In the abstract I agree with the point that Paul Krugman makes in his most recent New York Times column:

I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to miners and industrial workers. Yes, their jobs matter. But all jobs matter.

Yes, all jobs matter. Yes, we should be concerned about retail clerks as well as miners and assembly line workers.

On the other hand it seems to me that there are some important distinctions to be made. For example, here are some average wages:

If we lose 1,000 coal miner jobs and they’re replaced by 1,000 jobs in retail sales, that’s not an even swap. It’s $34 million in earnings less to middle income workers.

Additionally, when the loss of jobs is a consequence of policy as is the case with many dirty or dangerous jobs that have departed our shores in all likelihood never to return it’s different from retail which we’ve done everything we could to prop up for the last couple of decades.

I really need to dig through some old comments threads here. I can recall pointing out that both political parties had plenty of nutjobs and citing Maxine Waters as an example. I was taken to task on the grounds that Maxine Waters was an unimportant nobody.

Now she’s being held out as a paradigm. She’s still crazy. As Megan McArdle pointed out years ago, the party in power is always smug and arrogant and the party out of power is always crazy.

They’re both smug, arrogant, and crazy and strict adherence to the party line means you’re crazy, too. Be loyal to a political party if you must. Always keep in mind just how crazy they are.

At the New York Times academics Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci do their level best to determine and quantify just how objectionable the talk Charles Murray attempted to give at Middlebury College that provoked a violent protest was. What did they find? It was pretty darned mild:

Our data-gathering exercise suggests that Mr. Murray’s speech was neither offensive nor even particularly conservative. It is not obvious, to put it mildly, that Middlebury students and faculty had a moral obligation to prevent Mr. Murray from airing these views in public.

What then should we conclude about the protests and the protesters? It’s possible that the protesters are just brownshirts. They’ve been told that Chareles Murray is doubleplusungood and must be opposed by every means at hand.

It may be that the protesters were simply demonstrating their power—showing who’s boss. They’ve shown it. The inmates are running the asylum now.

It may be that the protesters were far outside the mainstream, not just of American thought but outside the mainstream of notoriously left-leaning academic thought.

Don’t confuse vehemence with rectitude. These protests are just more evidence that we’re entering a post-literate world which will be one that is much more agonistic and untethered to evidence or critical thought.

Here’s my menu for our dinner this evening: roast chicken, sweet corn spoonbread, sweet potatoes braised in maple syrup, peas with mushrooms and ham, and for dessert chocolate haupia pie. That’s a Hawaiian thing. Basically, chocolate-cocoanut pudding topped with cocoanut pudding topped with whipped cream and served in a pie crust.

I could probably feed 10 people with what I’m making although it’s just the two of us. Y’all are welcome.

The news of the day here in the States might have been North Korean missiles but in France, Germany, and Russia it was the referendum held in Turkey. CNN reports that the people of Turkey have voted to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan what amount to dictatorial powers:

Voters were asked to endorse an 18-article reform package put forward by the ruling Justice and Development Party that would replace the current system of parliamentary democracy with a powerful executive presidency.
“God willing, these results will be the beginning of a new era in our country,” Erdogan said at a news conference Sunday night, explaining that unofficial totals indicated the “yes” votes had prevailed in the referendum by about 1.3 million ballots, while Anadolu pegged it at closer to 1.14 million.

Turkey and Greece were both admitted to NATO in its first expansion in 1952. At the time both countries were ruled by anti-Communist military dictatorships and the rationale behind admitting them was rooted in Cold War politics.

Things are very, very different now. Rather than being a secular Kemalist state or a secular democratic one Turkey is increasingly an Islamist dictatorship and decreasingly compatible with either NATO or the European Union.

The United States and our European allies have some hard thinking to do. In my opinion Turkey has passed its sell-by date.

From Goethe’s Faust:

Released from ice are brook and river
By the quickening glance of the gracious Spring;
The colors of hope to the valley cling,
And weak old Winter himself must shiver,
Withdrawn to the mountains, a crownless king:
Whence, ever retreating, he sends again
Impotent showers of sleet that darkle
In belts across the green o’ the plain.
But the sun will permit no white to sparkle;
Everywhere form in development moveth;
He will brighten the world with the tints he loveth,
And, lacking blossoms, blue, yellow, and red,
He takes these gaudy people instead.
Turn thee about, and from this height
Back on the town direct thy sight.
Out of the hollow, gloomy gate,
The motley throngs come forth elate:
Each will the joy of the sunshine hoard,
To honor the Day of the Risen Lord!
They feel, themselves, their resurrection:
From the low, dark rooms, scarce habitable;
From the bonds of Work, from Trade’s restriction;
From the pressing weight of roof and gable;
From the narrow, crushing streets and alleys;
From the churches’ solemn and reverend night,
All come forth to the cheerful light.
How lively, see! the multitude sallies,
Scattering through gardens and fields remote,
While over the river, that broadly dallies,
Dances so many a festive boat;
And overladen, nigh to sinking,
The last full wherry takes the stream.
Yonder afar, from the hill-paths blinking,
Their clothes are colors that softly gleam.
I hear the noise of the village, even;
Here is the People’s proper Heaven;
Here high and low contented see!
Here I am Man,—dare man to be!

At the Chicage Tribune Rick Kogan pays tribute to the life and work of newspaper columnist Mike Royko, who died twenty years ago this month:

Royko, a vital part of people’s daily lives, was the best newspaper columnist this city had ever known. He started writing a column at the Daily News in 1964, and when that paper folded in 1978, he moved to the Sun-Times and then to the Tribune in 1984 until his death.

“He wrote with a piercing wit and rugged honesty that reflected Chicago in all its two-fisted charm,” I noted with my then-colleague Jerry Crimmins in Royko’s obituary.

“His daily column was a fixture in the city’s storied journalistic history, and his blunt observations about crooked politicians, mobsters, exasperating bureaucracy and the odd twists of contemporary life reverberated across the nation.

“It was Royko’s inimitable combination of street-smart reporting, punchy phrasing and audacious humor that set his column apart, along with his remarkable durability in facing daily deadlines for more than three decades.” (You can read the obituary here: chicagotribune.com/roykoobit).

It has been 20 years since his death, and there are thousands of young people to whom the Mike Royko name means very little or nothing at all.

For others, old enough to remember turning to the Royko newspaper column first thing, memories may have gotten dusty. He wrote close to 8,000 columns in his life — most of those banged out at a five-day-a-week clip — and though many of them are collected in books and two biographies have been written about him (Richard Ciccone’s “Royko: A Life in Print” and Doug Moe’s “The World of Mike Royko”), there is no immortality for newspaper writers. We forget.

Royko was New York columnist Jimmy Breslin’s contemporary. Breslin died this year at the age of 88. In other words Royko’s death in his 60s deprived us of years more of his brilliant column, barbs and brickbats hurled at local pols, and Slats Grobnik.

Mike Royko lived just nine doors south of me. When he left Chicago for the suburbs he moved next door to two of our dearest friends. We will not see his like again.

Although I largely agree with his point I think that this post by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, an indictment of “cultural appropriation” as applied to the practice of yoga, is giving me whiplash. I think that the very idea of “cultural appropriation” is on shaky historical grounds and is largely romanticism. There are very, very few cultures that derive nothing from other cultures.

African cultures from Somalia to Ivory Coast are heavily influenced by Arab culture. Arab culture is heavily influenced by Greek and Roman culture not to mention the cultures of their more immediate neighbors. And so on. Even China which prides itself on having pulled itself up by its own bootstraps probably owes a lot more to foreigners than they’d like to admit. There’s a book on my shelf from a very famous linguist and scholar of Chinese that suggests that China’s traditional writing system was derived from an earlier non-Chinese source.

It takes real chutzpah to claim proprietary ownership of something you didn’t develop.

But attacking those crying “cultural appropriation” about yoga classes in defense of Western values is a mite much for me.

I have grave reservations about George Will’s prescription, expressed in his latest Washington Post column, about using state money to support religious institutions. He’s writing about “Blaine amendments”, constitutional proscriptions in some state constitutions, against disbursing state funds to religious institutions. Here’s the wording of the Missouri version:

No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.

Here’s Mr. Will’s retort, describing a grant for installing a rubber protective surface in the playground of a Lutheran church’s preschool:

Practices during the Founders’ era demonstrate, McConnell argues, that “including religious groups in neutral public benefit programs was not viewed as an establishment.” And: “Shredded tires have no religious, ideological, or even instructional content . . . a rubberized playground is existentially incapable of advancing religion.”

Missouri cites, in defense of its practice, an utterly inapposite case in which the Supreme Court upheld a state’s refusal to fund students seeking degrees in devotional theology, even though it funded degrees in secular subjects. This involved entirely different issues than Missouri denying an organization access to a public safety benefit simply because the organization is religious. Spreading shredded tires beneath a jungle gym hardly (in the Supreme Court’s language) “intentionally or inadvertently inculcates particular religious tenets.” And Missouri’s denial of this benefit is, McConnell writes, “the clearest possible example of an unconstitutional penalty on the exercise of a constitutional right,” the free exercise of religion.

“The religious status of the Trinity Lutheran day care bears not the slightest relevance to the purpose of the state’s program.” Which pertains to knees.

Here’s my reservation: money is fungible. The money that Trinity Lutheran does not spend from its own pocket repaving the playground can be used for other, more explicitly religious purposes, and you have the State of Missouri supporting a religious institution and, presumably, determining which institutions it will support and which it won’t.

My reaction is a distinctly American one. In the United Kingdom religion classes remain mandatory in its state schools and in Germany 8% of the income tax goes to support the state churches. As in so much else we’re an outlier.