Category: News

On the front page of its NewsWatch section, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offers pro and con, emphasis on the con, of whether another casino would be good for the St. Louis area:

• (No) Opponents of new casino tell tales of addiction’s toll
  

  Looking back, Connie realizes she should have seen the problem. Her family members always wanted her to take a separate car to the casinos – they knew she would want to leave long before they did.

  She should have known the $50 here, $100 there that they borrowed was not a coincidence. She had lost a few bucks playing bingo before, she knew grocery bills were hard to cover sometimes. No big deal. They always paid her back.

  Had she been asked three years ago to vote on a new casino in Lemay, where she lives, “heck, yes, I was all for it,” said Connie.

  The loan requests grew larger and more frequent.

  “They ran themselves low on one person, and they couldn’t go to them anymore, so they would start on other people, and pretty soon, I realized they were all hitting on me,” Connie said of her family members.

  None of these relatives had gambling problems before casinos came to the St. Louis area. They had never visited Las Vegas. There was a history of alcoholism in the family, and Connie smoked through three pregnancies before she finally quit.

  “I know about addiction,” she says.

  So we start with an anecdotal lead that, I guess, will support the argument that government should pad the harsh walls of reality to make it safe for the least responsible or intelligent members of society, because if they can, stupid people will do stupid things.

• (Yes) Supporters for new casino see cash for education
  

  Last week, Hancock High School Principal Jason Naucke bluntly told his students that if they even considering drinking, don’t bother showing up for the prom. Fifth graders got a one-hour lesson from a police officer about the consequences of joining a gang, the 15th week of a 17-week course urging them to reject drugs and violence.

  Just another week in the “values” curriculum at Hancock Place School District, while the district’s superintendent was pushing for a casino to come to the neighborhood.

  A casino means money, and Superintendent Ed Stewart hasn’t seen enough of that.

  A new “casino” would mean “tax revenue” that “scare-quoted” “educators” could [Please punch up with use of term so-called. –Ed.] use in promoting “values” in their so-called curricula, and the unintelligent educators “educators” don’t capture the “irony” of raising money from gambling while promoting other “values” (which are obviously “scare-quoted” because anything valued by someone other than the journalist is “suspect”). Thus begins the story favoring the casino.

Criminey, I pay money to have this delivered. At least I am getting some use out of it now that hockey season’s over.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiles the president of the St. Louis Zoo. The lead: How he fired up his wife to think about conservation:

Perhaps the only wild creatures Melody Noel studied in law school were F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz. But today, Noel is an expert on penguins, cheetahs and addaxes.

“Farmers in Botswana are shooting cheetahs because they eat their livestock,” Noel said. “It’s going to take some creative solutions and some time to work through the problem.”

Noel has no background in biology, but she is married to St. Louis Zoo president Jeffrey Bonner. And anyone who lives in Bonner’s world – whether for two decades, like Noel, or two years, like the Zoo’s 1,000 employees – invariably adopts his passions.

“I am a perfect example of a convert,” said Noel, who practices domestic law. “These are not things I thought about before, but he knows how to get people fired up.”

You mean, farmers shoot wild cats that attack their domesticated animals? The horror! As mountain lions return to scourge the mountainous country of our own United States, I only hope the farmers in Botswana only use one bullet per cheetah and have a nice, fashionable pelt to wear afterwards.

But what’s the point of the anecdote? The great Mesmero can convince people who would marry him to join him in an inchoate collection of beliefs about the circle of life as it exists outside of Disney cartoons. So what makes him different from any other professor?

Now Bonner wants to convert St. Louisans and one of the city’s most beloved institutions. Soon, he promises, visitors will see a new sort of St. Louis Zoo, one that confronts the destruction of the wild, the slaughter of endangered species and the hard choices the public must face if it wants to change the world. This new Zoo that Bonner envisions looks a lot like the old one: The train still runs, sea lions still flip for fish and Raja still roams the sprawling River’s Edge. But with the fun comes a sober message of conservation and responsibility.

“What we have failed to do is really show people the world around us. In Africa, the loggers are putting in the roads, and the hunters go in with their AK-47s and slaughter every animal they see.

I guess he’s saying that he would prefer Africa to continue with substinence farming, famines, and starvation, since that lack of development didn’t threaten nature.

How daft is he?

To Bonner, who studied anthropology, the human element matters most.

“The environment is never the problem. It’s the people that are the problem – always the people,” he said.

Pretty damn daft, if you ask me. People are always the problem. Except people like him.

“Conservation ultimately requires compromise,” Bonner said. “I think people struggle with that all of the time, but if you look at the big picture, there are ways of balancing your lifestyle with the good you do.”

In Bonner’s case, he drives a sport utility vehicle, eats meat and wears leather shoes.

So he proffers this compromise: cattle farmers, African loggers, everyone outside of a pampered urban setting, you’ve got to do what he and his type dictate, based on theories and “hard emotions.” He, on the other hand, will continue to make six figures, eat meat, drive a sport utility vehicle, wear leather shoes, and promises never to get attacked by a big cat while jogging or allowing his pets or livestock to tempt carnivores. Also, he’s willing to suffer through puff pieces in the newspaper and colleagues who gush:

Jerry Borin, director of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, calls Bonner “a big-picture person.”

“He is always two or three steps ahead but he brings people along,” Borin said. “That’s important in the zoo community. We are not that large of an industry, and by nature we have to cooperate.”

That big picture? It’s a large, flattering self-portrait depicting Bonner as nobility, willing to do what’s best for his serfs, whether it’s popular or not.

Update:
What does a mountain lion or cheetah think of a zookeeper who’s not afraid to admit he wears leather?
Atkins-friendly.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I am also toying with a global outreach program called “Bullets for Botswana,” but that takes more effort than making jokes.

At the risk of imperiling my marriage, I shall link to this piece, entitled Second Hand Joke, wherein Dr. Sydney Smith recognizes that smoking’s bad, but also that trampling individual rights for abstractions such as “public health” or “the good of the individual” are worse. Read:

Smoking is a filthy habit. It causes bad breath. It stains the fingers and the teeth. It rots the lungs and it takes the breath away. Spend a day in any doctor’s office and you can quickly spot the long time smokers, such is its impact on the body. And death by tobacco is a truly horrible death, with the final days spent gasping for breath and drowning in ones own secretions while the doctors look on helplessly.

And yet, as loathsome as smoking is, it’s hard not to feel sorry for smokers. Every morning I pass small clusters of them in front of the hospital, just around the corner from the “No Smoking” sign, like high school hoodlums who smoke just a step away from school property. Some of them are hospital employees, puffing off job stress during their breaks. Others are patients, with nothing but flimsy hospital gowns and robes to protect them against the elements while they seek solace in tobacco. It seems cruel to make them smoke outside. The hospital has a special room for prayer. Couldn’t they have a special room for smoking?

But then, the world has become a cruel place for smokers. Not only must they huddle outside at work to indulge, they increasingly must also huddle outside when they’re enjoying a night on the town. Over a hundred cities in the U.S. have banned smoking in public places such as bars and nightclubs. Last month, Ireland banned smoking in pubs. Now Scotland is under pressure to do the same, and the EU is flirting with its own ban.

The rationale for these bans is that smoking in public is not only a nuisance for non-smokers, but a health threat. While it’s true that an asthmatic non-smoker may have problems working or relaxing in a smokey bar, anti-smoking advocates have lately drastically stepped up their claims regarding the dangers of second hand smoke. A CDC official, writing in the British Medical Journal warned people with heart disease to avoid all buildings that allowed any smoking, claiming that just thirty minutes of inhaling second hand smoke could cause heart attacks. Apparently, even miniscule amounts of tobacco smoke can turn your coronary arteries from this into this.

Slate published a couple good articles on Friday dealing with prosecutors and their new cudgels with which to beat the citizenry into proper obsequiousness. Read:

• Everyday Obstruction: The government finds a new way to nail old tax evaders
  How prosecutors nail people, like Martha Stewart, Frank Quattrone, and Jayson Williams with obstruction when they cannot make a case for an actual, you know, crime.
• Zero to Life: The injustice of white-collar sentencing rules
  How a “fraud” that causes Microsoft stock price to fall less than a nickel could cost the perpetrator life in prison.

Read them, and weep that your legislators will forever more empower prosecutors until such time as we’re all in prison, and they have to go after each other for wrongful prosecution and corruption.

Eugene Kane writes another of his screeds in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, this one entitled “Abuse of detainees nothing new in U.S.“:

The president of the United States of America assured the rest of the world Wednesday that images of prisoners in Iraq being mistreated by their American captors were just an aberration.

“People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent,” Bush said on Arab television, referring to alleged abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

“They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know.”

Maybe he ought to tell it to Curtis Harris, a Milwaukee man in danger of never walking again after an encounter with Milwaukee police officers last December.

Kane chronicles an aberration, an abhorrent treatment of a detainee by police in Milwaukee. I guess he equates it with the Iraq story because he’s trying to indicate that it’s standard operation of The Man whether He’s a cop on the beat or a soldier on patrol. Typical Kane.

Blech. I am sorry I bothered you with it, gentle reader.

Unlike this story, at least the media –the Cincinatti Enquirer anyway–caught a story of Bush’s common empathy:

Lynn Faulkner, his daughter, Ashley, and their neighbor, Linda Prince, eagerly waited to shake the president’s hand Tuesday at the Golden Lamb Inn. He worked the line at a steady campaign pace, smiling, nodding and signing autographs until Prince spoke:

“This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11.”

Bush stopped and turned back.

“He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man,” Faulkner said. “He looked right at her and said, ‘How are you doing?’ He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest.”

Faulkner snapped one frame with his camera.

“I could hear her say, ‘I’m OK,’ ” he said. “That’s more emotion than she has shown in 21/2 years. Then he said, ‘I can see you have a father who loves you very much.’ “

“And I said, ‘I do, Mr. President, but I miss her mother every day.’ It was a special moment.”

Do you think John Kerry would have given her an awkward pat on the stomach?

(Link seen originally on Wizbang!, but it’s everywhere by now.)

In his current column in the Chicago Sun Times, stings Bob Greene in a simile:

My room at the David Intercontinental looked down on the beach. The first night I couldn’t sleep, so went downstairs to slog through the Mediterranean and join what looked like about 10,000 people partying on the sand. I expected young adults dancing the hora. What I found were high school students, some falling-down drunk, clutching tequila bottles. I tried assessing the mood of Israeli youth, which seems to have absorbed our core American values. “I want to be a star!” exuded Tal Zolti, 16. Their English was good, but I started feeling like Bob Greene crashing the junior prom, and after one kid called me “Grandpa” I decided it was time to head back upstairs.

Remember, Bob Greene resigned his position at the Chicago Tribune after having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl (legal in Illinois, fellows!) whom he met on the job.

Me, I am disappointed. Not because I am a fan of Greene’s, which I am, but because I’ve been polishing my own Greene zingers since I’m reading Bob Greene’s America and will undoubtedly deploy those zingers in the online review.

Unfortunately, now they’ll seem derivative of a real writer. Thanks a lot, Mr. Steinberg.

Although this story from yesterday has been retracted, I stand upon my inferences thereupon.

Viva la economie!

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Good news: The Missouri Legislature has begun the process of eliminating emissions tests required for automobile licensing in the St. Louis area. As cars become cleaner, these tests’ burden, in terms of resident money and time spent, have not yielded that many results. The sponsor says:

Bill sponsor Rep. Jim Lembke, R-south St. Louis County, said the testing is unnecessary, unpopular and a burden to the elderly and poor. He said the program should be eliminated because 92 percent of all vehicles pass the test and the biggest polluters – motorcycles and many trucks – are exempt from the law.

Good work. Hey, I once met Lembke, back when he was running unsuccessfully for the position he now holds. He was canvassing door-to-door, and I had to hammer him a bit on conservative consistency–particularly his love of “incentives” to draw industry to Lemay, but his opposition to welfare and government handouts to individuals. But enough about me.

The bad news: opposition invokes a scattering of silly reasons to keep the program running:

Rep. Barbara Fraser, D-University City, said ending the clean-air testing could exacerbate the symptoms of allergy sufferers and would mean the loss of 250 jobs.

Got that? A slightly runnier nose and throwing 250 hard-working bureaucrats into the private workforce. Oh, the horror, the horror!

Politicians like this think you can legislate full employment by creating enough government regulations and divisions and offices. It got us out of the Greast Depression, didn’t it?

Hmm, no, I think that was the techno-military-industrial complex gearing up for WWII, not the CCC. But hey, I was less alive than the Baby Boomers were to experience it first hand. What would I know?

Command Post reports:

The LA Times is reporting that presidential campaign spending in this cycle may exceed $1 billllllion dollars. (Thank God we have campaign finance reform.)

Hot digduggity! So that’s a billion dollars of excess wealth drained from willing participants in the political process to be spent and redistributed to print and broadcast media, creative agencies, and in bars and restaurants where sales are struck. God bless America, and it’s not compulsory. Unlike tax money for social programs, which are too often spent the same way.

Via Snopes.com, a story about President Bush jogging with an injured serviceman:

Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton. He stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, 1 mile with the president. Not something you’ll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.

You think John Kerry would trip over him and call him a son-of-a-bitch?

It’s hard to tell if the author and the sources for this piece in Time are helping Kerry, or damning him. Explaining why John Kerry sounds like an unprincipled opportunist when he’s just the opposite:

Kerry’s verbal meanderings are partly a reflection of a mind that sees complexity in almost every issue. The son of a diplomat, educated partly in boarding schools in Europe, Kerry learned to look at current affairs from multiple perspectives. Says an adviser: “It’s not like he’s trying to shade the truth. He overintellectualizes his explanations.” Asked by TIME in a March interview whether the Iraq war would be worth the costs if no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, Kerry replied, “No, I think you can still — wait, no. You can’t — that’s not a fair question. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn’t mean [transforming Iraq] was the cause [that provided the] legitimacy to go.” Kerry may in fact be right when he argues that a successful outcome does not justify an illegitimate war, but a listener has to work hard to understand his point.

You got that? No? Put a little effort into understanding it, and you’ll come away with the message that John Kerry is too smart for you to understand.

Perhaps the Kerry campaign should not deploy senators whose understanding of nuance match Kerry’s own:

“If you look at his public career, it’s been just the opposite. He’s not been unclear on the environment, on labor and education issues,” says former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. “His reputation in the Senate is that you can trust his word. If he believes in something, he’ll fight for it.”

Got it?

• Kerry’s not been unclear.
  This does not say that he has been clear. Just that he is not unclear.
• His reputation … is that you can trust his word.
  This does not say that you can trust John Kerry’s word. This says his reputation is that you can trust his word. He’s got Senate cred, werd.
• If he believes in something, he’ll fight for it.
  This does not address whether Kerry says what he believes, nor whether he will fight for what he says he’ll fight for, or anything, really.

Thanks for not being a cartoonish or obfuscating character, little Kerrey. No, that sort of babble conveys precisely the slippery meaning the speaker intends, and both Kerry and Kerrey know it. They just have to tell the American people that they don’t, sort of, know it or mean it except when they don’t not.

More from the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics. Take this story, which says:

High gas prices are forcing families to shop in cut-rate grocery stores, a food industry analysis finds.

“High oil prices, both at the pump and for home heating, depress consumers’ ability to spend more,” said a report by the Food Marketing Institute released at its annual trade show in Chicago yesterday.

“It is not surprising that more shoppers are buying food today in discount stores and other low-price venues than ever before,” the study said.

It’s all good. As rational consumers, those who allocate their resources to fuel and to food discount stores are acting in their own best interests. The free market at work.

What about the grocers out there? Well, people are choosing low price over….what is it again a full grocery offers?

You see, the Brian J. Noggle “Capitalism: It’s All Good” School of Economics sees through every little ping of “bad” news as a net positive. When the man on the radio says copper prices are going up, that’s good for the miners and it’s good for the people who make alternatives to copper. Copper prices going down? Good for people who want to buy or make things with copper. Gas prices going up? Good for refineries and Big Oil, as well as for people who make hybrid automobiles, mass transit, and pastimes close to home. Gas prices coming down? Good for transportation companies, consumers, and tourist destinations.

Keep that in mind when these reports come out. The news is typically bad for whomever is releasing the report (well, probably good fro whomever got paid to prepare the doomsday scenario), but it’s good news for someone else, and it’s probably not zero sum. It’s better news for everyone when capitalism is unfettered.

Once again, highly paid academic consultants decide what’s good for cities: the creative class.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 29:

Yet another theory is dumping on St. Louis’ ability to create jobs, bashing the region and others like it on the most unlikely of economic measures: its lack of gays and bohemians.

It’s an argument waged by author Richard Florida, and it has set off a firestorm of debate about what makes up a vibrant economy.

Easy for someone to say, but what really makes a city? Hmm, why do people come together from their scattered hovels on the steppes? It’s because the city offers:

• Protection from nature and enemies. Better police coverage, fire protection, and better medical care than the small towns or rural areas.
• Jobs. A livelihood that does not involve slaughtering your own pigs or scratching dirt.
• Infrastructure. Since one’s not slaughtering one’s one pigs, one would prefer to not have to drive into the next town to visit the bazaar. One would also like roads, commerce, schools for the children, and other amenities that one cannot find in the wilderness.

Cities do not arise, or afall, because of gays and bohemians. The “artistic” class arises from a vibrant city.

Stupid schnucking city planners and elected officials keep shoveling money to consultants who want to elevate their cool, unemployed academic bohemian friends, all the while anticipating the day when they’re highly-paid consultants with with cool artistic friends.

From a story on Yahoo! news:

A judge gave a Tennessee zoo six months to convince him that an African elephant named Ruby is adapting well to her new home after being separated from a pachyderm friend in Los Angeles last year.

Judge George Wu ordered the report from the Knoxville Zoo on Thursday during a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to return Ruby to the Los Angeles Zoo.

I think the judicial system’s rapidly becoming a joke, and this story is but one punchline among many.