Archive for 2015

ANALYSIS: MOSTLY TRUE. The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis: “We are a nauseating nation.” “We too could be like them and our countries could be like their countries, which do not persecute the citizens and do open their arms to the victims of natural and political disasters. Yes, we could be like them if we thoroughly examined our barbaric political regime, our backwards social order, our obsolete curricula, our media that operates without professional norms, and our religious establishment that interprets the texts in a barbaric fashion, inciting to hatred and to abuse of the other, even members of the Islamic faith! This situation clearly mandates a velvet revolution that the educated [sector] must launch.”

I LIVE OUT IN THE COUNTY, SO SHE’S NOT MY MAYOR, but Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero says that Chilhowee Park isn’t a park, so the guns-in-parks law doesn’t apply:

State law states that someone with a gun carry permit can bring a weapon to a state or city park, if it’s not close to a school.

The Tennessee Valley Fair, however, is making it clear: No weapons will be allowed at the annual event, which begins Friday and runs through Sept. 20. The ban at Chilhowee Park will include permit-holders.

The city of Knoxville and the fair operators argue the law, which Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law in April, does not apply in the case of the fair. Despite the objection of some cities, including Knoxville, lawmakers chose to over-ride local bans to keep guns out of city parks.

According to the city, the park is an “entertainment and public assembly” facility to which the law doesn’t apply.

Besides being kind of cheesy, this is also indicative of an unwholesome prejudice. People with carry permits are very law abiding, and demonstrably less likely to shoot someone improperly than are cops. I suspect that Rogero, who’s a Democrat, is just playing politics here. I don’t know if a court would grant a TRO or not; she probably waited until the last moment with that in mind.

Just remember this when you hear that elected officials have to follow the law. In practice, they pick and choose.

SO MY AUGUST COLUMN ON the European immigration mess was ahead of the curve. Let me just repeat: “The good news is that immigration concerns aren’t just a problem for the United States. The bad news is that they’re a problem for the entire First World. What to do about it? Nobody seems sure. But although open borders are a nice idea, the fact is that countries differ in economics, in culture and in politics. No country can accept and assimilate an unlimited number of outsiders, and when the number exceeds a threshold, a backlash is certain. Thresholds are being exceeded, and backlashes are building, all over the world.”

UPDATE: Germany Creates A Disaster.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: With Website to Research Colleges, Obama Abandons Ranking System.

President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions.

Under the original idea, announced by Mr. Obama with fanfare in 2013, all of the nation’s 7,000 institutions of higher education would have been assigned a ranking by the government, with the aim of publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.

Instead, the White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation.

On the one hand, this is probably a better approach. On the other, this change is almost certainly because the higher education industry is a key core constituency for the Democrats. And, one suspects, a key source of six-figure speaking fees in Obama’s post-presidency.

I HAVE RAISED A SWEET, THOUGHTFUL, ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS MONSTER—AND SOON I WILL BE FREE: Glenn already linked to the jaw-dropping article titled “Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance,” written by a veteran Bay Area journalist/environmentalist activist last night, but it’s worth another look for a variety of reasons.

First, modern-day radical environmentalism isn’t that modern anymore — RFK ran on doomsday environmental ads in 1968, and the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was chockablock full of nightmare predictions that never came to pass. As Fred Siegel wrote in 2010 at City Journal in “Progressives Against Progress,” as a result of Earth Day and the like:

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim.

And beginning in 1970 with Walter Cronkite and CBS, environmentalist crankery has been very much approved by Big Business for decades. In 2007, GE, which makes a considerable amount of money selling light bulbs, urged its customers for the sake of Gaia to turn off the lights in their homes via the TV network it owned at the time – during halftime of a Sunday night Cowboys-Eagles NFL game whose stadium was bathed in a zillion watts of klieg lights. A couple of years later, American Express was praising would-be California “Dam Busters,” AKA, the people who helped bring you California’s current water crisis. In 2009, James Lileks linked to the following jaw-dropping MasterCard ad:

As Lileks wrote in response:

If they’d intimated that Mastercard can be used to placate your humorless little eco-scold, no one would have minded much. But no: the child is making his father a better man. It’s nice to see that Dad exists in a state of such unearthly perfection that the only means of betterment consist of abjuring incandescent lighting for pig-tailed CFLs, right? Alas: dad is a scoff-law who lets the tap run, uses doubleplus ungood bulbs,  and doesn’t correct the clerk when the food is put in a cornstarch bag, perhaps because he’s thinking about his job, the cutbacks and layoffs, the tiresome daily scrum of adult life. He works hard, but of course he could work harder – he has a part-time job so he can stay at home with his son. Mom’s full-time. He downshifted so someone would always be there when Ethan came home from school. This makes him an okay man, I guess.

But he could be better. He could buy a florescent bulb. On credit.

If I had a Mastercard, I’d print this ad out frame by frame and sent it along with my shredded card.

Afterwards, Lileks embedded a frame from the film version of 1984, in which early on in the movie, a nine-year old uniformed “Youth League” member whose father works alongside Winston in the Ministry of Truth blurts out to Winston, “You’re a thought criminal!” Later in the book, after his sister turns in dad for being a thought criminal, he and Winston sit in the white porcelain abattoir-like Ministry of Love awaiting their fates. As dad ponders how many years in a prison camp he faces, he’s proud that he raised that he raised such a good little citizen of Oceania!

‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’

How many parents allow their kids to hector them over environmentalist minutia without reminding them who is in charge of the family? Even if you do, how do you raise a kid knowing that they’ll be sent off to school where they’ll hear endless variations of Al Gore-style eco-crankery from their teachers? And assuming you don’t personally buy into the corporatist mantra that “we only have [fill in number of years] to save the planet” — or eco-doomsday is sure to follow — how does a parent counteract such programming?