Quotulatiousness

May 17, 2011

Matt Welch: BHL is a “national embarrassment to France”

Filed under: France, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Actually, I understate in the headline what Matt actually wrote:

And since we don’t want to reprint the whole quavering bag of apologia (“Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally,” etc.), let’s close with perhaps my favorite line:

     What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.

I’m guessing what BHL really means here is that no worldly rape can justify Strauss-Kahn’s treatment. Since if the accusations are true, a 62-year-old man known by every French person I’ve asked to have the sexual manners of a primate lunged nakedly at hired help half his age, grabbed her breast, knocked her to the floor, and chased her around his expensive hotel suite attempting with some success to thrust his penis into her body and discharge DNA evidence.

I don’t know if he’s guilty, and it would be imprudent not to consider the conspiracy theories in a case involving someone who until this week was the single biggest political threat to the sitting president of France, but the only decent way you can arrive at “nothing in the world can justify” Strauss-Kahn’s treatment is if you oppose all perp walks equally. Short of that, it’s just special pleading for a powerful dick. And another reminder that BHL is 10 times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday ever was.

April 10, 2011

NYC’s backlash against the bicycle

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Stephen Smith does a quick analysis of the reaction to P.J. O’Rourke’s anti-bike article in the Wall Street Journal last weekend:

Could it be that the bike lobby actually has alienated the rest of America (and even New York), playing into stereotypes (Stuff White People Like #61) of spandex-wearing, pasty-legged effete liberals who think that the bicycle is a reasonable tool for, say, intra-Brooklyn house moves? No, says Streetsblog — it must be some sort of advertiser-driven conspiracy. (Does The New Yorker even have an auto section? How many car ads are there in the latest issue?) This article is of course absurd, but I think it’s a symptom of the way that many bike advocates lionize their preferred mode of transit, perhaps unknowingly prioritizing it above even other non-automobile modes.

Don’t get me wrong — I have no problem with bikes, and even bike lanes. I’ve seen the stats on the Prospect Park West lane, about how it’s improved safety without slowing down auto commutes, and I don’t doubt it for a second. But as much as we wish it weren’t so, political capital is an exhaustible resource, and only so many reforms can be made before voters and citizens start to punish the politicians making them. Janette Sadik-Khan is, realistically, only allowed to anger so many people by changes to the status quo — every bike lane she stripes is a Select Bus Service route that won’t be implemented, a Haitian dollar van driver who will be fined and imprisoned, an outer-borough resident who won’t be able to catch a cab because of the medallion system. The fundamental problem, in my opinion, is that bike lanes are very culturally-loaded, and the anger they produce — which translates directly into other projects being shot down — is out of proportion with their benefits.

December 29, 2010

Recycling: it’s not economics, it’s control

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Gregg Easterbrook points out the stupidities of many municipal recycling programs:

Freeze! Drop That Discarded Dishwasher or I’ll Shoot! The New York Times recently reported that unwanted appliances — old washing machines and so on — placed on the curb for disposal in New York City have been “disappearing.” With scrap metal prices strong, what the article calls “thieves” have been driving along streets scheduled for used-appliance pickups — in New York City, this happens by published schedule — and taking away the unwanted junk before the city’s officially approved recycler arrives. The “thieves” then sell the unwanted junk as scrap metal.

Set aside whether it’s theft to take an unwanted item that has been discarded in a public place. New York City bureaucrats think so; they’ve instructed police to ticket anyone engaged in recycling without government sanction. Twenty years ago, New York City bureaucrats were demanding that citizens recycle whether they wished to or not, and imposing fines for failure to comply. Now if the average person is caught recycling, it’s a police matter.

This issue is not the cleanliness of streets or the environmental benefits of recycling — it’s control of money. The New York City Sanitation Department pays a company called Sims Municipal Recycling about $65 million annually to pick up and recycle metal, glass and aluminum. Notice what’s happening here? Recycling is supposed to make economic sense. If it did, then the recycling company would be paying the city. Instead the city is paying the company. Montgomery County, Maryland, my home county, imposed recycling rules saying they made economic sense. Now the county charges homeowners $210 annually as a recycling tax. If recycling made economic sense, government would pay homeowners for the privilege of picking up their valuable materials. Instead New York City, Montgomery County and many other government bodies charge citizens for something they claim makes economic sense.

Recycling of aluminum makes good economic sense, given the energy cost of aluminum and the high quality of recycled aluminum. Depending on where you are in the country, recycling of newspapers may make sense. Recycling of steel and copper usually makes sense. But recycling of glass, most plastics and coated paper is a net waste of energy. Often the goal of government-imposed recycling program is to use lack of understanding of economics to reach into citizens’ pockets and forcibly extract money that bureaucrats can control.

Notice what else is happening here — New York City pays a company millions of dollars to do something “thieves” will do for free. The “thieves” harm no one, and could save New York City taxpayers considerable money. But then bureaucrats wouldn’t be in control. And surely no-show jobs and kickbacks have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with New York City sanitation contracts.

December 8, 2010

Repost: “What was I doing when I heard . . .”

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Another year, another opportunity for some people to indulge in over-the-top, mawkish, ostentatious grief for someone the vast majority never actually met:

A post up at American Digest recounts what Gerard was doing when he heard that John Lennon had been shot. It’s a good posting: go read it.

What I was doing was a lot less interesting and profound: I was driving from Mississauga to Montreal that morning, and all I could get on the AM radio in the truck was endless playings of “Imagine” and other Lennon tunes I didn’t like to start with. To make it worse, I was going to be spending two weeks in Montreal (I don’t speak French), hanging off the side of an apartment building (I’m really not good with heights), learning how to install a master-antenna TV system. I certainly had enough worries of my own to occupy my thoughts.

I was born in 1960. By the time I started paying attention to popular music, the Beatles were about as current to me as the Monkees (and, truth to tell, I kinda preferred the latter, if only for the TV show reruns). John Lennon was some bearded weirdo with a whacky wife and they both spouted the sort of rhetoric that left me feeling that they really didn’t like the west at all. I was sorry that he was dead, but the wholesale public mourning struck me as being just plain over-the-top.

In retrospect, it was rather like the outpouring of public grief when Princess Diana got herself killed: unseemly, inappropriate, lavishly exhibitionistic displays of emotion. Perhaps I’m just not very sympathetic, at heart, but all it seemed to lack was ululations and slashing of cheeks to be a true primitive, tribal ceremony. I didn’t have the stones to say “Grow up” out loud, but that was what I thought then.

Originally posted on 8 December, 2004.

October 6, 2009

Another bulletin from the “Institute of Obvious Findings”

Filed under: Food, Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:02

New York City has the most “progressive” laws on the books for labelling fast food menu items. The intent was to ensure that customers would be aware of the calorie and nutrition values of food before ordering, with the hope being that people would deny their tastebuds and order less fattening foods. A recent study found — to nobody’s surprise — that this hasn’t been working:

A study of New York City’s pioneering law on posting calories in restaurant chains suggests that when it comes to deciding what to order, people’s stomachs are more powerful than their brains.

The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.

It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

The laws were changed because paternalists in power thought that consumers were being gulled against their better instincts, and that merely pointing out the information in a hard-to-miss fashion would assist these poor, weak-willed eaters to trim back on calories and fat. It doesn’t work because people like eating food that’s calorie-rich and fattening. You’re not going to change that without instituting literal rationing: and don’t think they haven’t considered it.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress