PJ Media

Just Saying

Maybe they talk differently in Chicago. Pack more meaning than most between the lines. “Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale gave new meaning to constituent advocacy yesterday when he told Metra’s executive director ‘people are going to get hurt’ in the dispute over how many minorities they decide to hire for a railroad bridge project, the ‘Englewood Flyer.’”

The Sun-Times also states Beale is not the only elected official weighing in on the project. Earlier this year, Congressman and former Black Panther Bobby Rush also threatened Metra over African Americans not getting their fair share of the first $86 million being spent on the project.

So the question is:  who doublecrossed whom? Why think so low? After all, the ground that was broken in October, 2011, for this $133 million rail project was funded by the President’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. By the messiah himself. It was slated to employ 1,500 workers. “Governor Quinn says the majority of those 1500 jobs … will be filled locally, as in by South Side Chicagoans.” What could go wrong?

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Whistle Me Up a Memory

Disaster strikes in Tombstone. A town’s water supply is cut off. The town fathers rush out to fix it, but the Federal government says no can do. No repairs unless they are effected using only 19th century tools. “There’s a popular saying in the American West: Whiskey’s for drinking, but water’s for fighting over. This dusty little city, made famous by the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, has a dilly of a water fight on its hands.”

Tombstone’s water line was damaged in last year’s massive Monument fire. The city says the feds are blocking emergency repairs that are critical to its survival.

In court papers, lawyers for the federal government say there’s no emergency. Instead, they contend, Tombstone is using the fire’s aftermath as an excuse to “upgrade and improve” its water system.

Kathleen Nelson, the acting ranger in charge of the Coronado National Forest, says the Forest Service has been letting Tombstone do some work, as long as it complies with the 1964 Wilderness Act.

In the wilderness, Tombstone can dig with shovels, not bulldozers. The new pipe can come up the mountain on horses, not in trucks.

Maybe the town should communicate with the Forest Service using the telegraph and the pony express as well. But that is hardly like to amuse the Federal bureaucracy, which prefers the high-tech. Recently lawmakers asked EPA Director Lisa Jackson why drones were flying surveillance over livestock operations in Nebraska.

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Hanging Together

Some headlines just grab you.

US student ‘ate roommate’s brain and heart’ — Telegraph.

Canada cannibal says he believed victim was an alien — Telegraph. “A Chinese immigrant who beheaded and cannibalised a Canadian bus passenger in front of horrified travelers four years ago spoke out for the first time Tuesday, saying he believed his victim was an alien.”

Cannibal on run after warning The Sun: I can’t stop killing — The UK Sun. “We showed cops sick film of a live KITTEN fed to a snake and an email warning: “Once you kill and taste blood it’s impossible to stop.” Luka Magnotta, 29, fled after his male partner – a missing Chinese student – was chopped up and eaten in Canada.

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All In a Day’s Work

What is the shape of the unemployment curve? Glenn Reynolds regularly features this graph showing the Administration’s predicted unemployment numbers versus the reported.   It is in one sense a graph that the administration would be happy to see vindicated. Even if the magnitudes are off, if the shape of the actual curve tracked predictions then policies are working — just not as quickly as anticipated.  Both curves peak when at the same point and decline at roughly the same slope.

But suppose that this is a picture of the wrong curve?  CNN’s Nin Tsai Tseng gives the reasons to doubt.  “Federal Reserve officials have suggested that earlier declines in joblessness may have less to do with an improving economy than the fall in the labor force participation rate (the number of working-age Americans who are either holding a job or looking for one).”

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Caging the Gyro

One of the central questions in the novel, The Great Gatsby is whether it is ever possible to fix the past. To make it all come out the way it should have. Nick and Gatsby were having a conversation about whether Daisy liked the party he threw. Gatsby wanted to start over again.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house — just as if it were five years ago.

“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours ——”

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

Nations sometimes want the same thing as Gatsby. To make the iniquities of history go away; to make up for slavery or dropping the Atomic Bomb on far away peoples a long time ago. And in so doing they unconsciously perpetrate new ones. Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy examines an interesting brief brought by Asian-Americans in Fisher vs Texas involving the University of Texas. “In the brief, four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions, arguing that race-neutral policies are the only way for Asian-American applicants to get a fair shake.”

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Smersh and Memory

One reason for Poland’s sensitivity to President Obama’s mistaken identification of Nazi extermination facilities as being “Polish death camps” lies in the historical fact that the phrase has been used so often. Wikiquote has more than a dozen examples of the use of the phrase by various individuals going back to the 1980s.

The users don’t actually mean that the death camps were operated by Poland. They just make it sound that way. For some reason, perhaps for reasons of cacaphonia more than anything else, no other country except Germany has had the “death camp” phrase affixed so readily affixed to its national name as Poland. Nobody knows why. Despite the popular belief that many of the Nazi extermination facilities were built in Poland, there were in fact comparatively few.

Most German Nazi concentration camps were located in the territory of Nazi Germany. A complete list, drawn up in 1967 by the German Ministry of Justice, names about 1,200 camps and subcamps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. During WWII, Nazi concentration camps were also located in many European countries such Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Belarus, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Italia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Unlike with “Polish death camps”, the media did not attach geographical context in reference to camps located in other countries (for example “French concentration camps” or “Norwegian concentration camps”).

Still the phrase seemed to roll off the tongue. The Economist points out that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland.”
[It has been pointed out privately and in comments below that most special purpose death camps, as opposed to other types of concentration camps, were in Poland. I regret the error.]

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What Trumps Clinton and Obama?

“It appears that El Paso voters have tossed out Rep. Silvestre Reyes, ignoring the advice and endorsements of two presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton,” according to the Dallas News.  Maybe the voters are listening to other voices which are working to oppose incumbents who are entrenched in office.  The Washington Post reports: “President Obama endorsed Reyes, and former president Bill Clinton campaigned for him. But the eight-term congressman was targeted by an anti-incumbent super PAC, the Campaign for Primary Accountability, which spent $240,000 on the race. ”

Not long ago, Reyes, a Democrat, laughed off efforts by the Campaign for Primary Responsibility to work against his candidacy in a CBS video.

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The War of the Words

At least it’s been words so far. Those who have been following the exploits of left wing activist Brett Kimberlin should read Robert Stacy McCain’s account of the in-court arrest of his victim — yes his victim — at a Maryland court.

Aaron Walker, whose complaint against convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin became a conservative cause célèbre this past week, was reportedly taken into custody today after a court hearing in Rockville, Maryland.

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None This Tide

The New York Times has a Memorial Day article whose centerpiece is the photograph of a woman who asked that she be allowed to sleep on the floor beside the coffin of her husband, a Marine who had been killed in Iraq. The author, Lily Burana, writes,

But in this photo — the one that lives on and on online — he merely stands next to the coffin, watching over her. It is impossible to be unmoved by the juxtaposition of the eternal stone-faced warrior and the disheveled modern military wife-turned-widow, him rigid in his dress uniform, her on the floor in her blanket nest, wearing glasses and a baggy T-shirt, him nearly concealed by shadow while the pale blue light from the computer screen illuminates her like God’s own grace.

I believe this photo has had such a long viral life not just because it is so honest but also because it is so modern.

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Croatoan

“Sooner or later,” my wife said, “people will have to face up to the fact that the Internet will allow perversions and twisted ideas which are statistically rare to find each other and gather force. It will become a public safety issue in our lifetimes. Count on it.”

I thought a second before answering, “Well it is a matter of degree is it not? It began with the rise of the cities. Evil which could find no kindred spirit in homesteads found them at last in cities. Alone a perversion might find no resonance and die out. But in the cities the individual sparks could merge into a blaze:  the bigger was the city, the bigger the blaze.”

That conversation came to mind when the Miami Herald reported a naked man had been found atop another naked man eating his face on the MacArthur causeway in Florida. A motorcyclist pulled up and yelled at the man to stop. He simply raised his head to display a grisly mouthful. The motorcyclist called the police. A responding officer fired a warning shot which had no deterrent effect on the man feasting on the victims face. Finally the policeman shot the assailant multiple times.

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