I’m Not a Lawyer, and I Don’t Play One on TV

Washington, D.C.

However, I do have the ability to read fine print.  And when it comes to this story, some lawyers, (cough cough, Glenn Reynolds, cough cough), don’t seem to be able to do that.

Politico:

Obama takes on zoning laws in bid to build more housing, spur growth

The Obama administration Monday is calling on cities and counties to rethink their zoning laws, saying that antiquated rules on construction, housing and land use are contributing to high rents and income inequality, and dragging down the U.S. economy as a whole.

Glenn Reynolds’s reaction?

White House Bucks Gentry Liberals On Zoning.

Not so fast.

The devil is in the fine print and the weasel words.  I have already quoted one of them, that is “calling.”  The rest of the article is the same way — All Obama did was issue a bunch of suggestions.  He’s suggesting that core cities do these things.  Meanwhile, he is wielding the power of the Federal government to force suburbs to build apartments, accept Section 8, and on the sly recruit single black women with children in urban areas.  And we all know what that is and what that means.

When there is a disparity between rhetoric and action, I go with the action.

 

Do Massa Gotz Gibs Fo’ Me?

New Haven, Connecticut

Even when they’re Yale faculty, they can’t lose the slave mentality.

Life Is Its Own Punchline

Los Angeles

Read carefully.

We find out that the prosperous tech and banking sectors in San Francisco are displacing artistic-oriented Bohemians to L.A.  However, once they get there, they’re displacing low-income Hispanics.

I guess this means that the Hispanics will go somewhere else, and in doing so, they will displace blacks.  Then the blacks will be moved, usually involuntarily, someplace, to where they will drive out the white bread white middle class.

Personally I take this as evidence that Nick Bostrom et al. are right and all this is just some big damned computer simulation.  In which case, someone is just fucking with us just to be trolling us.  Quasi-deity be like:  Drop some newfound prosperity in that place, wind everyone up, and watch ’em knock each other down like a line of dominoes, lulz.

I’m a Skeptical Customer

Downtown

A clickbait rankings on a clickbait website, and we’re supposed to believe that St. Louis is more leftist that Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, Calif., Boulder, Colo., and Evanston, Ill.

Come on now.

But this leaves us a few clues to how they came to this conclusion:

Along with election data and political activity, several touchstones of popular/consumer culture were used as factors, such as a person’s favorite television network, automobile brand, restaurant and magazine.

(For the record: St. Louis residents are most likely to watch HBO, drive a Subaru, read Maxim, shop at Victoria’s Secret and eat at California Pizza Kitchen.)

(snip)

Mayor Francis G. Slay, gets prominent kudos in the study, which notes that Slay, a Democrat, has been elected to four consecutive terms and also helped the city become one of just 25 (out of 291) cities to get a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s “municipal equality index.”

Human Rights Campaign is all about the gay, all about the LGBTQetc.  And if that’s all they’re basing it on, then the case is plausible.  A few years ago, a famous gay mag rated St. Louis as gayer and more gay-friendly than San Francisco, and I can believe that.

The ironies in citing Slay in this are:  (1) Democrats win everything in St. Louis City, so it’s not special that one particular individual Democrat has won four consecutive terms as mayor, when Democrats are on their 17th consecutive term in that office; the last Republican to win that office off an election was about a month before V-E Day, and (2) By St. Louis City’s standards of its political homeostatic equilibrium, Slay is on the right.  Yeah, he’d be a solid liberal Democrat in state or Federal politics, but St. Louis City treats him as something of a conservative.  See also:  Emanuel, R. and Chicago.

I also don’t think it’s fair to compare known core cities to incorporated suburban or exurban college towns.

Shorter Ben

Oakton, Virginia

Someone named Ben Cohen writing in AT makes the case against Jared Taylor thusly:

Interestingly, Taylor’s hypothesis has already been tested. In 1959, Congress admitted to the union a state that was overwhelmingly non-white. Has that state transformed into a third-world hell hole? A dictatorship? No.

By all measures Hawaii is doing pretty well. Hawaii’s residents enjoy the eighth-highest median income of any state in the Union, according to 2014 figures.

Good.  All we have to do now is admit every Pacific Ocean archipelago as a state and turn them into military and soft power Federal dependencies, and that will prove that diversity works!  Take that, alt-right bigots!

On second thought, I better shut my trap, before I give them any ideas.

Sounds Like a Personal Problem to Me

Clemson, South Carolina

Harambe memes = a form of racism?

I say “gorilla.”  You say “you’re insulting black people!” I say “I didn’t say anything about black people.”

What it all means is that they’re the ones thinking that black people are gorillas, and then, projection.

And, from the way I’ve read, seen and heard black people call each other gorillas, apes and monkeys, they’re definitely thinking it about themselves.

Also, I don’t get the through line between Harambe and “rape culture.”  Unless someone has it in the back of their mind that black men have a tendency to rape, why anyone would think that, I don’t know.

First Debate Open Thread

Hempstead, New York

Any suggestions on a drinking game?

I’ll be semi-crashing someone’s viewing party, so if I have any live commentary, it will be on the Tweeter.