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Wal-Mart's critics often complain that by not providing health care benefits to all its employees, it's unfairly shifting its costs for those left uncovered to us -- the taxpayers. But now that Wal-Mart's CEO has spoken out in favor of nationalized health care, I'm not hearing what I'd have expected.
After all, now it's proposing that the taxpayers support all of its employees. Why no outcry?
Though I'm generally supportive of Rudy Giuliani's run for the Republican nomination, he's showing himself to be particularly tone deaf on a few issues. Gun control is one.
Rudy Giuliani addressed a potentially troublesome issue with conservative voters, saying his policies as mayor to get handguns off the street helped reduce crime in New York.
"I used gun control as mayor," he said at a news conference Saturday during a swing through California. But "I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the right to bear arms."
He said what he did as mayor would have no effect on hunting.
Both Giuliani and Mitt Romney come across as nothing but big-time city slickers when they address the 2nd Amendment as a hunting protection statute. Most of us are not at all concerned with hunting. We just want to be able to defend ourselves and our families. If an intruder breaks into our homes, we won't settle for cowering in a closet like the Brits and Canadians -- defenseless -- until the police show up. Until they get that through their pointy, little, urban heads, they're not going to make much headway with conservatives.
The Buffalo News editorial board whined yesterday that the dead-end Congressional investigation of Alfredo Gonzales is diverting the Democrats from the "real" corruption of the Bush administration. Fred Barnes explains what that amounts to: must--get--Rove.
He is the chief target of Democrats, liberals, and the left, and they burn with a desire to see him discredited, fired, and jailed. If all else fails, and it has so far, they'll settle for tainting him as impolite [a la Sheryl Crow].
A few Democrats have talked of impeaching President Bush, but that idea is a nonstarter. Representative Dennis Kucinich has called for impeaching Vice President Cheney. But with enemies like Kucinich, Cheney doesn't need friends. When the Democratic presidential candidates were polled at a debate in South Carolina last week, they pointedly failed to agree with Kucinich. So that leaves Rove at the top of the Democratic hit list.
Rove is more than a symbol. He is the architect of Bush's election triumphs and an influential player in pushing the president's agenda. He represents Republican success. The Democratic strategy now is to criminalize that success by treating normal political conduct by the Bush administration, spearheaded by Rove, as a series of criminal acts.
[excerpted]
So what are Rove's crimes? That's what Democrats, now in control of Congress and armed with subpoena power, are desperately looking for. Their hopes initially rested with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. When he cleared Rove of wrongdoing in the CIA leak case, their disappointment was palpable.
Now they've turned to congressional fishing expeditions.
The Congressional Democrats, in other words, are playing Nifong to Rove's lacrosse player.
A civil rights victory in Kansas.
When global warming enthusiasts claim that we haven't seen "weather like this" for 50 years and that's supposed to prove that something alarming is afoot, do you ever think to yourself that -- yes, but we've already evidently seen this so what's the big whoop? Well, the dollar has dropped to "historical lows" against the Euro, but as the Econopundit points out, the Euro hasn't been around all that long.
WHAT THEY TELL YOU: The dollar dropped to an all-time low against the euro after the U.S. government reported the economy grew at its slowest pace in four years.
WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU: The dollar's been around for quite a while. On the dollar-historical scale, the euro was invented last week. "All time" highs or lows aren't really very interesting under these circumstances. Similarly, "slowest pace in four (count them -- 4!) years isn't that interesting either (except as a scary headline).
Read the whole thing -- there's a lot more that "they don't tell you."
Americans claim to love their farm subsidies -- of course they don't think about who pays them.
Here's the best survey I've ever seen on farm policy. Big findings:
Farm subsidies are extremely popular. Respondents had to choose between the following positions:
A. It is not consistent with the American way to have a whole sector of the economy dependent on government handouts at taxpayers’ expense. We should trust the market, not the government, to find the right balance between supply and demand.
B. There is nothing more important than food. The government needs to subsidize farming to make sure there will always be a good supply of food and that the price does not go up and down according to the whims of the market.
37% preferred the free-market position; 58% preferred the interventionist position.
I can't help but wonder what the responses might have been had the second question read something like this.
B. There is nothing more important than food. Government needs to pass regulations that raise its prices above what they might have been in order to make sure that farmers never lose money and that prices do not go down when more food has been produced than is needed.
That's what farm subsidies do after all.
Don Boudreaux explains why campaign finance reform is so foolish in a letter to USAToday.
To the Editor:
Drummond Drew writes that "We need to find a way to get money out of politics" (Letters, April 26). He mistakenly supposes that carts push horses. Money is in politics only because politicians confiscate and control so much of our money.
The only way to free politics from the influence of money is to free our money from the influence of politics.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
He's correct, of course. We have every right to support candidates who will reflect our own positions on the matters they will debate and pass laws on. It's our lives and livelihoods they're potentially harming or helping after all. But campaign finance reform has turned into little more than protecting incumbents against bad publicity from constituents opposed to them.
Have you noticed that campaign finance reform is a lot like lobbyist reform? It's supposed to help us, but never seems to. When politicians set about to regulate lobbyists, they inevitably impose all sorts of rules on -- the lobbyists! The lobbyists cannot take a Congressman to dinner and the lobbyists must not give him tickets to a football game. The lobbyists may not fly her to the Bahamas and the lobbyists dare not . . . you get the idea.
Well, why not just create a rule that members of Congress can't accept anything of monetary value from a lobbyist or they'll be punished? The reason that John McCain doesn't stand a chance in hell of getting the Republican nomination is his benighted campaign finance reform bill. It's well-recognized now that it didn't deprive political candidates of a single dime -- it just limited the rights of the rest of us to support whom we wish, when we wish and how we wish without hiring a lawyer and an accountant to do it.
Now Governor Spitzer's proposing campaign finance reform for New York. Well, when his proposal comes out, take some time and read it. Decide for yourself whether it will limit the politicians' access to money or just the New York electorate's ability to influence elections. I'll bet on the latter.
The Buffalo News editorial board claims that Alberto Gonzales's refusal to resign is just a distraction.
Good Republicans who don’t yet want to go so far as to call for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to resign have begun referring to him, more in sorrow than in anger, as “a distraction.”
Of course he is. That’s the role Gonzales has been assigned in the damage control party that the entire Bush administration has become. As long as the focus is on the hangdog Gonzales and his apparent nonmanagement of the Justice Department, less attention will be paid to the White House political operation run by Karl Rove and its suspected mismanagement of the same department.
Gee, if a bunch of humble reporters in Buffalo have caught on to the Republicans' latest wily ploy, you'd think that Pelosi, Reid and Schumer could figure it out, too. Leave Gonzales alone and go after the big fish! Hey, I heard that Al Gore's in town today; maybe he read the paper and can get word to someone in charge that the Democrats are being hornswoggled again.
It’s nice to see teens opting not to eat meat
Yeah, there's more left for me.
Every year when these figures come out, it's worth another mention.
Buffalo Niagara International Airport ranks among the five cheapest airports from which to fly in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
“This is the best we’ve ever ranked. This is excellent,” said Lawrence M. Meckler, executive director of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.
The federal air fare survey pegged the average cost of a round-trip ticket in the United States at $378 in the fourth quarter of last year.
In Buffalo, fliers paid a slim $295.58.
No matter how much I might disagree with the NFTA over other issues, I can't deny that it's done a stellar job building, managing and publicizing Buffalo-Niagara Airport.
Why's the New York State Assembly doing a Mormon imitation? I mean, I'm all for governmental reform, but this is just stupid.
Assemblyman Michael Cole was summoned before a panel of his peers Wednesday to explain why he spent the night in the Albany apartment of a 21- year-old female intern — a violation of a new Capitol taboo.
Cole, an Alden Republican elected just over a year ago, acknowledges he made a “terrible error in judgment” after walking the intern home from an Albany sports bar April 16. But he said nothing inappropriate occurred, and he spent the night on the woman’s floor after he felt he was too drunk to drive.
As a result, the Assembly Ethics Committee is now weighing whether to impose sanctions on him for violating the policy.
“As wrong as it sounds now, at the time I didn’t think it was such a bad decision to sleep there, being that I was incapable of driving,” Cole said. “But it was. I should have taken a cab home.
“At no point in time did anything inappropriate occur, nor has anything been alleged,” he added.
Cole says he now realizes he may have violated a strict rule prohibiting socialization between members and staff with interns.
Which government-nanny came up with this brilliant idea? Oh well, it doesn't matter and I suppose Mr. Cole voted for it anyway (mustn't appear to be against reform, you know), which would explain his abject apologies for having violated a senseless rule for a sensible reason. With all the real corruption in Albany and with our money being spent faster than Joe Bruno's high-speed train could travel from Albany to Colonie, I'd have hoped that the Assembly might have focused on something more momentous than socializing with adult staffers.
John Edwards talks of two Americas; now Melanie Phillips writes about the two Britains.
What we are seeing is nothing less than a cascade of abuse and neglect down through the generations, so that the instinct that makes morality possible — the ability to feel someone else’s pain, so there is a desire not to hurt them — is wholly absent.
This has given rise to the emergence of two Britains. The division is not between North and South, nor between rich and poor. Instead, it is between those who adhere to the basic rules of a civilised society and those whose lives are characterised by depravity and disorder. Our culture is now deep into uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour.
Her explanation makes a lot more sense than his.
When calculating all the savings that will accrue to you from converting to fluorescent bulbs, don't forget to add in the clean-up costs.
Consider the procedure offered by the Maine DEP’s Web page entitled, “What if I accidentally break a fluorescent bulb in my home?”
Don’t vacuum bulb debris because a standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area and contaminate the vacuum. Ventilate the area and reduce the temperature. Wear protective equipment like goggles, coveralls and a dust mask.
Collect the waste material into an airtight container. Pat the area with the sticky side of tape. Wipe with a damp cloth. Finally, check with local authorities to see where hazardous waste may be properly disposed.
The only step the Maine DEP left off was the final one: Hope that you did a good enough cleanup so that you, your family and pets aren’t poisoned by any mercury inadvertently dispersed or missed.
This, of course, assumes that people are even aware that breaking CFLs entails special cleanup procedures.
The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.
It’s quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about 4 billion lightbulb sockets in American households, we’re looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges’ bedroom.
Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes.
The article mentions one woman who was given an estimate of $2,000 to safely contain the mercury and dispose of it after she dropped a CFL bulb on the floor of her daughter's bedroom.
[UPDATE:] Debunked by the great one. Actually, I think that CFL's are an increasingly good alternative to incandescents. I am skeptical of their claimed economic and environmental transformative powers, however. If they really save us money, we'll switch to them without the government's forcing them down our sockets.
Ever wonder why poor people seem more disposed to obesity than the better off? It's perhaps not due only to a lack of education.
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
There's no good reason to subsidize agriculture, it's all just for vote-getting. Come to think of it, that's the reason for all subsidies. End 'em.
After particularly horrifying events, we Americans seem to have a compulsion to do something to stop them from ever happening again -- now! Now, that's a natural enough reaction, but unfortunately we never give them time to sink in before we rush off to fix them and then, satisfied that we've done "something," promptly forget about them.
Take this recent example of zero-tolerance from a school near Chicago (via Best Of The Web.)
High school senior Allen Lee sat down with his creative writing class on Monday and penned an essay that so disturbed his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct.
Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.
The youth's father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced to attend classes elsewhere for now. . . .
Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio said the charge was appropriate even though the essay was not published or posted for public viewing.
Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said.
The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," he said.
After the Long Island Railroad shootings in 1993 and later following the Columbine killings, the nation was gripped in gun-control mania. If we only had stronger laws against ownership of firearms, terrible incidents like these wouldn't happen. Well, we significantly strengthened the laws -- but the killings go on.
So, I was quite pleased that after the Virginia Tech murders, the calls for further gun control were muted. Maybe we've learned something, I thought. But now I'm reading more and more incidents like this where teachers are suddenly on the lookout for writing of the type created by Cho Seung-Hui and are fearful that another killer lurks amongst us.
This latest paranoia, too, will eventually pass, but in the meantime young people with completely innocent motives will suffer as this young man did.
[UPDATE:] Agoraphilia puts the VT shootings into perspective -- something that might have been expected of the above teacher and police chief.
[UPDATE, UPDATE:] Christopher Hitchens rues the mawkishness that marked so much of the reaction.
It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called "vicarious identification." At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn't know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the greater the grieving.
Buffalo News editorial.
Whatever must our troops think, the Senate’s Republican minority leader fretted last week, to hear that the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate has declared the war in Iraq to be “lost.” Maybe they think that somebody gets it.
Yeah, right.
[UPDATE:] We've already won the war. Saddam was turned out of power, captured and put to death. A democratically-elected Iraqi government is in place. So, Harry Reid's disgusting statement is really beside the point. But our victory will have meant nothing if we don't stay until that government can stand on its own.
The Buffalo News editorial board praises a very bad policy, Governor Spitzer's raising of the limits on charter schools and his "transitional aid" to the public schools.
The doubling of the cap gives charter school proponents several years to add schools and add quality to what charter schools offer. As Peter Murphy of the New York Charter Schools Association said, there is enough administrative and statutory rigor, and enough safeguards, to argue that a cap is unwarranted. But raising the cap to 200 allows room for both expansion and further evaluation.
The transition aid, along with huge overall increases in state education funding, should soften the blow for school districts that lose much of the per-pupil aid when children shift from public to charter schools. The $12 million in transition aid is designed to ease the impact of future student shifts, although it won’t help districts recover costs for students who already have left.
School districts should be heartened by this first-ever response to the funding impact problem by the Spitzer administration, the Division of Budget and the State Legislature, including work by Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, D-Buffalo.
The loss of per-pupil aid has put a squeeze on districts, an expense Buffalo School District Chief Financial Officer Gary M. Crosby has calculated for the city system. The difference between the drain and the $12 million in aid comes to about $28 million, he said.
Well, of course, the loss of per-student aid to the charter schools has put a squeeze on districts -- that was the point. The primary benefit of charter schools (which, we must remember, are "public" schools) was to provide more personalized and more effective schooling to children who weren't being served adequately, but the second was to inject some competition into the public school system.
By eliminating the pain of losing the student subsidies, the Governor has removed the incentive for the older schools to improve. Now, I applaud Mr. Spitzer for his support of charter schools, but will his "transitional" aid now have to become become permanent aid? Will it now be built into each succeeding year's budget? If that happens, the teachers' unions' opposition to charter schools will dissolve. After all, they wouldn't mind charter schools any more than they do private schools as long as they weren't financially harmed by them.
Sooner or later, someone in New York State is going to have to stand up to the unions and tell them that we think we're spending quite enough money on our school's already, thank you, and now it's your turn to hold up your end. The loss of per-student aid had been working to bring around changes to the traditional schools. Governor Spitzer's compromise has seriously weakened that.
From the Buffalo News Everybody's Column
Well, at last a sober analysis of the issue. After reviewing for us a good number of facts, Robert Samuelson concludes in his April 19 column that the poor aren’t poor because the rich are richer. This conclusion is important enough on its own right, nevertheless he amplifies it with the more significant one that their poverty reflects low skills, poor work habits or bad luck. What Samuelson fails to point out is that he is rich because he has the good luck of having the high skills and the good work habits to regularly write nonsense like this.
Walter Greizerstein
Williamsville
Boeing keeps racking up the orders for its 787. Virgin Atlantic has just signed a big contract and US Airways is returning to the Boeing fold after its flirtation with Airbus.
Check out the Anti-planner to see what a city without a Master Plan and, by the way, no zoning, looks like.
Mickey Kaus notes that the Democrats don't talk much about affirmative action these days -- much as they steer away from talk of gun control (or gay marriage I might add -- New York's Governor Spitzer excepted.)
I really enjoy City Comforts Blog. David details the problems facing Seattle from a left-leaning libertarian, though free-market, perspective and it's fun to read about places experiencing explosive growth and how their residents are dealing with it. I certainly don't agree with him politically on many matters, but that doesn't detract at all from his observations on urban issues.
I hope I've introduced his blog well enough that it will spur some of you to visit and he'll forgive me for lifting an entire post -- I find it relevant to Buffalo's situation.
One of those weird little ironies about the whole growth management issue (and which no NIMBY seems to notice or admit) is that there is no escape except poverty.
If you implement draconian restrictions on growth to keep out the undesirables you make your city or town all the more attractive...the snob-value/forbidden-fruit syndrome. You get intense competition to be in this rare spot. Housing prices go up and only the wealthy can live there.
And then of course if you plan to accommodate (albeit perhaps grudgingly) a growing population and invest in a civic infrastructure of parks, transportation facilities of all kinds, schools, museums, etcetera then you do indeed make your area more attractive and, yes, you get growth from that direction.
The only solution is a stagnant economy, led by a small reactionary elite which is unwilling to see change, to share the fruits of a dynamic economy and which is happy to keep its people barefoot and uneducated. So if you are really against growth in every way and can see no way to accommodate it gracefully, vote for poverty. OK, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. Success (e.g. M'Soft, Boeing, Starbucks, Amazon, UW, and many more) bring people here. [emphasis mine]
So far as I can see, the only choice is how to accommodate growth, not whether to allow it. I think that I am in the popular majority on this one — rare so I cherish the feeling — even though there may be intense debate in the community about the wisest how.
I'm pretty sure that David is unaware of Buffalo's problems (other than lots of snow which a Seattleite would consider hopeless) and probably doesn't care. But it might surprise him to find out that Buffalo's elites have latched onto his stagnant economy solution -- and it's working -- for them, anyway.
James Taranto takes a reporter to task for his rather glowing accounts of life in Cuba.
Cuba's average life expectancy is 77.08 years--second in Latin America after Puerto Rico and more than 11 years above the world average, according to the 2007 CIA World Fact Book.
It says Cuban life expectancy averages 74.85 years for men and 79.43 years for women, compared with 75.15 and 80.97 respectively for Americans.
Weissert doesn't tell us the source of the CIA's information. Do these numbers come from Cuba's totalitarian regime, and if so, shouldn't we automatically take them with a grain of salt? There are some obvious questions a serious reporter might want to ask about these numbers. The most obvious one: Do they include people who die trying to escape?
Of course, there's no money to buy smokes, likely no booze and deaths due to traffic accidents must be low because very few outside Fidel's family can afford to buy one. Come to think of it, it's surprising Cuba doesn't have the highest rate of suicide in the Americas.
Though, of course, if it did, who'd know?
Latina's closing Elmwood Avenue store. Well, you can't say I didn't see that one coming. It's too bad, though, because that part of Buffalo can support a decent supermarket. Latina's just expanded too fast.
I suspect that someone else will go in there and I hope it's Budwey's or Jack Dash, though I fear it will be Aldi's. There's nothing wrong at all with Aldi's; that neighborhood is growing poorer and the location attracts shoppers not only from Allentown and the West Side but over into the near East Side. Aldi's, with its back-to-basics format might very well find it a good location.
But there's still a lot of people in Allentown with money to spend at a decent deli, on fresh produce and a good meat selection. In the meantime, it's back to Wegman's for me.
The Buffalo Planning Board has declared that the proposed ethanol plant has passed its environmental review.
A proposal to build an $80 million ethanol plant on the Buffalo River took a big step forward today when the city Planning Board determined that all environmental issues have been addressed.
Despite pressure from project opponents, the board determined no further environmental studies are needed and that the plan should move forward. The board adopted a "negative declaration," meaning members are convinced the plan to turn a dormant cluster of grain elevators into a plant that will distill corn for use as fuel will not have a harmful impact on the community.
Board Chairman Frank A. Manuele claimed the project advanced by RiverWright Energy has already been subjected to exhaustive studies.
"They really did their homework," Manuele said of the developers. "Everything has been addressed."
Of course, as we know, nothing in Buffalo gets done without the well-known "opponents."
But some residents in the Old First Ward neighborhood disagree, insisting there are still unresolved issues involving fire hazards, pollution, noise and odors. Several residents attended today's City Hall meeting, including Julie Cleary of Hamburg Street.
"I think it's big business as usual," she said. "I pose this question to [Planning Board members]: Would they want an ethanol plant in their neighborhoods?"
I'm not a planning board member but my answer to her question would be "damned right I would." I live in a collapsing neighborhood, too, and some light industry over here would be very welcome. Once upon a time, manufacturing plants were commonly located in city residential neighborhoods -- just as retail still is. You can see evidence of it in long-abandoned buildings all over the East and West sides.
It's part of the mixture of uses that make a city a vital place Even urban-guru Jane Jacobs realized its desirability when she wrote of a large, commercial bakery located in her Manhattan neighborhood of the 1960's. Not only does it create local jobs, its employees often patronize neighborhood taverns and stores.
Now, I doubt that the opponents of the ethanol plant will meet with the success that, say, the anti-casino gang has.The latter has lots of money to continue its eternal lawsuits and this group doesn't. But anti-development sentiment runs very deep here and there's still plenty of time for one of the local philanthropic organizations to toss them a few hundred thou.
So, the ethanol plant must remain on the list of things we can't get done here -- until the very day it opens. Finger-crossing won't hurt.
The Virginia Tech killer evidently hired an escort last month. According to her report of their, um, date, she lived up to her delightful name.
To the best of my knowledge, the following is not a joke.
A middle school student in Lewiston, Maine is being investigated by the police for a possible hate crime after he placed a bag containing a ham sandwich on a table where Somali students eat lunch. According to the school's superintendent, Leon Levesque, the student has been suspended, and more disciplinary action could follow pending the outcome of the investigation.
[UPDATE:] I had a chance to follow up on this today at work and the story is true, the local paper's coverage is here. It was done as a prank and while I'd not be sorry to see the idiot teen-aged boy who pulled it suspended for a couple days and made to apologize, I think we'll be very sorry one day that something like this now has to be investigated as a crime.
And the reactions of the Muslim students are so overwrought you could be forgiven for thinking the whole report a satire.
The act reminded students of a man who threw a pig's head into a Lewiston mosque last summer.
[excerpt]
"We didn't know what was in this bag," the boy said. "One of my friends reached inside it. It was a big ham steak. There were five of us at the table, all Somali. It was intended for us."
The boy said he looked up at students he thought were his friends. "I felt angered, offended."
He suddenly felt like he was alone. "At the school the next day, I didn't feel safe.
Now, I'm usually very respectful of other peoples' religious beliefs but a theology which teaches its young followers to feel physically threatened by the mere presence of someone else's food is a particularly senseless one. Now, perhaps there is no bullying in Somalia, but the fact that so many Somalis have come here specifically to escape a brutal, decades-long civil war that has killed tens of thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- leads me to believe otherwise.
This young Somali man must learn to get a grip if he's to have a normal life and the young American bully must learn to stop it. Once upon a time the school principal could have handled something like this, but just look at the mess we're creating by criminalizing everything in sight.
The Anti-Planner alerts us to an upcoming tsunami of pro-planning propaganda.
On November 8, the American Planning Association celebrates World Town Planning Day. So it seems appropriate to celebrate Anti-Town Planning Week on the antipodes of November 8, namely the week that contains May 8.
During that week, the Antiplanner will review a number of city and town planning disasters that haven’t previously been mentioned in this blog. If you have any suggestions about what plans the Antiplanner could or should review, please feel free to let me know in the comments here or by sending me an email. It would be helpful if the plans are available on line.
Even as you read this post, Buffalo's pro-government planning enthusiasts are writing and revising the op-eds that will mark May 2007. Check back here (often) to maintain your sanity.
Powerline posts on one of the differences between the British press and the American press.
Reading British newspapers can be refreshing, in part because of the intelligence-related leaks that they report. Here in the U.S., there is only one kind of leak from the CIA and other intelligence organizations: those intended to damage the Bush administration. It seems that British spies have a different agenda, as their leaks are more often designed to alert the British public to the severity of the threat posed by Islamic terrorists. A case in point from yesterday's London Times:
Threats? What threats?
If there's one thing that artists know, it's that artists love government subsidies support. In fact, they're quite convinced that society can't survive without it. Nathan Whitlock documents the personal anguish of a Canadian artist witnessing the budget-making process in Ottawa.
...and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty [hang on: forty-nine, plus Martel... yup, still works out] artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit.
Please, read the whole thing. I will give him credit for artistic expression, though. In Buffalo, they don't even bother with that, they just claim arts subsidies will make the economy improve. Of course, you can get money for anything here with that line.
[UPDATE:] Sometimes I suspect that the arts community demands subsidies to make up for the fact that so much of what it presents us is of no interest and often of no value. I mean, here's one example of an artist who certainly doesn't need a government grant.
It's been a best-seller in the UK for some time now, and as Joanne Jacobs informs us -- it's about to hit the States.
How do you build a tree fort? Make a bow and arrow? Write in invisible ink? The Dangerous Book for Boys, a bestseller in Britain, explains traditionally boyish pursuits to 21st century children. AP reports:
Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy’s Own annuals, “The Dangerous Book” is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.
The book by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden won “book of the year” at the British Book Awards.
I sense the timing for this book is perfect -- these guys are gonna be rich.
I can't really add too much to the general hilarity which has ensued over Sheryl Crow's exhortation to use just one square of toilet paper, but I suspect that much of middle America will be unimpressed. While they might not have taken the time to fully consider the global economic ramifications of precipitously reducing human CO2 emissions, the unfortunate mental images caused by Ms. Crow's environmental proselytizing will have convinced many that a few inches of sea level rise may not be so bad after all.
I've always believed that if the personal costs of attempting to rectify so-called anthropogenic global warming could be presented clearly to the public, it would roundly reject the ridiculous asceticism the environmentalists are asking us to practice. Sheryl Crow may have accomplished just that -- albeit in a very icky manner.
Via the Instapundit I find out that flying cars are just around the corner. It turns out that NASA's been working on them but is holding back its announcement until that pesky problem of keeping us from hitting trees, your neighbor's house, power lines and each other's flying car is solved. In the meantime, though, good old Yankee ingenuity is at work.
Paul Moller has developed his own flying car and is working hard to get it into production.
The current model is a cherry-red coupe that looks as though it should be dogfighting TIE fighters outside the Death Star. The futuristic Skycar has four seats (carrying up to 750 lbs.), a maximum air speed of 350 mph, and a range of about 750 mi. In theory, it gets more than 25 mpg. On the ground, the Skycar should travel a dinky 30 to 35 mph, just fast enough to get to an empty parking lot and stun everyone with a sweet vertical takeoff.
Oh, and wouldn't that be sweet, indeed.
Buffalo News Everybody's Column
It’s the late 19th century, and Buffalo has become an industrial and commercial powerhouse. So much so that it has become the gateway to the rest of the nation, and earned its title as the Queen City of the Lakes. This title has earned it the right to demonstrate to the world what the future can become, and it does so by hosting the Pan- American Exposition. It is an exposition to show everyone what the future of this country will be. Buffalo is to play a major role in this development.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and Buffalo continually drops the ball. The waterfront, from Buffalo to Hamburg, is littered with obsolete, crumbling buildings that no one can realistically use. Get rid of them.
Parks, as nice as they are, don’t pay taxes or create jobs. Unless preservationists, politicians and activists stop looking out for themselves and allow Buffalo to become the City of the Future that it once seemed destined to be, we will continue to die a slow, painful death. At one time we looked to the future; now we are mired in the past. Build what we need, be it Bass Pro, a new bridge or whatever, before it’s truly too late.
Elaine Winter
West Seneca
Does Mayor Brown really want to subject Buffalonians to this?
The Buffalo News editorial board worked itself up into a regular lather over the Supreme Court's decision on the partial-birth abortion law, and, in the process, completely mischaracterized the Court's role in our government.
If the United States really wishes to protect vulnerable new lives from some very rare acts of wanton destruction, there are reasonable ways to do that. Wednesday’s ruling of the Supreme Court, and the abortion-limiting law that it upheld, are not among them.
Claiming to respect human life in all its forms, the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling upholding it in fact show a stunning disrespect for the lives of American women and their ability, acting under a doctor’s care, to decide for themselves which medical procedures are necessary and proper.
The basis for both, implicit in the statute and explicit in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion, is that women are such dithery and tender flowers that it requires an act of Congress to stop them from taking an action that they may come to regret, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their lives.
In the end, the Supreme Court ruled that a woman's constitutional right to an abortion is not violated by this particular limitation on the medical procedure employed. The Court passed no judgement on the mental abilities of women and made no pronouncement on the morality of the procedure in question. Limits on partial birth abortion, it decided, do not run afoul of the Constitution.
Many disagree. If so, they should submit an amendment. It's their right and perhaps their moral duty. Whining about the supposed personal opinions of the court's members serves no particular purpose.
I just love it when I come across ridiculous statistics -- you know, the ones designed to prove someone's point but which are statistically indefensible and meaningless to begin with.
Replacing incandescent bulbs with the more efficient compact fluorescent lights would produce a "huge energy savings" and reduce pollution generated by power plants, [California assemblyman] Levine said.
"It's the equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road," he added. [emphasis mine]
Is that an actual statistic or just one of those made-up numbers that get repeated often enough that they are assumed to be accurate. Well, I can play his game. Replacing incandescent light bulbs will result in over 11,000 Americans losing their jobs and 91.8% of women will think they look horrible when they look in the mirror.
Does he really want to be responsible for that?
Uh-oh -- more global warming problems!
High temperatures can reverse the sex of dragon lizards before they hatch, turning males into females.
The finding, detailed in the April 20 issue of the journal Science, could have implications for the development of life as the planet's climate warms.
The research reveals that extreme temperatures could inactivate a gene on the male sex chromosomes of dragon lizards and thus turn male embryos into females. The sex-reversed lizards look female and have female organs but genetically they are male, said lead author Alexander Quinn of the University of Canberra in Australia.
But - but won't evolution eventually fix it? I mean, I've been taught all my life that the fittest would survive and that new replacements would be spawned to replace those species who weren't able to adapt. It's still true, isn't it?
If this letter in the Buffalo News really reflects the economic beliefs of Dennis Gorski's former economic advisor, then we can gain some real insight into the causes of Erie County's terrible economic performance during the nineties.
Here’s the equation for this “economic development” retail deal [Bass Pro]: products sold come from outside of this community + customers come from inside of this community = withdrawal of wealth. That’s right. Our “leaders” want to invest $25 million of our money to make our community poorer. Period.
Mr. Chambers can't seem to get his head around the idea that if Bass Pro opens, we won't simply be giving it our money to then be whisked out of town. Private business is not the government after all, of course, therein may lie the source of his misunderstanding. When government taxes us, much of that money does go somewhere else to benefit others we'll never know in ways which we may not agree with.
But in the case of Bass Pro, we'll be voluntarily exchanging the money we've earned for something else of equal value to us. Bass Pro will make a profit to be sure, but then, some local people will make a living. And the rest of us will enjoy a new fishing rod or perhaps even a boat and be none the poorer for it. If you pay $50,000 to buy a new car, for example, you're not worse off economically and neither is the town you live in.
It's called trade and it benefits both parties involved. Period.
[UPDATE:] I think Larry Quinn gave a very good defense of the Bass Pro plan today.
Although the corporation’s plan for Bass Pro and Canal Side adheres to this step-by-step process, it does not deviate in any material way with the goals and intent of the original Canal District Master Plan. Like the old plan, the new plan retains the historic cobblestone streets and the river walkway and floating pier on the water’s edge. The interpretive exhibits along the canal will be built where they were always intended. No building will be built in excess of the pre-established design standards. Although the Aud and the unsightly Donovan State Office Building finally will be torn down, no historic structures will be demolished. Parking structures will be built with historic facades and liner buildings that will disguise their true function, just like their counterparts at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
[UPDATE, UPDATE:] I wonder if Gorski's former economic development advisor is also opposed to the casino? The money spent at the casino will stay right here in Erie County. That's his point, isn't it?
Hillary has decided on Bill Clinton's role in her administration.
Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation's tattered image abroad.
I know, I know, it writes itself, doesn't it? But it would get him out of the house, the White one that is.
Here's an often-used argument against religion.
A fascinating bit of irony occurred in Everybody’s Column recently. First, religious people denying that conflict is inherent among people of differing religious belief systems. Then, religious people of differing belief systems conflicted over the use of the word “bishop.” Things that make you go hmmmm.
John Marschke
Niagara Falls
But then it occurred to me that atheists are often in conflict with other atheists. Religion doesn't even play a part. Why, conflict might be caused by something having nothing at all to do with a belief in a higher being; like, say, we all have our own ideas of what's right. Hmmmm, I "went."
We all want lower health care costs and a private company is willing to build what amounts to a stand-alone emergency room in the Northtowns. The Amherst IDA granted them $200,000 in tax breaks but has "reconsidered."
Amherst Industrial Development Agency board members changed their minds Friday on granting tax breaks for a proposed urgent care facility on Niagara Falls Boulevard.
The board, by a 4-0 vote with one abstention, rescinded the nearly $200,000 in tax breaks that it granted last month to Exigence LLC to build a 6,000-square-foot urgent care facility at 2099 Niagara Falls Blvd.
Concerns about the project’s impact on Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, which is tripling the size of its emergency room, along with questions about how it might affect a possible transformation of DeGraff Memorial Hospital in North Tonawanda into an urgent care facility prompted the IDA to reconsider its approval last week.
Another urgent care facility would spur competition, lead to faster emergency room service and actually allow people to compare prices. Those generally leads to lower consumer costs. Remember when Buffalo was the 2nd most expensive city in the country to fly to? The NFTA attracted competition and local airline prices plummeted.
It's a simple concept. But when it comes to health care, rational thinking goes out the window.
I hope it gets built despite the IDA's decision. We need more health care options around here -- not fewer. That's why the state's decision to close Millard Fillmore Gates Circle and St Joseph are so preposterous. There's a race around here for our health care dollars and it can only lead to better service; but New York State and its development agencies see competition as something to be avoided and discouraged.
It makes no sense.
It doesn't get any better than this -- a union convention shut down because of a strike.
Hat tip to Viking Pundit.
Upstate's very own Angry Economist recently had the opportunity to spit on Marx's grave -- literally.
"Something awful is in the air. It is 19 years old and American. It ruins meetings, presentations and lectures alike. Its name is PowerPoint."
There are few words that have a greater capacity to chill than “I’ll just take you through this on PowerPoint” and there are few surer guarantees of daytime slumber than the gentle shuffling of slides as what was once a compelling argument becomes a computer-aided anaesthetic. PowerPoint presentations are to persuasion what male posing pouches are to seduction — the death of the art.
If you do want to win an audience to your point of view, whatever it is you’re selling, then there is no effective alternative to the traditional art of speechmaking. Rhetoric, as it used to be known, has acquired a dodgy reputation over the years. Platform speeches have become equated, thanks to the efforts of hack politicians like me, with pompous and stilted cliché-mongering. You know the sort of stuff — references to things being “beyond peradventure” and initiatives being “rolled out through multi-agency working”. But it is still the case that a single speech can move, excite, motivate and change minds in a way that no other form of communication can accomplish.
I hate Powerpoint, but my employer absolutely adores it; insists on it. I'm still occasionally criticized for a presentation I made three years ago without the requisite accompanying Powerpoint slides -- even though I presented my case clearly and sparked a very lively discussion. Anyway, read the rest at the Adam Smith Institute Blog.
Thoughts on regionalism and planning from Pennsylvania.
Bigger government isn't necessarily better government.
For decades, Lehigh Valley regionalists have been promoting their agenda as the solution to our ills. Generally good intentioned people, regionalists look to create valleywide government efficiencies. However, some of them have morphed this idea into an anti-suburban, pro-city agenda.While we all want to see the Valley cities prosper, pitting urban vs. suburban residents in the regionalism debate is not the way to go. Recently, it was reported that an Allentown official wished the city's crime out to suburbia. This isn't helpful or acceptable as a way of promoting Valley regionalism.
Many regionalists point to a 2003 Brookings Report study as their creed. The report, whose basic premise is that bigger centralized government is better government, blames the problems of the cities on too much suburban growth and too much local control.
But many would argue the opposite, that smaller government is more efficient and responsive to resident needs.
Instead of municipal regionalization, let's first look at better inter-municipal cooperation.
Treating suburbanization as a "problem" that must be fixed isn't particularly constructive.
The Welland Canal strikes again.
A virus that has already killed tens of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes is spreading, scientists said, and now threatens almost two dozen aquatic species over a wide swath of the lakes and nearby waterways.
The virus, a mutated pathogen not native to North America that causes hemorrhaging and organ failure, is not harmful to humans, even if they eat contaminated fish. But it is devastating to the ecosystem and so unfamiliar, experts said, that its full biological impact might not be clear for years. It is also having a significant impact on the lakes’ $4 billion fishing industry.
There is no known treatment for the virus. As a result, scientists are focusing on managing its spread to uncontaminated water — quite a challenge since the Great Lakes are linked and fall under the jurisdiction of several states and provinces in Canada.
“Updates over the winter suggest it has spread further than we thought, even last year,” said John Dettmers, a senior fisheries biologist for the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“It’s really early,” Mr. Dettmers said. “As much as I’d like to say we know exactly what’s going on, we don’t. We’re all sitting here on the edge of our chairs waiting to see how bad it’s going to be this year.”
Besides killing Buffalo's economy, the Canal is now severely damaging our lake. One bit of development we'd have been much better off without.
Geoffrey Pullum insists that attributing speech to animals is so much rubbish.
The chicken language, not too different from human language. Can you see why I get a little bit short-tempered around these gullible animal sentimentalists and the dim-wittedly credulous journalists who write up their stories? Can you?
I wish I thought this had been published on April 1, but I don't think so. I think Dr Baeumer — his chick-talk tapes have been played at universities in many countries, you know — actually believes chickens have sentences and — although they have understandably broken off communication with him now that his voice is so deep ("What's wrong with Erich? His voice sounds like a foghorn now! Let's refuse to speak to him!") — they can say things like "Could I have some privacy, please, so I can do my cooing thing with this pretty young chick?".
Steve says you can see the article here, but it's a pay site — $1 a month or $10 a year. I've decided to hold on to my dollar, actually.
Next week: learn how cockroaches actually have a language with subjunctive subordinate clauses, and they can say "Let us swiftly return to underneath the refrigerator lest he see us now that the light is on."
David Friedman ponders the power of advertising to corrupt our poor, addled minds.
While sellers of junk food do, of course, advertise their products, so do sellers of diet soda, exercise equipment, metrecal and health foods.
"The Progressive movement, which dominated the American scene in the years from the turn of the century to United State
