September 29, 2003

Mike Adams' immodest proposal

Posted by Jon Sanders at 12:27 AM

UNCW professor Mike Adams has an open letter to UNCW's director of diversity published in Town Hall today, in which he spoofs the campus diversity obsession with its absurd extents. In this case, it would be showering NAMBLA with diversity accolades.

I can think of two problems with Adams' piece:

(1) There are some people who are tone-deaf regarding satire. They mistake reductio ad absurdum argument for serious proposals (serious as opposed to one used to illustrate a policy's slippery slope). These are the kinds of people who must have peppered Swift with requests for his recipes for kids.

(2) Worse, there are also some in academe who are already seriously making proposals akin to Adams' (i.e., they're at home at the bottom of the slope).

By the way, Adams has a book due out next spring. I believe the title will be Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel.

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Whoops! Oh, It's Only $60 Million

Posted by John Hood at 10:10 AM

Thanks to long-ago CJ-er Jeff Taylor, here's an unintentionally hilarious editorial out of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the latest economic-incentive miscue. It seems that the State of Georgia spent $60 million purchasing and finishing an industrial site to house a new DaimlerChrysler plant that was going to build vans. Now the company has pulled out, leaving taxpayers with an "investment" in an open field that politicians hope will pan out, sometime. But the Atlanta newspaper says that the expenditure "appeared reasonable" at the time and "may still prove a good investment."

Yes, particularly if the rumors are true: that North Carolina and Georgia will soon announce daily nonstop flights from the Global TransPark to the new Georgia industrial site. It'll be billed as "heritage tourism" — introducing flyers to the heritage of industrial policy gone wrong.

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