I Love This Quote

"Only weak thinkers fear strong images."

Jack Shafer, Slate.com

The Lost Boy

Semaj Booker is at it again. Having seemingly given up on attempting to rejoin his grandfather in Texas, he’s turned to burglary.

One wonders what can be done to turn this kid's life around. On the one hand, the fact that Booker has developed a minor level of local infamy makes it somewhat more likely that an effort will be made to do something other than give him enough rope to hang himself. On the other hand, it shouldn't take a repeated media spotlight to spark some intervention.

More Important Things

William Saletan and Emily Yoffe have double-teamed Leona Helmsley for devoting her estate, valued somewhere between 5 and 8 billion dollars, to the care and welfare of dogs. For Saletan, the issue is that Helmsley deleted an earlier goal to help indigent people, and decided to focus entirely on dogs. He finds it bothersome, because to him, it shows that while Helmsley may have loved animals, she didn't "recognize or love the animals who matter most." Yoffe's point seems to be that since Helmsley was a bitter witch, the trustees of her estate should stick it to her by giving the money to the Gates Foundation, instead.

People who harp about what other people do with their own money give me a pain. We can complain about Leona Helmsley's priorities all we want, but who died, and willed that opinion commentators should be the final arbiters of who deserves the largess of rich people? My local PBS station runs spots asking people to leave money to the station in their estates. What great social ill does the existence of public television address? Wouldn't that money be "better spent" on poverty reduction? Or food security? Or public education? Or ending homelessness?

One we start deciding that we have the final say of the priorities of people leaving assets to others in their wills, you have to start asking yourself why the estate tax shouldn't be 100%. Why shouldn't we simply take the money of dead people (who won't miss it) and make ourselves feel better by letting them pay for our "generosity?" Why should we respect a "right" to let people choose who they are going to make financially better off, when there are other, needier, and by Yoffe's logic, more deserving people who would really benefit from even a small windfall? Hell, for that matter, why don't we just take "excess" money from rich people while they're still alive? When "Julie" had her housecat, Little Nicky, cloned, David Magnus of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University complained that for what she paid, "[S]he could have provided homes for a lot of strays." So why not just take the money from her, and do it? For that matter, Gates wouldn't miss a billion or five - you could chalk it up to a rounding error. Yoffe treads this path when she admits to "faint longings for the return of Marxism." She seems to have forgotten that while "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" looked good on paper, it was really hard to implement in the real world.

There are always "better things" that people could be doing with their money. I spent a couple hundred dollars buying miniatures (along with rulebooks, dice, paints, et cetera) to learn to play a wargame that I decided that I didn't care for. I'm sure that SOMEONE out there could give me a lecture on some noble cause that the money would have been better spent to support. Or that the hours I spent painting toy soldiers and leaning over a table with a tape measure could have been more productively used to help someone improve their lot in life. But you could say the same about the money I spent on my car, or the time that I'm using to write this weblog posting. When does it end? And who gets to judge?

Ultimate NIMBY

The Mayor of Juarez, Mexico, has given up on thinking that there is a solution to the problem of violent drug cartels shooting up his town. His goal is now to simply get the fighting to move elsewhere. While on the one hand, this is classic NIMBY, the Mayor's attitude seems to be more one of resigned desperation than the self-serving obstructionism that American NIMBYs are often accused of.

What Do You Know?

There are things that people don't know, that you'd think they would know.

Dino Rossi, who wants to be the next (Republican) governor of Washington state has registered his partisan affiliation as the "GOP Party." It's been conjectured that this is because he's hoping that there are a certain number of voters who, not realizing that the "Grand Old Party" and the Republicans are one in the same, won't link him to the party (and presumably, policies) of the Bush administration. What seems like a dumb idea at first glance may actually have some merit - it seems that as many as 25% of the populace doesn't know what GOP means.

Then there are things that people do "know," and you wonder how.

According to this piece in Slate, a poll revealed that about 10% of registered voters think that Senator Barack Obama is a Moslem. I'm amazed that there are still people out there who cling to that notion. Although even more amazing is the idea that this somehow would disqualify him from being President, which speaks to the absolute terror with which a segment of the American population regards non-Christians.