…doesn’t mean that no one is out to get you.
I haven’t heard anything about the actual investigation into the Hastings crash. Are they treating it as an accident, or a potential crime scene? One of the many ways in which the Vince Foster investigation was completely botched (including by Ken Starr) was because the park police initially assumed it was a suicide, which is not how you’re supposed to treat such things, and thus lost the chain of custody on key parts of the evidence.
Fellow Michiganian Michael Barone explains why he went from “liberal” to conservative:
Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.
To get a feel for what this particular hell is like, you should read Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy…
His book opens as he notices in the ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft in one of Detroit’s many, many abandoned buildings the feet of a corpse. We see him having a drink with Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the congressman’s wife who later went to jail for bribery—and stopping off before to see the 13-year-old girl who, while attending a council session, criticized Conyers for calling the council president “Shrek.” He makes the mistake of stopping for gas on the east side (“semi-lawless and crazy”) and escapes being robbed by two goons when he pulls a gun from his glove compartment. He hangs out with honest guys whose job is to cope with the city’s violent murders and arson-set fires—”murder dick” Mike Carlisle; firefighters Mike Nevin, who is unjustly sacked, and Walt Harris, who says grace at firehouse meals and dies in a fire set by an arsonist for $20. Detroit is no longer the nation’s murder capital—though, LeDuff notes, police officials systematically undercount homicides—and Halloween is no longer Devil’s Night (with 810 arsons in 1984). But the good guys are fighting uphill. City and county buildings are dilapidated; firemen have to bring their own toilet paper to work and don’t have water pressure to put out a fire set in their own firehouse; the morgue doesn’t have room for all the bodies.
Dan Austin’s Lost Detroit (2010), a book highlighting a dozen of the city’s abandoned architectural landmarks, shows photos of the old Packard plant, closed since 1956, where young men drive cars to the top and then pitch them to the ground, trees growing inside what were once downtown office buildings, and a grand 1920s downtown theater whose interior is now used as a parking lot (without many cars). LeDuff helps you see the rot. As he goes about his rounds he shows you “neck-high grass that went ignored and the garbage heaps that went uncollected,” “sewers backed up into houses,” and the disgusting disrepair of public buildings.
Socialism never works, really, but the anti-science Left always returns to it, because many see it as a route to power, and there is a flaw in human nature to which it irrationally appeals for the uneducated.
The New York Times finally admits that it’s been feeding its readers BS.
This was never about justice. As Glenn notes, it was just about energizing the base in 2012 with race-baiting politics.
Was he really a walking time bomb?
Maybe. He certainly sounded like a good candidate, given his weight, though we don’t really know what his other stats were, probably for privacy reasons. I think that the doctor quoted is just speculating, and his credibility went down with me when I read this:
A holiday heart attack is a surprisingly common phenomenon, said Dr. Crandall, chief of the cardiac transplant program at the world-renowned Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.
“Heart attacks often manifest on holidays when you’re not eating the normal meals,” he said. “You eat excessively, indulging in high fatty foods, and this causes the blood to thicken. The result is a blood clot, which can rupture, resulting in the blockage of blood flow to the heart, causing heart attack and sudden death.”
Do “high fatty foods” really “cause the blood to thicken”? Is there any actual empirical evidence for this? Or is it just nutritionally ignorant lipophobia?
It’s magic fig leaf day!
Or should I just say, “Er ist kein Berliner”?
An uncomplimentary British review of The One’s latest blather in Germany:
In stark contrast to that of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries, and the championing of more big government solutions.
In other words, business (or lack of business) as usual.
Randall Munroe graphically describes why I worry more about global cooling than global warming.
A screed:
I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.
If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.
Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.
Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.
No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.
…with government regulations:
A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.
In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days.
Think about that for a second. I’ve offered regular parents the same opportunities that eBay gives independent resellers. When I do it in the real world to recycle used clothes, the Department of Labor says no way. That’s bunk. My volunteers are not employees or independent contractors. They’re customers.
By this dreadful logic, Build-a-Bear Workshop employs child labor when it lets its young customers assemble their own teddy bears.
Unfortunately, as my situation shows, too many new ideas are being held back by rules that are stuck in the past. When the Fair Labor Standards Act was written in 1938, nobody was imagining a collaborative, social business like mine. And I’m far from the only entrepreneur stifled by outmoded dictates from a world I never lived in.
You’re not allowed to freely cooperate or exchange without the permission of the State, citizen.
[Update a while later]
Tocqueville would have been saddened, but perhaps not surprised:
Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.
…[He] also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Except the government is not a shepherd — it is becoming the wolf, against which we need sheepdogs.
…with government lies:
Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined, if not in jail.
Almost everything that IRS officials have reported about the agency’s unlawful targeting of conservative groups has proven false. IRS malfeasance was not limited only to the Cincinnati office, as alleged, but followed directives sent from higher-ups in Washington. Lois Lerner confessed to the scandal only through a rigged public query by a planted questioner, designed to preempt an upcoming critical inspector general’s report. There is legitimate dispute over both the number and the purpose of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s visits to the White House and nearby executive office buildings, but he did his credibility no good by snidely remarking to Congress that at least one of those visits was to take his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll.
And that’s just the IRS.
I hope that historians will have the opportunity to point out the irony that, just as Barack Obama was the greatest gun salesman in history, his evil-clown car of an administration finally broke the back of Big Government.
[Update a few minutes later]
More IRS lies seem to come out every day.
[Update a while later]
“We have not yet begun to investigate.”