From Insty I see this latest bit of nonsense:
Alief, a working-class suburb of Houston that is 71% Hispanic and black, is planting 1,200 new trees, but the objective is not just to beautify the neighborhood. Rather, the idea is that trees will fight crime.
…
Houston’s KTRK reported Friday that the tree-planting initiative is based on a study “published in the Journal of Public Economics,” which purported to establish that “when temperatures go up, crime does, too.” This is bad for Alief, which “averages 10 degrees hotter in the summer months than well-shaded areas of Houston.” This is because “Alief has only an 11% tree canopy, compared to the Houston average of 33%.” So if Alief cools off, the criminals will cool off. Or at least that’s the idea.
The only way that this makes sense is if over time the trees see the dead bodies of criminals dangling from their branches. And before people start accusing me of wanting to create a health hazard in places like Alief (corpses wouldn’t take long to start rotting in Houston’s steamy climate), let me stipulate that no body should be left hanging for longer than a day before being replaced with a fresh one. (As a bonus, that’s even an employment opportunity, both for hangmen and disposal staff.)
No doubt, someone will have a problem with my suggestion; but as a rationale, it’s backed by more commonsense than the fanciful bullshit that “Ensuring equitable tree cover across every neighborhood can help address social inequities so that all people can thrive.”
It’s not “More trees, less crime” (which is a specious suggestion). It’s “More trees, fewer criminals” (which is based on the cast-iron tautology of “Fewer criminals, less crime.”
There is probably an extremely strong statistical correlation between neighborhoods that have lots of trees and much lower crime rates. The problem is that “social scientists” aren’t ACTUAL scientists, and that they never understood that correlation does not equal causation.
Hence we have this type of “wet streets cause rain”, and “flies cause garbage” mind-set.
This is exactly the type of knee-jerk reaction that notes that since middle-class people own homes, giving homes to other people will magically make them middle-class. It ignores the fact that middle-class people have values, standards, morals and ethics that lead them to things like delayed gratification, working hard enough to earn your keep plus a little bit more, having a shred of honor, etc. ad nauseum; the people to whom they intend to bestow the blessings of home ownership (or trees in this case) share none of these attributes, but that doesn’t deter the idiots from trying to instill them with the results of those attributes.
I wouldn’t give a shit if they were trying to do it with their own money, but then they go and involve the government sticking a tax-collector’s gun in our faces and stealing our money for their ideas of charity.
Black Wing,
Your insight is spot on especially in the last paragraph. Far too many people think the public treasury is the funding source for all of their hair brained schemes.
JQ
I wish I could post a comment including a pdf image here, but I can’t figure out how. There’s a great old “Peanuts” cartoon that pretty much sums up the collectivist/statist/authoritarian view of the world and their desires. Charlie Brown and Linus start out sitting on a step of a sidewalk, and Linus says:
Linus: “When I get big, I want to be a great philanthropist.”
Charlie: “You have to have a lot of money to be a great philanthropist.”
There’s a pause for a panel as Linus looks down, and then:
Linus: “I want to be a great philanthropist with someone else’s money!”
About the only thing left out is that they also want to be altruists with someone else’s LIFE.
Patience, Kim, patience. You can’t hang a noose from a sapling. Let the trees be planted, then let them become established and grow. THEN suggest the nooses.