As IF Times

link Long Island Middle School Bans Footballs, Other Recreational Items « CBS New York.

The knee jerk response is to tsk tsk the parents of these precious darlings for treating their spawn like Faberge eggs, but that would be a mistake.  While most parents have some sense of over protectiveness with regard to their children, few expect that they would be completely insulated from playground activities.  Anyone who has not suffered an abrasion, bruise or scraped knee as a kid must have never attended school; maybe they were living in an aquarium.  But it’s not Bloomberg-ism that is driving this policy.  It’s lawyers.  No doubt, the administrators at this school were petrified at the possibility that under their care, some harm would come to junior which would open them up for an expensive lawsuit.  It’s amazing that they don’t mandate the wearing of helmets during class.

It used to be that you could never exceed the reach of the long arm of the law, but over generations, this has morphed into not escaping the long tentacles of lawyers.  As we’ve discussed previously, when a nation puts out as many law grads as the U.S. does, they have to make themselves useful somehow.  Statistically, few of these lawyers will be Oliver Wendell Holmes material.  Most of what they do in real life will circulate around arguing petty rules and  grievances rather than arguing big picture principles.  Unluckily for the public, many of them wind up as politicians.

Life truly does imitate art as even the depiction of lawyers has evolved over the years.   In the old days, Perry Mason was the admired role model; today, it’s more Jackie Chiles from the Seinfeld show.  In fact,  the very expression “frivolous lawsuits” is as redundant as “bleeding heart liberal”.  While there exists many arbiters of what’s legal, there does not exist any arbiters of what’s stupid.

And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.  As a society, we have been programmed to be passive about most things and instructed to ‘let the process work’ as far as legal fixes, no matter how convoluted or illogical that process may be.  Ironically, what has evolved is a society openly contemptuous of many of its laws and especially of their lawmakers, rather than a more civilized one.  As criminals know, laws are for law abiders.

It’s highly unlikely that those first crafting laws for our society envisioned  exhaustive prescriptive rules rather than on general humanistic principles.  That occurs only in Muslim enclaves and in North Korea under Mullah X or Kim Jong Un.  To be lumped in with societies run by those folks should be sobering for anyone.

link Hunger Seen Worsening by Oxfam as Climate Change Heats Up World – Bloomberg.

They might have been able to get away with this back in the ’60’s when access to information was scant.  Images on TV of emaciated children holding bowls of milk would send people scurrying to write generous cheques to Oxfam.  Marketing to Americans’ natural compassion was an easy sell.  The current program of selling the idea of pervasive world hunger by tying it to the spurious cause of our day is either thinly veiled crappy marketing or simply pandering to the new generation of gullible people in America.

There’s probably somebody hungry in the world somewhere, but the chance that it’s linked in any way to global warming is as likely as a fat chicken in Ethiopia as one of my good friends is fond of saying.  People who count these kinds of things claim that Americans ( and that means Canadians too ) throw away over 400 pounds of food per person per year, so there’s no shortage here in North America or indeed most Western countries.  Unfortunately, this wasted food can’t just be transferred like a journal entry to those in the world who could legitimately use the food.  Indeed, in this part of the world, the people who are actively in the food distribution business such as McDonalds and KFC are demonized for providing too much cheap food.

According to Oxfam, ““The changing climate is already jeopardizing gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen,” In addition, Oxfam said. “A hot world is a hungry world.”   The people who penned this little slogan have obviously never spent any time in the tropical Amazon rainforest where it’s hot 365 days of the year and yet things still grow there like body hair at a lesbian convention.   They must also have never considered that in Saudi Arabia, where the average temperature is over 100 degrees for half of the year and yet few are starving there either.  The heat=hunger argument looks iffy.

So how is it that global warming only affects people in some parts of the world whereas in others, people have so much food that they’re throwing it away? This disparity of reality can be solved by looking closely at exactly which constituencies are served by Oxfam.  Their website claims ‘over 90 countries’, but when you look at the list:  http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/countries-we-work-in  The Philippines, Egypt, South Africa, Russia and the UK  are probably not their main focus spots.  The vast majority of those countries served by aid are in continental Africa.  Interestingly, many of those countries listed are in the midst of on-going tribal and religious wars.  Anyone in the farmer business in any of those countries is not going to be interested in farming or ranching if someone is likely to plant a bullet in them.

The issue of hunger in these countries is one of security and political stability not one of a few hot days ’caused’ by someone driving their SUV.  Adding more tax to a gallon of gasoline will no more alleviate hunger than would taxing Listerine in America solve halitosis worldwide.  It’s all hot air.