS. Some are really old.

COMING TO A COUNTY NEAR YOU. As a result of an amendment to WV Governor Tomblin's prison overcrowding bill, drug courts have been mandated for all counties by 2016.

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