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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

THE SUBURBS HAVE WON…...DOWNTOWN HAS LOST.

We can learn to somehow live with this fact, or we can “rage against the machine” and try to hold back the ocean with laws that violate the rights of individual citizens in order to satisfy the aesthetic vision of the planners. Despite the often fevered rhetoric, THE BIGGEST REASON

for this triumph is not the “conspiracy” of big oil and freeway builders oft-cited by enviro-activists, but the simple desires of ordinary people—not only in America but in most rich countries—to own a piece of land, however humble, where they may live in relative comfort and peace. It reflects what the 1960s Los Angeles urbanist and Italian immigrant Edgardo Contini labeled “the universal aspiration.”

The triumph of the common man over his “betters” has finally reached Oregon, the center of the “smart-growth” world. Here, where folks with wisdom to know what’s good for the rest of us, had managed to hold back the tide, and show the world how wonderful a planned society could be…..at least if you were among the elite. But, THE WORM HAS TURNED as

The nation’s strongest laws against sprawl are beginning to buckle here in Oregon under pressure from an even stronger, voter-approved law that trumps growth restrictions with property rights.

Property rights?! What kind of retrograde thinking is THAT? Well, 61% of Oregonians decided , and voted, that it’s good when

The law compels the government to pay cash to longtime property owners when land-use restrictions reduce the value of their property—or, if the government can’t pay, to allow owners to develop their land as they see fit.

Naturally, those who wish to control the use of the land while someone else pays the taxes (and all other costs, as well) are outraged. And, to be honest, I’m likely to be upset when my favorite view of open fields with orchards and the river in the background gives way to someone’s dream home. But, isn’t that one of the costs of liberty…...? That we don’t always get what we want if we can’t afford it? WHAT a concept!

Posted by Earl on 03/08 at 02:25 PM
Politics • Comments •

Monday, March 07, 2005

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION SHOWS HARVARD THE WAY…......

Remember that LAWRENCE SUMMERS, the President of Harvard University, got into trouble for suggesting, in some INFORMAL REMARKS at an academic conference, that there might be factors other than discrimination that explained why there are so many more men than women in Math and Engineering professorships. SOME FOLKS thought that this kind of “stirring the pot” was healthy at an academic institution…..that vigorous debate on the subject might bring us all a little closer to the truth about the situation.

OTHERS, of course, just wanted him to shut up, so they wouldn’t have to deal with ideas so uncongenial to their current opinions…...

Now, the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION has stepped up to demonstrate to the academics in Boston how scientific questions can be debated, and perhaps even solved, by a free exchange of views among secure individuals who seek out the data and actually incorporate it into their arguments.

The article resists “sound-biting”, so you’re going to have to read it yourself if you are interested. But, it’s not overly long, and VERY interesting—I recognized a number of things from my own childhood, and from watching my kids…...

The long and the short of it is that we don’t know the answer to the questions addressed by Lawrence Summers—what we DO know is that he’s correct that there is something more going on than simple discrimination against girls. In today’s world, that dog won’t hunt!

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 01:06 PM
Miscellany • Education • Politics • Comments •

WHY IS IT OK TO HATE THE FRENCH (GOVERNMENT)? LET’S START WITH THIS…....

Most people around the world believe that Israeli soldiers killed Mohammed al-Durra. And why not? TIME MAGAZINE and every other news source tells us the story in exactly that way.

But the government of France knows the truth, and the REAL STORY isn’t new, either.

Back in 2002, a documentary made by the German State Television station, ARD, concluded that Palestinian rather than Israeli gunfire must have killed the child. In June 2003, the veteran journalist James Fallows wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly presenting “persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from Israeli soldiers.”

More recently, Denis Jeambar, editor-in-chief of the French newsweekly, L’Express, and documentary filmmaker Daniel Leconte, were permitted to review the raw, unedited video of the shooting. They reached the same conclusion. “The only ones who could hit the child were the Palestinians from their position,” Leconte told the Cybercast News Service (CBN). “If they had been Israeli bullets, they would be very strange bullets because they would have needed to go around the corner.”

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Mohammed al-Durra isn’t dead at all:

Juffa (a journalist) obtained testimony from “Dr. Joumaa Saka and Dr. Muhamad El-Tawil, two Palestinian doctors of the Gaza Shifa hospital, who said that al-Durra’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1 P.M.” But France 2 reported that the shooting did not begin until 3 P.M. “How can someone be killed by bullets that were fired hours after he was already dead?” Juffa asks. He believes the answer is simple: The child in the morgue and the child in the France 2 report were different children.

Why does this matter? Hundreds of deaths have been specifically attributed to Muslim terrorism in the name of Mohammed al-Durra…...would it not make a difference if uninvolved parties, and even supporters of the Palestinian cause (such as French Government-owned TV stateion, France 2) were to make it plain that the story we’ve all come to believe is simply not true? READ THE WHOLE THING….. (thanks to NRO, The Corner)

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 11:43 AM
Comments •

EVEN SUNNI ARABS AREN’T REALLY “OTHER”......

Meaning, that when they find out how far the “insurgents” are willing to go, humanity trumps ideology, standards emerge, and they object to “total war”.

“The real resistance should only target the occupiers, and no normal person should consider dozens of dead people to be some kind of collateral damage while you are trying to kill somebody else,” cleric Ahmed Abdul-Ghafur told worshippers yesterday at the main Sunni mosque in Baghdad. “Everybody should speak out against such inhumane acts.”

Note that this mullah thinks that bombing the Americans should continue, but with more care not to murder nearby innocents. Well…...it’s a start.

READ THE WHOLE THING

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 11:37 AM
Politics • Iraq • Comments •

REVIEW OF CHRISTO’S “GATES”......

Many have heard about the “installation” in NYC’s Central Park, even if only through INTERNET PARODIES.

There are at least 64,000 GOOGLE ENTRIES that come up on a search, but WHAT to think about them…....?

No taxpayer money was spent, which is a big plus right from the beginning. And they’ve been
wildly popular, if attendance is the measure—with eight hundred thousand folk turning up just on the first weekend!! And many people are flying into New York from all over the world to “groove on the experience”. Of course, besides “art”, they’ve been called “totalitarianism” and “defacement”, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority opinion.

I didn’t get up there to see them—Running Fence was MY personal experience of a Christo installation—but THIS STORY gave me a great feeling about them. See if you agree:

As happens in February, the Park was bare, cold and gray. There was some snow, the trees and pieces of green. The apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue stood as they always do in winter—immutably concrete, like the grand, drab facings of inactive hydroelectric dams. The Park was quiet and almost deserted—except for The Gates.

If one opened one’s mind just a crack, it was hard not to be touched by them, and lifted.

The Gates had dignity. They stood still, moving just a little, like the leafless trees. The trees didn’t seem to mind their brief companions. Indeed, they tamed The Gates. Like this: Across a glade, rising to the clock tower by the Metropolitan Museum, the branches of the trees broke down The Gates’ stolid rectangles into glimpsed, cracked shapes of the branches’ choosing. Many people thought The Gates were made for walking through. I thought they were made for standing and staring, turning, and staring again. Amid bleak February it was hard there in the orange-tinged Park not to feel, well, happy.

Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art. I do understand that Olmsted’s Park is self-sufficient solace. But by my definition, Christo’s Gates qualified.

Smithsonian magazine HAD AN ARTICLE about Christo and his partner, Jeanne-Claude not long ago. It it began the process of “opening my mind a crack” about these fascinating people and
their art…...I still laugh at the parodies, but I have a growing respect and admiration for the remarkable artists whose imaginations have conceived, and whose incredible work ethic and refusal to give up have created, such extraordinary and fascinating art.

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 11:12 AM
Miscellany • Comments •

FORMER COMMUNIST NATIONS LEAD THE WAY…....THEY KNOW THE TRUTH FROM EXPERIENCE!

There’s a growing number of countries around the world abandoning the progressive income tax - the great monument to class envy that substitutes appearances for reality. The major “gift” of high marginal tax rates is slower economic growth, and lower living standards for average citizens. BUT, we all get to “stick it to the rich”, right? Well, NO, actually:

...as former California governor Jerry Brown pointed out during his 1992 presidential campaign, the rich will always be able to hire experts to lobby for tax loopholes and avoid the higher rate traps set for them.

Indeed, under existing flat-tax systems the wealthy end up paying a larger share of total tax revenues. In flat-tax countries, taxpayers in the highest brackets move from consumption or tax-sheltered investments to more productive, taxable investments. Many higher earners work harder or take additional risks, rewarded by higher after-tax returns.

So, if rich people pay more of the costs of government under a flat tax, WHY do we keep the complicated, expensive, and frustrating system we’ve got now?

Envy and the lust for the political control that complicated tax regimes can provide are powerful motivations to keep progressive tax systems in place.

What’s REALLY fascinating is that, despite the fact that the graduated income tax was #2 on Marx’s list of things a society based on class struggle simply must have,

every country that has adopted the flat tax is a former communist nation—except Hong Kong, the modern originator of the concept, which has seen its new communist rulers retain the flat tax as a centerpiece of its economic policies.

Perhaps we shouldn’t say “Despite the fact…”, but should substitute “Because of…..”! Maybe the formerly Communist nations know something that our political class is ignoring, and trying to hide from the rest of us…......READ the whole thing…..

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 10:46 AM
Politics • Economics • Comments •

LARRY SUMMERS GETS SOME SUPPORT…....

The President of Harvard has been hearing members of his faculty call for his resignation or firing after he suggested that the male/female imbalance in top-flight mathematics and engineering professors might be due to something other than discriminatory practices of the “old boys”. I don’t think that Susan Polgar had him in mind when she did this interview, but her perspective is a lot more sensible than what we’re hearing from the feminists on Harvard’s faculty, as well as others in the “movement”. From an OPINION JOURNAL.COM article:

Ms. Polgar is not someone who sees the two sexes as the same. “I think women are built differently and approach life very differently,” she told me. And in a 2002 column for ChessCafe.com, she took on what might now be called the Lawrence Summers question. “If we talk about pure abilities and skills, I believe there should be no reason why women cannot play as well as men,” Ms. Polgar wrote, but she went on to list various reasons that more female players have not reached chess’s highest ranks—among them their biological clocks, narrower opportunities to compete, cultural and gender bias, and the fact that “for years, women have set much lower standards” for themselves in chess than men. “If you do not put in the same work, you can’t compete at the same level,” she said then.

Read the whole article—she has a clear-eyed understanding of the bias that she has been subjected to, along with a recognition that this doesn’t explain everything about who’s a grandmaster and who’s not. And she’s DOING something about the problem, as well:

Two years ago, she founded her nonprofit Susan Polgar Foundation to promote chess to young people nationwide, with a special focus on girls. This year, more than 3,000 of them will participate in regional qualifying events for the second Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls. The University of Texas at Dallas will award a full four-year scholarship to the highest finishing player who has not yet graduated from high school when the tournament is held in Phoenix this August. She also is looking for support, both from donations and from politicians, for her foundation’s Excel Through Chess program, which aims to introduce chess to every child in every school to help them do better in their studies and in life.

Ms. Polgar is only one of three sisters playin chess at a very high level. What a
GREAT STORY

Posted by Earl on 03/07 at 10:30 AM
Politics • Comments •

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