Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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.

According to Yahoo! news:

He is one of Hollywood’s best-compensated actors, but matinee idol Ben Affleck (news) came to the US Congress Thursday to lobby for higher pay for some of America’s lowest-paid workers.

Affleck, who earns millions per screen appearance, appeared alongside Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to urge lawmakers to increase the federal minimum wage from its current five dollars and 15 cents per hour to seven dollars per hour.

Apparently, the pressure was getting to be too much, and Affleck had to open his mouth to let a little pressure out.

Instead of just talking the talk, Affleck could choose to spend his own damn money, of which there is no shortage from my vantage point but about which his fleet of accountants are undoubtedly concerned, to open a series of fast food restaurants and discount groceries wherein he could somehow pay workers $7.00 an hour and still keep in business. That would probably put some of his accountants in the morgue with heart failure, because they know (even if they don’t communicate this with their client) that higher labor costs and higher employment tend to work against each other, much like higher labor costs and affordable prices.

Instead of risking his own “earned” capital, Affleck wants to sacrifice that of real entrepreneurs. He chooses to “give at the office” by making other people and corporations pick up the tab for his community ideals, much like people who want to take care of the poor but don’t volunteer or donate because they already paid taxes but think the government could do more.

If the country were filled with people like you, Mr. Affleck and like-minded, we’d have a world….. well, much like the screwed-up one we have now.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows the voters the error of our ways:

Looking to go swimming at a St. Louis County park pool on Memorial Day or Labor Day?

Forget about it.

After voters this month narrowly turned down a sales tax increase to support county parks, the parks department is trimming five weeks off the swimming season.

Obviously, not forking over an extra sixteen and a half million dollars of our money every year has forced the county to prioritize its budget and trim some non-essential services. Unfortunately, this will infringe upon the pencilled-in right to swim found in the elaborately customized constitutions owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Undoubtedly, this will impact the children, the seniors, and the poor disproportionately, as they don’t have swimming pools in their backyards. I guess we’ll read that in tomorrow’s Post-Dispatch.

Friends, were I in college today, odds are that I would not graduate.

Instead, I’d probably be in jail for assaulting one or more dishonorable cretins, or be killed by a rabid mob of the same.

As a columnist in the paper in my college days, I mocked many ideals, but never a death.