Short Items

American Diplomacy: This Is Disappointing

This article tells of how the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, in light of the French bill making the public denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, made no comment on that legislation but instead said that Turkey needed to face up to its past if it wants to become one of the world’s top economies. This will just needlessly rile up people over there. Leave that for the historians and cultural critics back home. Or bring it up only if they bring up what they see as our own misdeeds. Instead, he should have condemned the legislation as contrary to the spirit of free speech.


A Good Question on the Pipeline

I am in favor of the Keystone Pipeline, but here a letter writer to the Columbus Dispatch, George Kalbouss, wonders why we need a pipeline all the way down to Texas when we could build a refinery in North Dakota instead. Anyone?


The Islamification of Nigeria

See here for an interview in today’s Guardian with a member of an Islamist group called Boko Haram in northern Nigeria who wants to impose shari’a on all of Nigeria, and eventually the entire world. He claims that Christians would be a protected group, but what this probably means is that they would be reduced to being second-class citizens subject to higher taxes, at best. At worst, the protection wouldn’t mean much of anything and, like Egypt’s Copts these days, would live their lives dreading the whims of the Muslims among them.

And see here, also, for an editorial in the same paper. Many of the commenters seem to think like me. Is there a sea change about these things going on in Britain these days? This comment, mixed in with all the serious ones, was pretty silly:

“It is tragic when 60's pop groups go on the rampage.”


The Current Rushdie Affair

This is the sort of editorial I’d like to see from our leftists in that it condemns the politicians for caving in to the demands for banning people and their artwork. In particular, this sentence says it all:

The standard explanation of politicians - that these steps are unavoidable because the books and works of art hurt religious sentiments - is a throwback to the silencing of Galileo in 1633 because his claim that the earth moved round the sun offended orthodox Christians.

This is pretty much the way I’ve always thought of the issue of the Islamification of the West, that we are regressing. Unfortunately, there are too many in our media and our colleges and universities who think that their attitudes represent a step forward.


Obama and College Tuition

Obama wants to stop tuition hikes at our colleges and universities. Good for him. However, he appears to believe that the problem is because of a decrease in state funding. This is what I was always hearing during the 1980s and 1990s when I still subscribed to leftist magazines like The Nation and In These Times. Since such decreases would not affect private colleges, then their tuition ought not to have gone up, but it has.

The real reason, as most conservatives know, is the huge increase in the number of administrators, many of whom were given jobs because of a liberal left agenda (the affirmative-action officers, the environmental overseers, and so on). And this is why his efforts will probably fail. There is nothing he will do to stop that sort of increase, and even if he were motivated to do it, he would be opposed by powerful interests in his own party. So, don’t expect anything to change.

Comments

[Mark Spahn]

On "Christians would be a protected group", as you probably know, "protected group" is a euphemism for the more explicit term "dhimmis".
On college tuition, there is the general economic principle that any subsidy allows the seller to charge a price higher than it could get without the subsidy.

[Steve Burri]

In regard to a refinery being built in North Dakota I would guess three factors: Environmentalist opposition, weather, and lack of ocean port.

[J. Reed Anderson]

I've inquired, Steve, and have been consistently given answers #1 and #3. However, #3 is a bit lame, considering the refineries not anywhere near oceans, such as the ones in Joliet, Ill., outside St. Paul, Mn., Bakersfield, Ca. I think the answers are #1 and #4--which is the money involved fighting #1 that would double or treble the cost of building a refinery in NoDak. A refinery in NoDak would seem to make sense without Canada's sand tars, seeing as how all that oil's coming out from under the Williston Basin now.

[John Pepple]

I was going to mention the refinery outside of St. Paul, but J. Reed beat me to it.

[deadcenter]

Environmental is the only reason I can see. I work in the environmental field, the facility I helped permit under RCRA required 5 years and our air emissions permit required about 4, and we're relatively remote and non-controversial. A refinery in proposed to be built in SW Arizona required 7-9 years for the air permit and, I've heard runs 900 pages.

A pipeline, due to its relatively small footprint even though it's 1,700 miles long and lack of air emissions, would be easier to permit especially if it is built within existing pipeline footprints wherever feasible.

[John Pepple]

deadcenter, thanks for the info. This just reinforces my belief that we need blue-collar impact statements from environmentalists before they do any of their stuff. How their policies affect the poor needs to be taken into account, too.

[foxmarks]

There are actually two refineries in suburban St. Paul.

You forget that even with a refinery in NoDak, the refined product still has to get to market. We would need something like Keystone anyway.

It is somewhat difficult to reverse the flow in a pipeline. We have just reversed the Seaway pipeline at the Cushing, OK, hub (to get more crude to coastal refineries). The coastal refineries almost certainly have outgoing distribution pipelines in place.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/enbridge-buys-into-pipeline-to-reverse-flow-2011-11-16

[John Pepple]

I'm certainly learning a lot from my readers. Thanks, foxmarks, I knew about the Pine Bend refinery, but I didn't know about the other one.