NY: In the Last Days of Summer, Government Comes for the Ice Cream Trucks

City Council Member Lincoln Restler and eight of his colleagues recently introduced a bill to ban the use of gasoline or diesel generators on ice cream trucks.

Banning generators from New York City ice cream trucks would make no measurable difference to the climate.

Like the canary in the mine shaft, seemingly crazy policies that take hold in local jurisdictions often portend what’s coming for the rest of us.

This Labor Day, people all over the country will be savoring the last days of summer with ice cream. But some New York City politicians want to eliminate even that small sweet treat. What does New York have against ice cream?

Already home to crazy ice cream rules that prohibit folks from enjoying the summertime treat while waiting at a bus stop or that make carrying your ice cream cone in your pocket on Sundays illegal, now some city politicians want to essentially take away ice cream trucks.

Specifically, City Council Member Lincoln Restler and eight of his colleagues recently introduced a bill to ban the use of gasoline or diesel generators on ice cream trucks. According to Restler, the move would “severely reduce air pollution and noise and address the climate crisis.”

This is absolute nonsense.

Let’s take a look why. We will start with noise.

Ice cream trucks require generators to keep the ice cream cold, and generators can, admittedly, be noisy. However, modern gas and diesel generators exist on a spectrum of noise, and many fall well within what any reasonable person would conclude is acceptable. Some inverter generators already can be as quiet as a private office. Further, generators can be combined with dampeners to reduce noise even further.

If this were really the issue, then the City Council could simply put reasonable noise restrictions in place rather than total bans. This is precisely what they’ve done with ice cream truck bells by restricting their use to trucks in motion.

That leaves the environmental question. For this, we need to separate out traditional air pollutants and alleged global warming effects.

Critics of ice cream truck generators make the same mistake as critics of coal and other hydrocarbons by conflating the pollution from old and new technology. It may well have been the case that old generators, especially in densely populated areas such as New York City, emitted unacceptable levels of pollution. However, advances in fuel efficiency and emissions treatment technology significantly reduce emissions, and the technology is only getting cleaner.

So, that leaves climate change.

Putting aside the real debate over the human effect on climate, and accepting for the purposes of this discussion Washington’s underlying climate policy assumptions, banning generators from New York City ice cream trucks would make no measurable difference to the climate. In fact, eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would have virtually no environmental benefit.

The Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician, Kevin Dayaratna, has investigated exactly this using the same models used by government agencies. a href="https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/report/the-unsustainable-costs-president-bidens-climate-agenda">He found that eliminating all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would reduce temperatures by less than 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The facts, of course, don’t matter to environmental extremists who dislike ice cream trucks. They are more than happy to push their agenda on us no matter the cost or lack of efficacy. Instead, they make empty promises about seamless, low-cost alternatives and how everyone will be better off if we just comply.

Obviously, compliance has real costs. While some estimates come in below $10,000 per truck to comply, real world costs could be much higher. According to one ice cream truck company CEO, upgrading a single truck can cost upwards of $65,000. So, does Mr. Restler expect every mom and pop ice cream vendor and small ice cream truck business to just lay down more money per truck than what a decent used ice cream truck costs to keep operating in New York City?

With average annual incomes of around $30,000 for mom and pop ice cream trucks in the United States, even the expense of the lower $10,000 estimate could be enough put them out of business.

This is out of the question and is why everyone should understand this legislation as a virtual ban on ice cream trucks.

At a minimum, there will be far fewer ice cream trucks serving New York citizens, and those trucks will be owned by a small number of large companies that can afford the compliance costs. That assumes that larger companies think they can even make such a substantial investment back in sales. Finally, the fewer trucks and higher operation costs will mean much more expensive ice cream.

Like nearly every other mandate, this one will hurt the poor the most, drive companies out of business and take away the jobs of those who work for them, and serve only the egos of wealthy do-gooders and busy-body politicians.

But if that’s what New York City wants, why should we care?

Because like the canary in the mine shaft, seemingly crazy policies that take hold in local jurisdictions often portend what’s coming for the rest of us. Revealingly, Restler tells us as much when he says that he’s “excited to see how they can serve as a model for electrifying mobile food truck vendors.”

In other words, environmentalists won’t stop at ice cream trucks in New York this Labor Day. Rest assured, environmental extremism will be coming for your ice cream trucks in your neighborhood next Labor Day, and that’s why this proposal needs to be stopped now.

https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/the-last-days-summer-government-comes-the-ice-cream-trucks

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Why Sunak’s prayers in Delhi matter

Ever since Alastair Campbell’s declaration that ‘we don’t do God’, no prime minister – and almost no politician – has discussed their faith. David Cameron said his Christianity came in and out ‘like MagicFM in the Chilterns’, a line he borrowed from Boris Johnson who self-defined as ‘a kind of very, very bad Christian’. But Rishi Sunak is different. He’s a practising Hindu who has a shrine in No. 10 for family worship and works with a Ganesh idol on his desk. This being Britain, no one cares: a distinguishing point about our country. Sunak gets flak for being a Winchester old boy, a Brexiteer and an ex-banker, but no one is suggesting any tension between his faith and his office.

Sunak is leaning into his faith in his trip to India, offering prayers at the Akshardham Temple in Delhi and letting the cameras follow him as he knelt barefoot in front of the shrines. Pretty much wherever he went, he put his palms together in an namaste greeting (handshakes are less of a thing in India) and posed for pictures with flower garlands with his Indian wife next to him. It’s the kind of scene India would not have seen before from a visiting head of government. To British Hindus it will mean a great deal: that a Hindu can not only become prime minister but can be open about his faith.

When Tim Farron quit as Lib Dem leader amid questions about his evangelical Christianity, he concluded it was no longer possible to reconcile faith and politics, that he had to choose between his faith and his career. I know several other MPs who share this view, who think their faith is a liability in a secular country so it needs to be hidden away. But this year, we’ve seen three politicians go the other way.

When SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes defended her faith – a Free Church of Scotland member with unfashionable views on gay marriage, pre-marital sex and abortion – some thought it waas politically suicide. Instead, she ended up almost winning, with 48 per cent of the vote. She won support from people who admired her refusal to edit or conceal aspects of her identity from fear that it would be a vote-loser. On Humza Yousaf’s first day as first minister he released pictures of himself at prayer with his family in Bute House.

Sunak is doing the same in India. The age of these three – Sunak is 43, Yousaf 38 and Forbes 33 – is also a factor. We can see a new generation of British political leaders who are doing God (or, in Sunak’s case, gods) and thereby normalising faith in the public sphere. These are small things that happen without fanfare or comment, but are important milestones in establishing Britain not as an anti-religious secular state but a multi-faith democracy.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/why-sunaks-prayers-in-delhi-matter/

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The strange link between HIGHER education and antisemitism

WHAT KIND of person considers Jews "the central enemies of Western civilization"? What sort of individual spreads caricatures of leering, hook-nosed Jews or claims that Jewish Germans used their influence to introduce "sexual perversions of all sorts," including "sadism, masochism, lots of homosexuality"?

It likely wouldn't surprise you to be told that those grotesque and hateful slurs, which attracted attention recently in the British press, were spewed by a knuckle-dragging boor who never got past grade school. In fact, they are the words of Boštjan Zupančič, who for 17 years was a judge on the European Court of Human Rights. Until recently, Zupančič had a sterling record as a legal scholar and a protector of human rights. He earned degrees from Harvard, lectured at colleges around the world, and published extensively in multiple languages. He even wrote poetry.

He is also, it transpires, a raging antisemite. Zupančič has spread numerous smears about Jews, of which the examples quoted above are merely a selection.

Such rank antisemitic bigotry is often believed to be associated with ignorance or lack of education. The sociologist Frederick Weil, surveying the academic literature in 1990, concluded that "the better educated are much less antisemitic than the worse educated." Surveys by the Anti-Defamation League have found that education appears to reduce intolerance in general and the demonizing of Jews in particular.

The recently released US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism devotes more attention to education than to perhaps any other theme. The words "educate," "educator," and "education" appear in the document more than 120 times. Of 18 "strategic goals" set out in the Biden administration's 60-page report, the very first is to "increase school-based education about antisemitism." It stresses that "education enables students to understand what can happen in a democratic society when hatred goes unchecked." It emphasizes the importance of "more education on Jewish American history and the valuable role that Jews have played in our national story."

Of course all this is well intended. But as the example of Zupančič shows, education is no prophylactic against the hatred of Jews. The judge is about as learned as anyone in the 21st century can be. And not only learned but an educator himself, an honored jurist who made his mark as an upholder of human rights. How could someone known for such intellectual achievements be an unabashed Jew-hater?

It's a trick question. The premise is false. Towering artists and learned intellectuals have always been numbered among the most virulent defamers of the Jewish people. Martin Luther, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wagner, Voltaire, Karl Marx, Edgar Degas, Amiri Baraka — the list could be extended indefinitely. On college campuses, hostility toward Jews is becoming endemic. The Nazi genocide may have been inspired by Adolf Hitler, but it was planned and carried out by SS men with PhDs.

So why have studies repeatedly shown a link between low levels of education and antisemitic beliefs? Because, as University of Arkansas researchers Jay P. Greene, Albert Cheng, and Ian Kingsbury explained in 2021, "for the most part, these studies measure antisemitism simply by asking respondents how they feel about Jews or by asking whether they agree with blatantly antisemitic stereotypes." Respondents with more education are sophisticated enough to realize what is being asked, the three scholars hypothesized, and more likely to respond in ways that hide their antisemitism.

To examine their hypothesis, they devised an entirely different test, focusing on whether respondents held Jews to harsher standards than others. They drafted two equivalents of a series of questions, with one in each case asking about an explicit Jewish example, while the other applied to a non-Jewish context. For instance, one of the questions asked whether someone's "attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest" when they lobby for certain foreign policy positions. For half the respondents, Israel was the country in question; for the other half, it was Mexico. Another question asked "whether public gatherings during the pandemic posed a threat to public health and should have been prevented," with Orthodox Jewish funerals and Black Lives Matter protests as the parallel examples.

What Greene, Cheng, and Kingsbury discovered turned the conventional wisdom upside down. "More highly educated people were more likely to apply principles more harshly to Jewish examples," they reported. "Contrary to previous claims, education appears to provide no protection against antisemitism." By preventing respondents from knowing that the purpose of the study was to measure attitudes toward Jews, they demonstrated that more highly educated people in the United States tend to have greater levels of antisemitism.

The recently released US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism devotes more attention to education than to any other theme. But that emphasis is misplaced.

It may be comforting to cling to the conventional wisdom that the best inoculation against the toxic virus of Jew-hatred is more education. But contrary facts have always been apparent to anyone willing to look. More than 30 years ago, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a renowned scholar of African American thought, lamented in The New York Times "not only that blacks are twice as likely as whites to hold antisemitic views but — significantly — that it is among the younger and more educated blacks that antisemitism is most pronounced."

Some forms of intolerance do result from ignorance and can be overcome through education. But antisemitism is more than mere hatred of a minority. It is a moral derangement and a form of conspiracy thinking, and it can seduce the author or statesman or human-rights judge no less than the unlettered high school dropout. Unlike other forms of racism, Jew-hatred is a variety of intellectual disease. Those afflicted with it attribute to Jews whatever in their worldview is uniquely hateful or treacherous, so that it is constantly assuming new shapes and expressing itself in new accusations.

The preventive and cure for antisemitism is not more book learning. It is the cultivation of good character, which is a far harder task. An enduring lesson of history is that where society is disordered, antisemites grow louder and bolder. A human rights judge who loathes Jews? I fear worse is yet to come.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27204/the-dubious-link-between-education

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Too much free stuff

Judith Sloan

I was a big fan of P.J. O’Rourke, who sadly departed this world too soon. Who didn’t love his biting, satirical books and essays, poking fun at the ardent devotees of the trendy zeitgeists of the day?

My absolute favourite O’Rourke quote is this: ‘If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.’ The point is that when governments give away free stuff – of course, it’s not really free, just provided free of charge to the users – all sorts of negative consequences follow.

Sadly for us, the vast majority of politicians either don’t understand, or prefer to ignore, this message. They simply can’t wait to offer more free (or excessively subsidised) stuff in order to amass the greatest number of grateful recipients. While there will be various spins put on why free stuff is necessary – helping the disadvantaged, improving the environment, lifting education standards, yada yada – the reality is far too many government spending programs are simply a means of using the power of the government purse to hoover up more votes. And all sides of politics do it.

Before I cover some of the big free stuff, let me first outline one of my current favourites – free fishing rods and other fishing gear to Grade 5 students in Victoria. It will cost $1.5 million out of a $96 million package ‘to improve fishing, boating, piers and aquaculture’. There must be votes among anglers, obviously.

The blurb reads: ‘The Minister for Outdoor Recreation announced 60,000 kits will be made available to grade five primary students in more than 1,900 Victorian schools. The kits will set families up with everything they need to wet a line including a fishing rod and reel, line, tackle box, some tackle and a Kids’ Guide to Fishing that includes information and links to educational resources to learn the basics such as fishing safety, knots and rigs. The kits will help youngsters get active, learn about the aquatic environment and have fun in the great outdoors whether they be down the coast, on Port Phillip Bay or by a river in regional Victoria.’

You probably think that I am making this up, given the extremely parlous state of public finances in Victoria. But, no, this free fishing gear is currently being sent out to primary schools so the kids can nag their parents to take them fishing, even though this will prove highly inconvenient in most cases and most parents will have no expertise or interest in fishing.

By the way, most Victorians don’t live close to the sea or a river.

I’m only guessing here, but perhaps Dan the Man, current premier of Victoria, has fond memories of fishing with his dad and he wants to spread the love using other people’s money. The more likely outcomes are family disputes, a few nasty accidents as fishing hooks end up in the wrong places and all that hardly used fishing gear being left on front lawns to be picked up in the next rubbish collection. At best, some parents might make a few bob by selling it on eBay.

At a bigger level, free stuff is flourishing as an idea in the minds of many political leaders. One of the current popular ones is free kindergarten/pre-school. If you believe the promotional material, all three- and four-year-olds are guaranteed a certain number of hours per week in kinder/preschool with no charge to the parents. But, of course, the parents are perfectly capable of gaming the system to maximise the benefits for them.

In New South Wales, for example, parents of four-year-olds are entitled to three days of free preschool at any one centre. But go to another centre and you can get the other two days for free as well. The net effect is that the centres are full of four-year-olds and there are simply no spots for three-year olds, notwithstanding the commitment the NSW government made.

They’re called supply constraints which is clearly an alien concept to those who are designing and running these programs. Not only are there a limited number of physical centres, but there are also shortages of suitably qualified carers to work there. It’s all very well offering free kinder/preschool but the reality is it will simply not be possible to make good the promise, at least in the short term. In the longer run, it will prove very expensive.

Similar problems have arisen in Victoria where many kindergartens are run by local councils. According to the Age – don’t ask – ‘Knox City Council will stop running all but two of its 28 kindergartens from January 2025, affecting placements for 1100 children aged three and four.’ The combination of rapidly rising costs and inadequate funding by the state government has led to this decision.

Free TAFE courses and even free university courses have also become popular among politicians. The argument is that you just need to identify the skills in need and then lure students into the relevant courses by making them free of charge. Sadly, the evidence is that people don’t actually value highly something that they receive without charge: the completion rates of these free courses are wretchedly low.

And again, there is very little attention given to the supply side. The fact is that the providers of these free courses are often inadequately funded using inappropriate funding formulas. Moreover, the instructors often have weak incentives to provide quality courses because the students aren’t paying anything anyway.

Of course, free stuff can be very popular with the users as long as the stuff is available and deemed to be of acceptable quality. It’s why bulk-billed medical services have tended to be a hit with patients, even for those who clearly have the means to make a financial contribution to consultations.

But here’s the thing: if something is free, there tends to be overuse and runaway government spending. It is also the case that the quality of the service will almost always decline – superficial, single-issue six-minute GP visits, anyone?

Asking everyone to pay, say, the equivalent of a cup of coffee or two is surely not asking too much. In the meantime, politicians need to wake up and realise that providing lots of free stuff is extremely poor public policy.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/too-much-free-stuff/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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