JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS

Thoughts, comments, musings on life, politics, current events and the media.



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Saturday, December 28, 2002
 
I only missed by six numbers
I usually agree with James Taranto, but he had a ridiculous overreaction to this week's lottery hype in Friday's OpinionJournal. With regard to the news coverage of the man whose tickets I wish I had, he writes:
All this media attention to lottery winners serves only to glorify gambling. And the lottery is a bigger rip-off than any other form of legalized gambling. Innumeracy.com ran an experiment to see what would happened if it made 10,000 random selections and entered them in each of 479 drawings in the British lottery. Result: An "investment" of £4,790,000 returned just £1,375,082, which means that each £10,000 "invested" would have cost the player £7,129.

A lottery, Innumeracy.com notes, is "a tax on the poor and the stupid." The next time some liberal journalist complains about "tax cuts for the rich," consider how his colleagues in the media help enable the government to soak the poor.
To be fair to Taranto, this isn't an uncommon sentiment, though it usually comes from those on the left side of the political spectrum. As if. Do these commentators really believe that most people who gamble think they're going to get rich by doing it? Saying that the lottery is a "tax on the stupid" because it provides a negative return on investment -- I think it awfully strange that Taranto felt the need to provide a link to an "experiment" which proved this, as if basic probability isn't sufficient -- simply demonstrates that Taranto doesn't understand the appeal of the lottery. People don't argue that a movie ticket is a "tax on the stupid" simply because the purchaser ends up with $8.50 less than he started with, do they? Of course not. He's purchasing a couple of hours of entertainment, not an investment vehicle. And, despite what Taranto thinks, that's what lottery players are purchasing. They're purchasing the excitement of anticipating a possible win, of figuring out what they'd do with the money if they won, of mutually commiserating their friends and coworkers the next day when none of them win. And there's nothing wrong with that.

 
And make sure you wash behind your ears, also
I've blogged on this topic before, but it came up again in the New York Times the other day: activists who are ungrateful spoiled brats. New York City, of course, is one of the most generous welfare jurisdictions around, but some groups aren't satisfied. It's not enough to offer extensive benefits; the city must force them down the throats of residents:
The November numbers come as hunger-relief advocates have intensely criticized the city for mishandling the program. They have complained that with unemployment rates at 8 percent, the highest in four years, the number of those receiving food stamps has risen by less than 5 percent over the course of the year. Currently, 800,000 New Yorkers with incomes low enough to qualify for food stamps do not receive them, according to a report released last week by the Community Food Resources Center.

Hunger-relief advocates and their allies argue that lack of outreach by the city is behind the shortfall. In New York State, only 50 percent of those eligible for the program receive food stamps, according to the most recent reports by the United States Department of Agriculture, which administers the program on a national level. Nationally, the level of participation is 59 percent.
See? The problem is "outreach." Not only are the poor not responsible for feeding themselves, but they're not even responsible for putting out the minimal effort needed to take money from taxpayers to feed themselves. The ultimate nanny state: the government is responsible even for making sure people take advantage of the help offered to them.

Wednesday, December 25, 2002
 
Merry Christmas
Or Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever the heck it is you celebrate. On second thought, none of you got me anything for Chanukah. (Well, almost none of you.) So I don't really care what kind of holiday you have. Just don't expect a card from me.

 
Will wonders never cease?
I've criticized the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff before, but such a sensible article appeared under his byline yesterday that you have to wonder if he has an identical twin. He praises the Bush administration on an environmental matter, namely the use of snowmobiles in national parks:
So President Bush's compromise very sensibly will ban two-stroke machines in Yellowstone but will permit four-stroke snowmobiles, confined to the same roads that cars use in the summer. In the meantime, environmental groups are still trying to evict snowmobiles from Yellowstone by going to the courts.
Not only does he question the fundamental truth of the New York Times -- that George Bush can do no right -- but he also contradicts a fundamental truth of the environmental movement: that humanity is evil.
Some environmentalists have forgotten, I think, that our aim should be not just to preserve nature for its own sake but to give Americans a chance to enjoy the outdoors. It's fine to emphasize preserving roadless areas and fighting development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, both of which are good causes, but 99 percent of Americans will never benefit from those fights except in a psychic way.

And as for Yellowstone, the moose and bison should share it each winter with humans — even humans on snowmobiles.
I don't agree with Kristoff on the ANWR -- indeed, it's hard to square that portion of his column with the rest -- but his philosophical observation is dead on. The original idea behind conservation was to preserve wilderness so that people could enjoy it; it was only later that environmental fundamentalists decided that wilderness was good only if people didn't enjoy it. Areas of undeveloped land are desirable because they make the lives of people more pleasant; they're not good merely because people aren't there.

 
Know thine enemy
The New York Times carried a story today of an Al Qaeda suspect who managed to slip through the collective fingers of German law enforcement. A Polish immigrant to Germany who had converted to Islam, he was potentially involved with the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia earlier this year:
Prosecutors overseeing the investigation say that under German law, the evidence tying Mr. Ganczarski to the bombing and his own confession of recent contact with Qaeda leaders were insufficient to keep him under constant surveillance or to prevent him from traveling. They say those limitations are the consequence of a Constitution devised to prevent the reoccurrence of the country's totalitarian past.

The case has caused concern among officials in France and Tunisia involved in an investigation into the Djerba bombing and illustrates the complexities of fighting a global network like Al Qaeda.

Last week, the Tunisian justice minister complained openly about Mr. Ganczarski's departure. "Investigations into the attack on Djerba have moved forward very well, and I hope that the flight from Germany of an accomplice of the suspected perpetrator of the attack will not hamper inquiries," the minister, Bechir Tekkari, told Agence France-Presse.

In a recent interview a high-ranking French official, who insisted on anonymity, expressed frustration that Mr. Ganczarski had not been detained. Under French law, the official said, "he would have been."
Well, everyone seems to be upset at the Germans for letting the (alleged) terrorist get away, and perhaps they're right to be. But perhaps there's another place to which the anger should be directed. After all, it's not as if he stowed away on a freighter bound for South America.
A German man under investigation for links to top figures of Al Qaeda slipped out of the country last month, withdrawing his four children from school, terminating his lease and obtaining visas for Saudi Arabia without attracting any attention from the police, according to German officials.
How long are we going to keep up the pretense that the Saudis are our allies?

Tuesday, December 24, 2002
 
Four out of five dentists surveyed...
I've criticized the New York Times before, many times, for their use of the "news analysis" label to editorialize in the news section. But they have one standard tactic which may be even worse: their "We won't do any polling because it might get in the way of the story we want to write" polling story. If you wanted to know what black Americans felt about L'Affaire Lott, wouldn't you commission a survey to find out? Well, certainly that's one theory. Or, you could ask nine black people what they thought. And then conclude, from this perfectly representative sample, that a group of people have "mixed feelings" about a subject.
In interviews in a dozen cities and towns across the country this last-minute-shopping weekend, black Americans eagerly welcomed the chance to talk about the furor surrounding Mr. Lott's comment on Dec. 5 that the nation would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 when Mr. Thurmond was an adamant segregationist. But their responses to Mr. Lott's removal ranged widely, from a newfound approval of President Bush to a renewed hostility toward him and all Republicans.
Which is news to whom, exactly? Is anybody other than Howell Raines surprised to find out that even people of the same skin color can have more than one opinion about something? Isn't this sort of story more worthy of USA Today than the New York Times?