Normally, I’m pretty libertarian in my outlook but there are a couple of areas where I think government intervention is a pretty good idea. One of them happens to be public libraries. So it was with some concern that I read that the Free Library of Philadelphia will close on October 2nd. It’s exactly the sort of brinksmanship politicians play when they want to raise taxes in the face of public opposition. Tennessee legislators did it a few years ago when voters disapproved of a bond referendum or something. So they stopped funding school transportation.  It’s one of those times you wish that people would grab their guns and descend on the state capitol for a good ole revolution.

That may be  what’s going on here. Or, if Philadelphia or PA is in such bad economic shape that they really can’t afford to keep the libraries open,  I hope the voters of Pennsylvania remember over the course of the next several elections who put them in this situation.

Mostly it reminds me of why politicians can’t be trusted.

[Free Library of Philadelphia via Boing Boing]

Let me start I by saying I love California. I’d seriously consider moving there if it weren’t for goofiness like this reported over at TechCrunch. The short version for those that don’t want to read is that CARB is considering regulating the color of cars sold in California to minimize the increased energy requirement of cooling black cars. Because black paint doesn’t reflect sunlight well. Really. The best and brightest of the California Air Resources Board. That’s what they came up with.

See, the problem is (for anybody who has every worked around bureaucrats*) that they feel like they have to “do stuff” to justify their continued feeding at the public trough. Apparently that’s what they’ve done. The chief of the Paint Reflectivity Studies Section, Heating and Cooling Branch, Research Division of the Office of Living Like Cavemen (sorry Cavepersons) has convinced somebody that black cars contribute to air pollution in some way. So they got a grant to study the problem which means more money and personnel for the PRS section which will eventually mean a cushy new job as branch chief for something or other for the PRS section chief.

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*As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this also applies to middle managers and politicians.

Yahoo News has a story about New Jersey reversing itself on its plan to ban genital waxing. The reason for the proposed ban was that 2 women (that’s two) recently got infections from being waxed and had to be hospitalized. Read it again…. Two Women. I don’t know how many women in NJ get bikini waxes but the salon owner they talked to Cherry Hill did 1,800 last year. Assuming she’s the only place in NJ that did bikini waxes (and I’m betting she’s not), that would be an incidence rate of 1 in 900 or about 0.11%. If NJ bans everything that has a failure rate of 1 in 900 not much will be going on in NJ.

It reminds me of the times that NC changed the law on swimming pools because some little girl got stuck on the drain or passed a law making it illegal for 12-17 year olds to ride in the back of a  pickup because 2 kids got hurt in an accident.

The danger with politicians, like middle managers, is that they feel like they have to “do sumpin” in order to justify their existence.