Tag Archives: culture

A Method of Identifying Acceptable Views

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Notable & Quotable contains an excerpt from a Times Literary Supplement piece in which the piece’s writer recounted a classroom incident in which he had touted a free market society and the instructor had written on his paper, “Are you Margaret Thatcher?” and left the paper ungraded. The classroom boy was mortified.

[T]he comparison shocked me into a more thoughtful politics and provided an early lesson: if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view.

And

That doesn’t mean that every person with [fill in that disagreeable person’s identity] views endorses those links, but some soul-searching is surely called for.

Of course. It isn’t the merits of the message that’s important; rather, it’s the merits of the person carrying that message.

This is what has passed for teaching our children for too many years.

Rent Control Fails Again

Posted on by
Reply

And so does the St Paul, MN, city council, sort of.

Last November, the city’s voters passed a rent control law that caps annual rent increases at 3%. Then reality intruded, and the City Council was forced to attempt corrective actions.

The City Council noted in its reform bill that, “according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there have been only two hundred (200) residential building permits in Saint Paul through April of 2022, compared to 1,391 at the same point in 2021.”

That drop occurred as immediately as any economic reality can—beginning just two months after the cap was passed.

The City Council’s corrective actions are limited to

  • a 20-year rent-control exemption for new residential properties and some apartments that participate in government affordable-housing programs
  • after a tenant leaves or is evicted with just cause, landlords will be able to raise rent by 8% plus inflation
  • property owners can…apply to St Paul for an exemption to the 3% rent cap if their property taxes go up or if there are “unavoidable increases” in maintenance and operating costs, including increases owing to inflation

In truth, this may be all the City Council can do to…modify…the will of the city’s residents. To get serious correction to this rent control fiasco, the question really needs to be resubmitted to those residents.

If those voters reaffirm their position on rent control, we’ll all know what those worthies truly think about housing and access to it by those in the lower economic tiers of the city.

Snowflakes

Posted on by
Reply

A New York University chemistry professor—at NYU after four decades at Princeton—has been fired because his students, many of them doctor wannabes, circulated a petition complaining about how hard his class was. Their petition read in pertinent part,

We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class….

Neither should grades be a reflection of the time and effort; they should be a reflection of actual performance and learning. Imagine a patient whose illness was prolonged, or who was maimed, by a botched treatment being told “So sad, but I tried really hard.” Or the survivors of a patient who died from that botched treatment being told, “Too bad, but I put in a lot of time on your son.”

The seemingly unjustified firing because some precious snowflakes didn’t want to work is not the only problem here, though. The other problem is NYU itself.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who had New York University on his resume. NYU appears unconcerned that its graduates cannot think critically, or that its graduates are afraid of the hard work the real world contains, even as it appears to take student whining seriously. NYU graduates would seem to be a waste of any enterprise’s payroll.

A Simple Enough Solution

Posted on by
Reply

And straightforward, too.

Nike thinks it has supply chain and marketing problems with its shoe manufacturing.

Nike Inc’s quarterly results highlight how some US brands have too much inventory at home and in markets like China, where the companies have placed big financial bets.
The sneaker giant on Thursday said revenue from China in the August quarter fell 16% to $1.65 billion, citing Covid-19 lockdowns in different cities hurting store traffic.

The People’s Republic of China represented some 13% of sales and 29% of earnings for Nike in its quarter ending last August.

Nike offered a number of excuses for its problems, including the PRC’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns, a heat wave in the PRC that the PRC claimed affected energy production, and inflation.

These are, though, just excuses. Nike’s problem—and it’s a political and a moral one, also—is that it does business inside the PRC.

These problems wouldn’t exist if the company moved is manufacturing facilities out of the PRC. Neither Vietnam nor Japan nor Australia have lockdown or heat wave/energy problems affecting manufactury (Australia has made significant progress since its wind storm shut down its wind-power energy production in a western state a couple years ago).

Neither would Nike have a PRC-related inflation related problem with its PRC inventory or sales if it didn’t do business in the PRC.

Nike wouldn’t have any sort of supply chain problem, or delivery problem, were it to make its products in the US.

Nike would solve its political and moral problems (did company managers have the grace to recognize that these problems are real) if it had no business dealings of any sort with the PRC so long as that nation continues its genocidal behavior vis-à-vis the Uighurs.

Based on What Evidence?

Posted on by
Reply

Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall claims the National Archives hasn’t received all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration. She wrote this to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) in all seriousness:

While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should[.]

And

Specifically, Mr. Ferriero informed you in his February 18, 2022, letter that NARA [National Archives & Records Administration] has identified that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.

Since Wall has succeeded in tracking down “missing” records of messaging accounts by tracking down the messages’ recipients, on what basis does she claim there are further such accounts—or is she simply…assuming?

In the end, if she doesn’t know, by her own statement, how does she know? Or is Wall just another Party acolyte making politically convenient allegations without any substantiation at all?

Wall’s letter can be read here.