After the Deluge

As we get to know more about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the scale of the devastation
becomes clearer, as
The New York Times reports.
In New Orleans the failure of two levees has unundated the city

causing incalculable destruction and rendering it uninhabitable for weeks to come.

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines
inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city. Officials began
planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly
grim conditions as water and food were running out and rising water threatened the generators.

The situation was so dire that late in the day the Pentagon ordered five Navy ships and eight
Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations. It also planned to fly
in Swift boat rescue teams from California.

We all extend our best wishes and our help to the folks digging out of the destruction and hope for
a speedy repair of the damage.

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about the vulnerable position of New Orleans, how it is
below river level, how it is in the path of hurricanes, an environmental disaster waiting to
happen. Now that the worst has happened,
we will get to see how bad the worst really is. Chances are it is not the end of the city, not
an environmental disaster, but just
a huge challenge to be overcome, the sort of thing that humans are really good at.

Here are some fearless predictions. The loss
of life will exceed 1,000 souls.
The total damage will
be north of $100 billion, and New Orleans will be back in business, sorta, in a couple of months.

Death of a Supply-side Salesman

There have been many important figures in the rise of the American conservative
movement, but in anyone’s front rank must be Jude Wanniski who died Monday August 29, 2005
aged 69. Obituaries can be found
here and
here.
Bob Novak recalls him here.
George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, celebrates Jude as an
inspiration:
“Economies are driven not by the dollars in people’s pockets but by the ideas in their heads.”
Even The New York Times rolls out a decent obit.

It was Wanniski, as one of Bob Bartley’s bright young men, who first advanced
on the edit page of The Wall Street Journal
the supply-side cocktail of sound money and low tax rates that
brought Ronald Reagan to the Presidency and that remains the
bedrock of Republican Party economic policy. Wanniski’s economic ideas are
expounded in his immodestly titled book The Way the World Works.

Supply-side economics is the basis for the solid economic growth that the
United States has enjoyed since the first Reagan income tax rate cuts started
to bite in late 1983. The new economic policy seems to have shifted the United
States to a decadal business cycle with only two short recessions, in 1991 and 2001,
since the start of Reaganomics.

It is natural for the governing class to look with skepticism on supply-side
economics. Elites like ideas that boost elites; that is why they loved Keynesian
economics. But supply-side economics relies upon a Hayekian understanding of
the economy. It is the millions of decisions by millions of economic actors that
drives the economy, not the big ideas of powerful people. Bureaucrats and
experts simply cannot know enough to outperform the economic decisions of millions
of businessmen, entrepreneurs, and consumers.

Understandably, Democrats hate supply-side economics. Their politics is based
on dependency and clientage, handing out economic goodies to their supporters in
programs and “targeted” tax cuts. In the supply-side world where ordinary
people do extraordinary things, there is no need for all-knowing experts and
patronage-dispensing political bosses.

Still, the Democrats will probably be hesitant to crank up tax rates again. They
tried it in 1993 and were promptly spanked by the voters in 1994 in the Republican
takeover of Congress.

It Couldn't Happen Here

Let us talk about something important. No, not the burning question whether the
recent Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, but something even more important:
The power of the government to take your children away from you.

Maybe there is nothing to worry about on this score. But then again you can’t be too careful
where government power is concerned. In Britain, things seem to be getting beyond the “nothing to
worry about” stage, according to
Cassandra Jardine.

Again and again, I have heard parents say that social workers seem to make
an instant judgment about their fitness as parents and then assemble the evidence to support
that decision. One woman sobbed down the phone from South Wales that she had been accused of
neglecting her children because one of them was underweight; even those of her children without
dietary problems have been taken from her. A cluster of women from Sheffield contacted me about
the high-handed behaviour of social services: one had had her two children taken because she had
left them with a 12-year-old while shopping; another had had her younger children taken because
her eldest had mental health problems; a third because she and her partner had been arguing. From
the Isle of Wight, I heard from a woman whose three-year-old cowered whenever the doorbell rang
because twice she had been taken into
care by social services on the basis of inaccurate information.

Maybe that is just the British welfare state. But here is a curious story from the excellent
Minette Marrin about the rights of parents over their adult disabled children. How
many rights do they have? Not very many.

In both these areas, the removal of children from their homes by the state and the control of adult
mentally disabled children, the presumption is clearly in favor of the government, its experts, and
its functionaries. If the local social worker starts a file on you and your family, then you could
very easily find yourself fighting to prove that you deserve to raise your children. If you have
an adult disabled child, well, the government is the one with the money, after all.

We have got into this situation gradually, without ever really getting a chance to decide what
is right. We set up government child protective services to help abused children, and then the experts
and the social workers went to work. Their interest, of course, is to increase their power and increase
their discretion and reduce the power of parents to “make a nuisance.”

But the question is: do government child service operations result in positive outcomes, compared
to other approaches? Where should the level of proof be set when the government removes a child from
its parents? And what kind of say should parents have in the treatment of their adult disabled children
even if the state has custody of them?

Let’s have a dialog. Sooner rather than later.

People Want to Work at Wal-Mart

Who would want to work at Wal-Mart? That’s the question at the bottom of the
left-wing campaign to unionize the world’s biggest retailer. Critics make a big
deal out of the fact that Wal-Mart doesn’t offer good benefits to its employees, and therefore
they need a union to get the benefits they deserve.

Here are some facts about Wal-Mart for you, courtesy of the London
Economist.

Wal-Mart retorts that it offers “good, affordable coverage” of benefits
to staff willing to pay $70.50 per fortnight per family. Anyway, with Wal-Mart’ tax
bill of about $5 billion a year, American taxpayers come out well ahead. Whatever
shortcomings Wal-Mart may have as an employer, it can hardly be accused of paying
less than the market rate, at least in America. Last week it said that over 11,000 people
had applied for 400 jobs at a new store in Oakland, California.

Oh really. So 11,000 people signed up for 400 jobs at Wal-Mart in Oakland. So just what is it
about Wal-Mart that makes it such a pariah in the eyes of the union movement and so
desirable in the eyes of eager job-seekers in Oakland?

Of course in New York City they’ve changed the law to make the city unwelcome as
a business location for Wal-Mart. So the chances
are that we will never know how many people in Gotham would like to work for Wal-Mart. But
we do know how many would like to work for Wal-Mart in Oakland, California. 11,000. That’s
quite a lot.

Good God, Carruthers. A Flat Tax in Germany?

Don’t get too excited, old chap. Angela Merkel, head of the German Christian Democratic Party, says
that a flat tax in Germany is only a “vision” for the future. But the appointment of Germany’s principal
flat tax proponent, Paul Kirchhof, to her campaign staff has got all us flat tax wackos in a twitter.

The folks at the London Daily Telegraph are getting quite giddy. Writes
George Trefgarne:

Prof Kirchhof believes he can slim down or scrap more than 90,000 German
tax rules and 418 tax exemptions. "Each person only has to pay 25 cents out of each euro
earned," he
explains. "With the rest, he is set free in the garden of liberty."

Trefgarne smells blood. In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likes the present system and likes

to review his Red Army of tax inspectors and officials,
parading past his window. In fact, he has just merged them into a sinister new department called
HM Revenue and Customs and moved 1,500 of them into his own building on Whitehall, where he can
summon them to his office to hear news of fresh victories.

And in case you think that describing Mr Brown’s tax collectors as an army is overdoing it,
a report by the Treasury select committee last year said there were 99,400 of them, only a
couple of thousand less than the strength
of the Army and much more than both the RAF and the Royal Navy.

We know that the British Chancellor doesn’t like the flat tax because documents obtained from the UK
Treasury say so. Oops! It turns out that the unredacted copy of the documents reveals that the officials
were quite impressed with the flat tax.

One of the Browned-out pieces even said there
could be an "economic mini-boom" if a flat tax were introduced.

By the way, in this
Reuters report
the German for “flat tax” is “einheitlicher Steuersatz.” It doesn’t exactly come trippingly
off the tongue, does it? Oh wait. There’s a short version: “Einheitssteuer.” So that’s all right.

More Points on the Board in Iraq

Now that the Iraqi constitution is looking like more than Bush administration wishful thinking,
Mark Steyn
is allowing himself a little thimbleful of celebration. The liberals
said it couldn’t be done, but the Bushies just executed on their strategy and made it happen.

By the way, here’s another reason why Iraq isn’t another Vietnam. Back in the Sixties, the Democrats
never really had a strategy. Nixon did, but he got bounced out of office by Watergate.

Ever since 9/11 the Bush administration has been executing on a strategy, a plan (
yes, the Bushies really do have a plan) to introduce
some sort of democracy in the Middle East and to put pressure on the terror masters, first in Afghanistan,
then in Iraq, and now in Syria and Iran.

Of course, things have gone wrong. They always do. Mistakes have been made. As alway. The whole project
may blow up and end in disaster. The Israelis could be driven into the sea.

But the Bush administration keeps putting points on the board. The reduction of Kabul. The invasion
of Iraq. The interim Iraqi government. The reduction of Fallujah. The January 2005 election.
The buildup of the new Iraqi security forces. The draft constitution. These are not just propaganda and public relations. They
are real, hard-won victories. They mean something.

After 7/7, Brits are Rediscovering Britishness

In the aftermath of 7/7, the Brits are pondering what it means to be British.
Even the Labour government, which has done as much as anyone to erase the
concept of Britishness, is joining in, writes
Charles Moore.
But just what is Britishness or “British values?” How about this:

Take sport. Isn’t it rather interesting and important
that most of the greatest sports in the world - soccer, rugby, golf,
cricket, tennis, racing - began, or first took organised shape, in this
country?

It worked out that way because the British invented the games and the rules
in their own clubs—free from the government. Then there is the joint-stock
company.

Oxford and Cambridge, the ancient universities in Scotland.
Take Scouts and Guides, the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, mutual societies,
charities, private clubs, trade unions, and residents’ associations.
Take the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church,
the Royal Society, the Royal Academy, the National Trust,
the Hospice Movement, Battersea Dogs’ Home and - for all I know -
the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes. There is almost no end to
the list of British institutions, some of
them so successful that they have gone global.

You’ll note that most of these institutions were developed by individuals, or
groups of individuals working in a spirit of adventure and voluntary cooperation
with each other.

Even the word “`Britain’ is essentially a political word,
originally revived more than 300 years ago to bind up a populated,
multi-cultural space” that was busy uniting itself into a single United Kingdom.
Britannia, a figure last used in the Roman Empire was dragged into service
as a symbol of the new nation. But recently
“Gordon Brown announced that he was removing Britannia from
the back of the 50p piece and holding
a competition for a design to `reflect Britain today.’”

The left has thought for over a century that the nation state was
obsolete and needed to be retired as soon as possible. The question is, with what
are they going to replace the loyalty that people have
willingly given to the nation state and the sense of belonging that they
have obtained from it?

Will More Money Help?

Democrats seem convinced that they don’t have the resources to get their message out. So
Democratic strategist Rob Stein is putting together a Democracy Alliance of liberal givers
to raise $80 million for a series of liberal think tanks, according to
Thomas B. Edsall.
Stein believes that the Democrats need to replicate the policy think tanks that dominate the right:
The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, and the libertarian Cato Institute.

But these Democrats miss the point and misunderstand their position. Their strategic focus
must always be on defending their existing programs, the hundred of billions of dollars that flow
out every year to Democratic voters, from Social Security to Medicare, to the myriad of social services,
to education, to the research community and to the government health system. Next to that, the
need to develop exciting new programs that catch the enthusiasm of the American people is a very
low priority.

Actually, the Democrats already have a magnificent system, with ample funding, that defends vigorously
any and all attempts to “cut” their programs. They’ll find, if they think about it, that constructing
a new layer of Democratic advocacy may just muddy the waters. The one and only thing that Democrats
should concentrate on is defending Democratic programs from the attacks of Republicans.

The trouble is that the great creaking monopoly of Democratic programs is slowly delivering less and
less while gobbling up more and more resources. Eventually, the whole thing will collapse. But why
worry? Any collapse can only happen in the far distant future. Right?

Now Even Vacations are Wired

Progress never solves anything. It only raises the stakes. Reporting from a vacation on
South Carolina’s Outer Banks,
Suzanne Fields
wonders where it will all end, when we even take our electronics on vacation. She writes on her laptop
while her grandsons play their LEGO Star Wars game nearby.

Will the violent XBox first-person shooter games create a generation of violent young men? Will the
chatter of cell phones obliterate the deep waters of long-considered wisdom? And does the
addiction of video games “offering
immediate gratification that makes disciplined study all the more difficult” mean that nobody will be left
that can think a deep thought?

Perhaps the electronification of the world will create an huge nostalgia for quiet and repose. Hunting
survives as a nostalgic male pursuit long after agriculture became the chief means of livelihood. And
the cult of the countryside began immediately upon the removal of the farmers to the city.

But how can we create a still pool of quiet in the middle of the electronic hurricane of bustle and noise and chatter?

Spengler on Global Demographics

Not surprisingly, liberal academicians have hesitated to investigate the consequences of the childless
society that they and theirs have championed. That is why we have
Spengler,
the peripatetic scholar writing at Asia Times.

Spengler wonders whether there is a statistical correlation between childbearing and religious
belief. Since no social science professionals have been doing any serious statistical study of the problem,
Spengler recently volunteered his amateur services as a temporary substitute for
serious scholarly study of the problem.

Having found no academic research that specifically measures the impact of
religious belief on fertility controlling for these factors, I have done some
calculations of my own using a cross section of data for 174 countries. My analysis,
preliminary as it is, supports the conclusion that religious belief strongly influences
fertility after controlling for wealth and education. There are lies, damned lies, and
statistics, of course, and results of this kind should be viewed with caution.
Still, this analysis passes the first cut of tests for rigor.

He finds that by far the biggest predictor of family size is literacy, but that religious belief
is also a strong predictor. All this is to support his feeling that:

Underlying the demographic crisis of the industrial world, I believe, is a spiritual
crisis. If the above analysis has any merit, the issue is not wealth, but rather the desire of men
to continue to inhabit this planet. Secular ideologies - socialism, positivism, and so forth -
promised a world free of bigotry and hatred,
and an unending vista of peace and prosperity.

And religious belief, he believes, is necessary to populate the planet because

Humankind cannot abide the terror of mortality without the promise of immortality,
I have argue in the past... In
the absence of religion human society sinks into depressive torpor.

Then Spengler turns to a
review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
a book that attempts to explain the fall of societies as a consequence of environmental folly. Why should a
tale of environmental extinction appeal to a mass audience?

Diamond’s books appeal to an educated, secular readership, that is,
precisely the sort of people who have one child or none at all. If you have fewer
than two children, and most of the people you know have fewer than two children, Holmesian
deductive powers are not required to foresee your eventual demise.

Spengler things that these secular readers should look in the mirror if they want to think about
the cause of collapse.

In fact, the main reason societies fail is that they choose not to live.
That is a horrifying thought to absorb, and the average reader would much rather delve into the
details of obscure ecosystems of the past than reflect upon why
half of Eastern Europe will die out by mid-century

Of course, the real question facing the west is the Muslim demographic invasion of Europe.
They had better get on with it, Spengler
writes. Although Muslims are having lots of children compared to secular Europe, their
birth rate is falling faster. If they want to conquer Europe, they had better do it in the next
30 years, or it will be demographically too late.

In the Productivity Explosion, Government is Left Behind

In a piece published for India’s Independence Day,
Subir Gokarn
wonders why the public sector in India, from ministers down to the lowliest intern,
has not participated in the productivity explosion that is going on in the
private sector.

The unfortunate economic reality today is that the state, far
from being a partner and facilitator in quest for faster growth and
productivity gains, imposes an extra load on the system.

Precious resources that could be used in far more productive ways have
to be deployed by the private sector to offset the weaknesses in public
delivery.

In fact the way to make money in India is to enter sectors where
the government reigns incompetently supreme and deliver replacement product. He explains:

Equipment for private supply of electricity — generators,
inverters, and so on — are needed to compensate for the inadequacies of
the larger system.

As the guy says in the movie Monsoon Wedding when the lights go out:
“This is India’s Big Problem!”

Private security makes up for the perceived failure
of the state security apparatus.

Private education at every level continues to surge, while public
institutions sink. And, while access to publicly-provided drinking
water eludes an increasingly large proportion of the population, the
number of brands and the sales volumes of bottled water continue to climb.

As the little girl said: “Why is that, Daddy?”

“Er, well, that is something you will understand when you get older.”

What Reenlistment Problem?

Back in the spring, the MSM was trumpeting the news that the U.S. Army was way behind in its recruitment goals. They didn’t say so, but you could read between the lines the awful prospects: understrength units sent to fight in Iraq, plunging morale, humiliating pullout, plunging poll numbers for President Bush.

But a few months later, everything looks hunky-dory, according to Ralph Peters. It turns out that the Army will meet and exceed its recruitment goals after all.

The standout results are the re-enlistment numbers. You could say, if you were a liberal, that continued first-time enlistment was due to the naivété of poor innocent young boys from underprivileged homes who didn’t have any other option but to serve themselves up as cannon fodder. Actually, first time enlistments are right about on quota. But the real story is in re-enlistments. And it is the elite combat units that are really turning in the numbers.

Every one of the Army’s 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date. Those with the most intense experience in Iraq have the best rates. The 1st Cavalry Division is at 136 percent of its target, the 3rd Infantry Division at 117 percent.

Among separate combat brigades, the figures are even more startling, with the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division at 178 percent of its goal and the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Mech right behind at 174 percent of its re-enlistment target.

How could this happen? It’s going to take quite a bit of explaining away. But don’t worry. After the MSM has gone through its silence phase on the topic, we will start to see explanations. It’s not what you think, we will read. Things are really going badly. Some specialties are suffering such poor re-enlistment rates that it will soon affect combat readiness.

The truth is that, in the aftermath of Vietnam, the U.S. armed forces have spent a generation learning how to create soldiers according to the pattern advocated by the brilliant German General von Seeckt: “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” You could call the process making a band of brothers.

That is what the U.S. armed forces have learned to do, and that is why re-enlistment rates are sky high.

March of the Nannies

Nannies at the NCAA want to ban the use of tribal names for college teams. But they forgot
to ask the Indians. The Seminole tribe in Florida, for instance, approves of the use of the tribe’s name
as a mascot for the Florida State Seminoles. And anyway, didn’t old Red Barber, good loyal
liberal sportswriter that he was, wax endlessly about the Florida State Seminoles on NPR? Doesn’t that
give them a pass?

The problem is, nannying doesn’t stop at college team mascots. Nannying is everywhere,
according to John Leo.

For instance, “In North Dakota, a state bill would make it illegal for people who
are just turning 21 to drink before 8 a.m. on their birthdays.” Oh good. So that way they won’t
rush out to get drunk until the evening of their 21st birthday instead of in a drunken orgy
starting at the very stroke of midnight.

The obesity police want to force restaurants to serve smaller helpings, and the California
textbook police regularly censor dangerous references to “ketchup and butter.”

The real problem at the root of all this nannyism is you and me. We are all of us far too
quick to call our congressman when we see or hear something that offends us.

Or maybe the problem is mothers. They just want everyone to be safe.

An Environmental Split-up

If the Republicans were as split as the environmentalists are over wind power for Cape Cod, there
would be predictions all over of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

But because environmentalists are battling environmentalists instead of evil conservative
Republicans battling not-so-evil moderate Republicans, the only reaction is a little
harmless chuckling.
Introducing the whole sordid affair Jonah Goldberg
invites his readers
“to take a Nestea Plunge into the swirling waters of limousine liberalism.”

[S]ome environmentalists and a company called Cape Wind want to build 130
windmills way out in the ocean to help offset energy costs in the region — and to satisfy
all those demands that we find substitutes for evil fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, other environmentalists and conservationists are eager to stop the wind
farm from being built, largely because it will mar the view from their extravagant
coastal homes. Leading this charge is Sen. Ted Kennedy,
whose famous compound would have a nice view of the turbines.

All in all, it would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the Battle of the Liberal Wind Farm.

Lying and Politics

Everybody knows that politicians lie. But there was a time in Britain when the Duke of Wellington
could say, according to
Paul Johnson
(subscription required), of Sir Robert Peel: “I have sat in many cabinets with him,
and I have never known him, in public or
in private, say anything which he did not believe to be the strict truth.”

We have certainly progressed a long way since then.

The question is: why do today’s politicians today lie so much? The answer is pretty obvious. We require
them to lie. We refuse to be contented with the truth. We want our politicians to tell us what
we want to hear and nothing less will satisfy us.

Perhaps we can understand why people are upset with President Bush for not talking up the economy
and not rallying the American people for the war on terror. They want him to tell them the things
they want to hear.

Maybe President Bush’s problem is that he just doesn’t like telling lies.

The Coalition between the Left and Islamic Terror

It still seems almost beyond belief: the coalition between the western left and
the Islamicists. Is it really possible that the champions of women, minorities,
gays, and lesbians could really be allied with the Islamic terrorists.

The answer is clearly: Yes. Judging from this article by
Douglas Davis,
there exists a formal alliance in Britain between the lsft and radical Islam.

You don’t have to search for them under rocks. They are organizing in the
open, holding conferences in Cairo, and have an official joint committee.

The steering committee of the Marxist-Islamist alliance
consists of 33 members — 18 from myriad hard-Left groups, three from
the radical wing of the Labour party, eight from the ranks of the radical
Islamists and four leftist ecologists (also known as ‘Watermelons’
‐ green outside, red inside). The chairman is Andrew Murray, a leading
light in the British Communist party; co-chair is Muhammad Aslam Ijaz,
of the London Council of Mosques. Among the major players from the
Left are Lindsey German, who resigned as editor of the Socialist
Workers’ party newspaper to become convenor of the Stop the War
coalition; John Rees,
also of the SWP, and, of course, George Galloway.

What could be uniting them? It’s hate, of course, the universal glue of
militant mass movements. And what the fundamentalist Muslims and secular Lefties
both hate is us:

Points of potential disagreement between the hard Left
and radical Islam — democracy, human rights, xenophobia, free-expression,
feminism, homosexuality, abortion, among many others — would seem to
pose insuperable barriers to the union. Not so. The hurdles have been
neatly vaulted in the interest of mutual hatreds: America, Israel,
globalisation, capitalism and imperialism.
Anti-Semitism is never far from the surface.

It’s breathtaking. America. Capitalism. Globalization. The three things
that have brought the billions of the world to freedom and prosperity are the very things
that these people have combined to assault and destroy.

Legislating The Morality of Health

How important is diet and exercise to a healthy life? Everyone knows, of course, that it
is very important. You can change your life by ending unhealthy eating habits and by
starting a program of moderate exercise.

Everybody knows this, but is it true?

TechCentral Station’s
Sandy Szwarc
and now
John Luik have been pulling out some research that says “not so fast.”

For instance, we all know that thin is healthy. But is it? Luik cites longitudinal research that
says that thin is dangerous:

Take, for example, one of the most extensive and publicized efforts in health
promotion of all time, the Mr Fit (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial) which was
specifically designed to establish the truth of health promotion by showing that heart disease
and cancer could be reduced through reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking. After
sixteen years of study, the intervention groups, which had received extensive assistance with
exercise, changing diet and smoking cessation, had results which were not significantly better
than the group that had received none of these "health promotion" interventions. Indeed, the
intervention group, despite lower rates of smoking, actually had higher rates of lung cancer.
What MR Fit showed was precisely how lifestyle interventions failed to reduce
mortality from multifactoral diseases like cancer and heart disease.

Then there is this:

Consider the Framingham study. Begun in 1950 as a longitudinal investigation of the
causes of cardiovascular disease, some 5,209 men and women aged 30-59 were followed for 30 years on
the assumption that those who were thinnest would have significantly lower risks for heart disease.
But in 1979 when three of the study’s lead researchers published their data it was found that for
men the highest risk -- that is the worst life expectancy -- was for the thinnest men; men who were
25-40% fatter than the ideal weight were living the longest. For women,
mortality was elevated only for the very thin and the very fat.

The bigger problem is that the health promotion movement is advancing a moral idea under the
color of science, the idea that longevity is a good thing. But is it? Is it worth adding a few
years onto your life by, for instance, avoiding spicy and fatty foods?

If, indeed, it is hard to
show that diet and exercise have much of an influence on longevity, then why should the government
be getting into the business of health promotion?
“When those in favour of getting the State involved in the lifestyle intervention
business begin to speak about what to do about these claims, they cease to speak as
exalted scientists and become simply moralists.” Or, as the left likes to say, they are legislating
morality.

And that assumes that a long life is a good thing. Is it?

Government Guts Gifted Kids

All you need to say about government education is: Why? When the working
class of the nineteenth century were crowding around the school house door,
when 90 percent of children were literate and 90 percent of them went to school, why
did government have to take over?

And why do liberals, who so famously celebrate diversity, want one size fits all
when it comes to the education of our children?

One thing they want is to keep gifted children back. They want to mainstream
everyone’s kids so that nobody gets left behind—or gets too far ahead. Even
President Bush has signed onto this pernicious notion.

Some people have been trying to do something about this.
Thomas Sowell marks the death of a longtime champion
of special education for gifted kids, Professor Julian Stanley of Johns Hopkins University.

Stanley ran a bunch of programs for gifted kids at Johns Hopkins.

He created special programs for unusually bright high school
students on weekends and during the summer at Johns Hopkins University.
The success of these programs
has inspired similar programs at Purdue University and elsewhere.

Such programs have not only produced academic benefits, the gifted
students in such programs have expressed an almost pathetic gratitude
for finally being in a setting where they are comfortable with their
peers and are viewed positively by their teachers.

In regular public school classrooms, these gifted students have
been too often resented by their classmates and their teachers alike.
Some teachers have seemed glad to be able to catch them
in occasional mistakes.

Yes. You can understand why many public school teachers wouldn’t be too fond of having bright
kids around. Students in graduate colleges of education usually come from the less
able students in undergrad school.

But the question is, why is the government in this business in the first place?
Can’t we trust parents to know what is best for their children?

The Corrupted University

One thing about big business. Whenever some CEO steps out of line, the whole nation
descends on him in unison. Americans are shocked, shocked, by corporate malfeasance.

But suppose there is corruption and malfeasance at a government university? What then?
For some reason, nobody cares.

So when a bright young law professor gets the shaft on tenure from his department because
he failed to sign a petition supporting the rights of the notorious plagiarist Ward Churchill of
the University of Colorado, we don’t get to hear about department heads being terminated and
Vice Chancellors resigning. Indeed, if anyone attacks the university they get the treatment. McCarthyism!
Freedom of Speech! And the rest of the liberal attack arsenal.

According to
Professor X
William Bradford is an untenured associate professor of law at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis with
“ a stunning record of publication, including a book, a forthcoming book, and 21 articles in law reviews or in books.”
But one third of the faculty of law recently voted against awarding tenure and against continuing his
position as untenured faculty.

Bradford believes that he was denied tenure because he refused to sign a
petition circulated in the law school this spring which supported Ward Churchill, the
Professor of Ethnic Studies at Colorado who described the victims of 9/11 as
"little Eichmanns" deserving what they got. The petition was circulated by Florence Roisman,
who is a full
professor holding a prestigious Chair in Law at the school.

Of course Florence Roisman is a left-wing professor with close ties to the administration. She is
a part of the march through the institutions that have reduced so much of academe to a left-wing
echo chamber. And the university administration is supporting her in the interests of
“protecting the institution.”

For us ordinary mortals that don’t get to play around with other peoples’ money in this way, there
are two sad aspects to this sorry affair. The first is the position of Professor Bradford, and his
victimization by the left-wing totalitarians. It is wrong for a government university to deny
anyone due process like this.

But the bigger issue is the damage that this sort of institutional decadence does to the nation. Everybody
gets worked up when a CEO betrays his trust, and rightly so. But the damage done
by 10,000 university professors abusing our trust is as bad or worse. After all, nobody thinks
of corporate executives as moral exemplars. But we do expect teachers and professors to rise above
petty politics and political agendas; that is why we privilege them with titles and with tenure.
Instead they have turned the university into a cesspool
of politics and intellectual marginalization

Eventually the university radicals will get their comeuppance. But not before they do a lot more damage.

Teacher Knows Best at Wal-Mart

How will the unions’ new strategy on increased organizing affect you and me? Well, here is how. The National Education Assocation, the teachers’ union, is organizing a boycott of Wal-Mart.

Er, just why would it be so important for the teachers to take their eye off the ball and their critical national role in educating our children to worry about Wal-Mart and its employees? That is what Michael Reitz is wondering too. Apart from the fact that the NEA is worried that “Wal-Mart employees are forced to seek government-subsidized health care benefits, which drains billions from public money that could be used to fund public education,”

The NEA even criticizes the Walton family, the founders of Wal-Mart, for contributing to “anti-public education efforts like private school voucher initiatives and anti-public educations PACs.”

What’s the problem, you say? Why stop the NEA when it starts worrying more about Wal-Mart than defending its own monopolies and privileges? Good point. The more “cycles” that the NEA puts into union boycott campaigns the less it can put into opposing education reform.

Al Qaeda's Seven Phase Strategy

Through analysis of an interview in Der Spiegel
Bill Roggio reviews the grand seven stages of Al Qaeda’s plan to bring
the whole world under a new caliphate.

The big question is how seriously we should take it. So a rich kid holed
out in Afghanistan has formulated a grand plan to take over the world. So
he has staged a spectacular attack on the icons of the great world hegemon. So
he predicted that the US would attack Iraq in response. So he got a bunch
of young hotheads fighting the Great Satan in Iraq.

So what?

The two competing western responses to the outrages of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7
both assume that Al Qaeda is a major movement that requires western response.
The Bush strategy is to move militarily and culturally into the Middle East against
the regimes that condone or encourage terrorism. The left’s strategy is to blame
the west for its hegemonic oppression of the Middle East and to demand
withdrawal from the West Bank and Iraq.

In evaluating these two strategies we must confess that we do not really
know if Al Qaeda is a real mass movement with the power to inspire millions
of young men to join up (e.g. another Nazi movement) or whether it is little more than a rich kids’ talking
shop spiced with a bit of mayhem (e.g. another Baader-Meinhof gang). But
we can figure out how this uncertainty meshes with the two strategies, Bush’s
and the left’s. In Bush’s strategy we are taking no chances; we are treating
the terrorists as a serious enemy that may turn out to be very powerful. The
left’s approach is a good way to encourage Al Qaeda to become in fact
a militant mass movement by giving it effortless
victories (unilateral withdrawal from Iraq and the West Bank) that would encourage it to believe that it was
a powerful movement on the march.

Coming up soon, of course, is the question of Iran.

Liberals Said It Couldn't Be Done

Remember the Carter malaise? Remember 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment?
Remember crime in New York City? How long ago it all seems. Even the crack epidemic has subsided.

And the liberals said there was nothing we could do about it. America had become ungovernable.

In a remarkable piece in the London Times that could never have appeared in The New
York Times
Andrew Sullivan
reminds the Brits just how much things have turned around in America in the last 25 years since the nadir
of inflation, unemployment, and gas lines in 1979-80.

He is writing all this not to sneer at the Brits but to cheer them up. He is telling them not
to worry about lager louts, rampant crime, lone parents, and bombers from Leeds, but to realize that things don’t have to stay in the
toilet. America went through a phase like that and then things started to get better.

But the liberals said it couldn’t be done.

Liberals have not just said it couldn’t be done. They have done more. They have
said, and they continue to say, that it never happened. And that is the striking take-away from Sullivan’s article. When
you read about how everything has gotten better all across the fruited plain, from the economy to crime to drugs to divorce, you
think to yourself: “Why do I never seem to read about this in the MSM? Why do I get to read nothing
but sulphurous rage against George W. Bush? Why do we still hear Democratic politicians claiming that
the 1980s were a lost decade of greed and homelessness?”

Sullivan is right, of course, to credit all the improvement to

civil society — that hard-to-define Burkean mélange of families,
friends, small organisations, volunteers, churches and PTAs.

But it is important to remember why Burke was rambling on about the “little platoons” back
in 1790 at the height of the French Revolution. He was proposing the virtue of bottom-up civil society against the top-down oppression of know-it-all elites.
He was proposing that one of the most important jobs of an elite was to stop meddling and let people
get on with their lives.

That is what the conservative movement has been all about. It wants to set the overall parameters
and let ordinary people get on with it. Because then, in the words of the American philosopher
Rush Limbaugh, ordinary people will do extraordinary things.

The French people still, two hundred years later, remain unable to escape from under the
yoke of an overweening, meddling elite.

The liberals said it couldn’t be done.

Many Muslims are on Our Side

On the “just how big are they anyway” front, the incomparable Mark Steyn clears the bases in the Spectator this week. Warming up with the story of the Innu people of Davis Inlet in Labrador, Canada, and their culture of “snorting drugs, glue, petrol and pretty much anything else,” and how the “impeccably progressive soft-lefties” in the Canadian government actually managed to make things worse, he then turns to the Islamicist terrorists.

The fact is, he shows, the Arab chaps are losers. And not just in the terror cells.

Even in corners of the Arab world that have the veneer of modernity, people say nutty stuff to you all the time. Not misfit weirdsmobiles in loser jobs, but fellows at the very heart of the community. To pluck at random, take Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, respected Egyptian professor, lecturer at Cairo University and head of the Sharia faculty at Al-Azhar university, the Harvard of Sunni Islam.

Who hit the twin towers? “‘I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act.’” Oh yeah.

People that lie to themselves in this way are not guys that are going to succeed in demolishing the western world. The Islamists, like the glue-sniffing Innu, are

a dysfunctional amalgam of traditional and Western culture, fundamentalist Islam filtered through an old-school European fascist movement. Like the Innu, they’re hooked on welfare and the glorification of self-destruction.

Michael J. Totten agrees. It’s not about us. It’s about them. And there are plenty of Muslims who are not just “moderate” but pro-American.

Take Iran, for instance. The regime is Islamist. "Death to America" is one of its rallying cries. But the Iranian "street" prefers "Death to the Ayatollahs." Few people in the world are as pro-American as the average Iranian.

Here’s the end game, according to Totten. “Empowered liberal-democratic Muslims with guns will defeat the Islamists in the end. We can’t do it without them.”

Last Union Breakup Led to More Organizing

Will the breakup make a difference to the union movement? That
the question as the Change To Win faction led by SEUI president Andy Stern
splits off from the AFL-CIO.

The last time the unions broke up was in the 1930s when the breakaway group, then as now, wanted to crank up organizing, according to
Carl F. Horowitz.

In 1935, a group of unions, led by Mine Workers President
John L. Lewis, formed a dissident faction within the American Federation
of Labor. The unions in this new Congress of Industrial Organizations
not returning to the fold were expelled a couple of years later.
The CIO, free to pursue its preferred strategy of direct confrontation,
changed the course of labor history. Using the sit-down strike, they organized large numbers of workers in the rubber,
steel, auto and other mass-production industries.

By the time the CIO had returned to the fold in 1955 they had changed the face of the US
labor union movement.

Now, of course, the labor leaders want to organize headline companies like
“Wal-Mart, Comcast, Clear Channel and Toyota,” as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney
told the AFL-CIO convention. They question is: Can the AFL-CIO or Change to Win
deliver?

Coverup! Clinton Administration Knew of 9/11 Plot!

Our objective friends at the MSM are very busy trumpeting the left-wing fantasies of a gold star mother
down in Texas this month. So they really don’t have the time to report the story that the Clinton Administration
knew of the Atta terror cell in 2000, according to evil
Fox News and NY Post columnist
Deborah Orin.

But according to rules set up by 9/11 commission member Jamie Gorelick while serving in the
Clinton Justice Department, the elite military
unit Able Danger, which found the Atta terror cell, couldn’t tell the FBI about it.

A year later the members of the Atta terror cell were driving airplanes into tall buildings.

Er, just what was a Clinton administration official doing on the 9/11 commission anyway? Oh, I see.
Democrats are altruistic and committed, so the usual rules about conflict of interest don’t apply.

And now commission staffers are doing a coverup to deny that they were ever briefed about the
Able Danger intelligence unit and its report.

Thank goodness that there is far more important news for the MSM to cover: the broken-hearted
left-wing mother down in Texas who only wants to be able to tell her story to President Bush.

What If They Are Stumble-Bums?

What is the difference between a bunch of would-be world conquerors who can talk
a good line and the ones who can deliver world domination?

It is hard to tell because anyone that can do a stand-up in front of a video camera. And it
is not too hard to stage a terrorist bombing and
fill a camera frame with mayhem and destruction.

Our friends in the international MSM can make these chaps look pretty imposing. But to Amir Taheri they
don’t look to great. His analysis of the video statement of mullah al-Zawahiri indicates that things
are not going too well.

For the past three years, al-Zawahiri had advocated a policy of focusing
the terrorists’ efforts on winning power in "vulnerable" Muslim countries — Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt. Yet his latest message shows that he is now persuaded
that such a strategy has little chance of success. All the countries targeted are doing well
in their war on terror;
Afghanistan and Pakistan may have already turned the tide.

The world is full of would-be world conquering world movements and voluble
spokesmen with their demands and their threats. The question is not whether you can summon
spirits from the vasty deep, as Harry Hotspur noted four hundred years ago.

The question is: Will they come?

Global Warming Convergence

Is global warming real? Up to now there had been a difference between surface temperature measurements
and satellite temperature measurements with surface temperature measurements coming in at 0.2 degrees
per decade and satellite temperature measurements showing 0.09 degrees per decade.

But now Roy Spencer reports that anomalies in the measurements from satellites
indicate that the satellite temperature series comes in much closer to the surface series.

Which indicates that “global warming is real.” So now the question is:

"how much has it warmed, and how much will it warm in the future?".
(Equally valid questions to debate are "how much of the warmth is man-made?",
"is warming necessarily a bad thing?",
and "what can we do about it anyway?").

Welfare in Paris

We don’t often get to read about the details of the welfare state in Old Europe due
to the language barrier. We Americans do not know French and German, and we should.
But here’s a story from
Sylvain Charat about
the poverty trap in France.

Yes, in France as elsewhere, it doesn’t pay for a woman to get off welfare because
she loses as much in benefits as she gains in income from work. So there are about half
a million people (although nobody knows exactly how many) who stay home from work and get
the RMI (revenu minimum d’insertion).

The French social model creates poverty. It transformed a system
that was supposed to be temporary into a permanent one. Willing to work, most people are thus forced
into behavioral poverty, since they are better off staying home.

And as we know, lengthy periods of unemployment are very harmful because people rapidly lose job skills
when they are out of the workforce.

Sooner or later, the French are going to have to suck it in and copy the cowboy Americans. They will
have to put a limit on welfare, just like we did in the United States. But we’ll be nice
about it. We’ll just pretend we
didn’t notice.

Trying to Smoke Out the Lawyers

Remember the great lawsuit against Big Tobacco? It was a noble crusade to make the tobacco companies pay for the damage they have
done to smokers. Well, not exactly. They are going to pay state governments
to compensate them for the extra health costs of smokers. Well, not exactly,
because smokers die early and cost government less than ordinary folk.

So what is going on with the great Tobacco Deal?

Smokers are going to pay tobacco companies who are going to pay state governments
and lawyers about $250 billion over 25 years.

But wait a minute. Can they do this? Doesn’t the U.S. Constitution forbid
the states from acting in concert without the consent of Congress as in
“Article I, Section 10 — the compacts clause — that “No state shall,
without the consent of
Congress ... , enter into any agreement or compact with another state.’”

That is what the Competitive Enterprise Institute is wondering, and it
is suing to have the whole Tobacco Deal declared unconstitutional.

You think they got a chance? Maybe, writes
Jonathan Rauch.

Turtles All The Way Down

The summer of ’05 seems to be turning into a good old-fashioned sophomore bull session, arguing
across the political divide about intelligent design vs. evolution.
Paul Campos, for my money, has the best entry yet. He argues that it’s
turtles all the way down, as in

The student asks the great sage, "O Master, upon what does the Earth rest?" The
sage replies, "O seeker of knowledge, the Earth rests on the back of an enormous turtle." The
student then asks, "Tell me, Wise One, upon what does this turtle rest?" The
sage answers with annoyance, "Well obviously it’s turtles all the way down!"

As usual, the two sides are arguing past each other.

First, the secular liberal is mistaken in his belief that there are special
people called "scientists" (or more broadly, "rational thinkers," "members of the reality-based
community" etc.) whose beliefs are based solely on something called "the facts" or "evidence" or
what have you, and who therefore don’t rely on faith-based reasoning.

Because it all comes down to faith. But the conservatives are arguing the opposite, and just as
foolishly:

Second, the cultural conservative is mistaken in his belief - a belief
held by many proponents of intelligent design theory - that a more tolerant attitude on the part
of natural scientists toward supernatural explanations would confirm that the divine origins
of life are empirically verifiable. Science can tell us nothing about God for the same reason
that a comprehensive physical description of the Mona Lisa, down to the level of subatomic particles,
would tell us nothing worth knowing about the Mona Lisa.

The British radio astronomer Bernard Lovell recently told
Mary Wakefield
that he wasn’t too sure
about the Big Bang. This is the guy who helped invent the radio telescope that was used to detect
the background radiation from the Big Bang.

"The Big Bang? Well it is of course conventional wisdom that there was one, but I’m not so sure," said Sir Bernard. "There is a tendency to talk about it as if it happened, but we really do not know."

He looked, as I remember, a little impatient. What about black holes, surely they exist?

"Everyone now believes in black holes, but they forget that the evidence is just circumstantial," he said. "One infers a black hole from plotting in detail the structure of a distant galaxy but no one really knows."

I felt confused. Why does everybody talk about these things as if they’ve been proved? I asked. "Young people get enthusiastic. And I suppose they just think it makes a better story."

Of course, Sir Bernard Lovell is 90. He could just be confused. Or maybe he is a postmodernist, and he believes in “narratives.”

It's Because We are Taking Over the World

What could we do, the war critics ask, to deal with Al Qaeda’s demands so that they will go away and leave us alone? What have we done to stir them up to such rage?

The thesis of the “Why do they hate us” crowd gets a good airing from the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner.

Gardner walks through the usual routine. The terror masters do not exactly tell us what they want.

But they have, through smuggled video cassettes and internet broadcasts, and in their own pedantic and lecturing way, made their demands clear. These are: the withdrawal of all Western forces from Muslim lands, especially Iraq, the withdrawal of support for Israel, and of support for "apostate" governments, specifically in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Of course, he admits, Al Qaeda’s grand plan is a single caliphate from the Philippines to Gibraltar, but by meeting their demands on Iraq we could damp down the enthusiasm in the Muslim street. And then the terrorists would probably go away.

But this approach, treating the West as just there and the terrorists as angry victims enraged by oppression misses the point.

The West is a world-historical movement that wants to take over the whole world and convert it to democracy and capitalism. You can personalize this if you like in the person of George W. Bush, but that would miss the point. The leader of the United States plays the role of the leader of the world-historical western movement whatever his party or his name. The radical Muslims rightly understand that if things keep going the way they are then their culture and way of life will be destroyed. The US invasion of Iraq and military presence in the Arab lands is merely a local manifestation of the world-historical force of western capitalism and democracy at work. The US deploys its armed forces in Iraq and the Arab lands because they are resisting our world-historical force.

This conflict is not going to be resolved by dialog and diplomacy. It is a clash between two world-historical forces. One of them will win, and the other will be destroyed.

Inside the Movement

We should have been reading this stuff years ago, but better late than never. The London Times
sends an
undercover reporter
into a group in the Islamicist terror network in Britain and finds—well,
an ordinary mass movement driven by rage and hate.

So now we know what we are dealing with, now
we can get cracking to solve it. It seems that the number one thing we can do is stop the welfare.
These noble terrorists and their leaders make a virtue out of living off welfare, able-bodied, adult
men as they are. The undercover Times reporter

discovered that the core of the group consisted of about 40 young men guided by
a handful of spiritual mentors. Many are of Bangladeshi origin, jobless and living in council flats
[i.e., public housing] in east London. They use aliases, taking the names of the prophet Muhammad’s
companions.

At their meetings — which often included school-age teenagers — they were fed a constant
diet of propaganda warning that the kuffar [non-Muslims] are out to destroy them.

Integration with British society is scorned, as is any form of democratic process.
Followers are encouraged to exploit the benefits system. They avoid jobs which could
bring them into contact with western women or might lead them to contribute to the economy
of a nation they are taught to despise.

This shouldn’t be too hard. If these chaps had to go to work they would have a lot less time
to plan bloody revolution. They would have to get with the program, and they would have to learn
how to make it in the economy, earning a living and serving the consumer.

Your move, Prime Minister Blair.

Jobs Disconnect Continues

The increase in non-farm payroll jobs this last month was impressive, at 207,000 new jobs
since the June establishment survey. But the household survey was even more impressive. (The
household survey is the one used to come up with the unemployment rate.)
It showed an increase of 438,000 jobs.

Why is there such a huge difference between the establishment survey and
the household survey? Great minds wonder too. But here are the numbers in the
government’s Employment Situation Summary.

Economy Great, Americans Are Miserable

What’s wrong with the Yanks, asks British commentator
Gerard Baker?
The economy is great, and basically has been for twenty years ever since the Reagan years,
with a couple of shallow recessions just to keep things ship-shape. Yet

only 4 per cent of the public rate the economy to be in excellent
condition; a further 37 per cent describe it as good. But 59 per cent say it’s
either not good or poor. This incongruous misery is reflected in a broader national
funk. Only 32 per cent of Americans think the country is on the right track;
54 per cent say it’s headed in the wrong direction.

Now why would the American people think that everything stinks? It could be
that their appreciation of the economy always lags its actual performance. They tend
to think the economy is in a recession for years after robust economic growth resumes. They only get
really optimistic just before a fall.

It couldn’t be, could
it, that a sector of the political class are engaged, as they were in the 1980s, in
systematically talking down the economy and the nation? Whereas in the 1990s they
were regularly fainting in the aisles with wonder at the genius of the Clinton economy?
No. That could not happen in a country blessed with an objective, professional corps of
news journalists and with a patriotic and loyal Democratic opposition.

At any rate, the objective facts are that the economy of the United States is the
envy of the world. We supply-side fanatics think we have an explanation for this.
Tax rate cuts. During the administration of the “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan and the
mentally challenged George W. Bush Congress enacted, upon the strong recommendation of
the executive branch, significant tax rate cuts. (Note to you liberals: tax rate
cuts. There’s a secret in there if you have the intelligence to figure it out.)

Yes. Just like Calvin Coolidge and Jack Kennedy, Reagan and Bush implemented significant tax rate cuts. In the “narrative”
of capitalist economics, tax rate cuts are said to lead to significant increases in
sustained economic output.

Not that that means anything. Oh no. It’s just a narrative, after all,
and there is no reason why any one narrative should be privileged above other narratives.

New Biggies Help Self-employed

Everybody knows that the e-businesses like Amazon.com and eBay are revolutionizing
the economy. Or something like that. But under the radar they are revolutionizing
business in ways you wouldn’t expect, according to
Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

eBay is offering health insurance
“to their `Power Sellers’-- basically people who sell
$1,000 or more a month and get good customer reviews.” So not only does eBay provide
a marketplace for millions of buyers and sellers, but it also is facilitating their
transactions with services that we traditionally expect from top tier employers.

You can do things now, as a little guy, that formerly
could only be done with a big organization. But what’s interesting is
the symbiosis here. The little guys can do as well as they do because
of the big organizations, like eBay or Amazon,
that they associate with, not in spite of them.

Our liberal elites have been so busy defending Bill Clinton and hating George W. Bush
that they are completely missing the revolution in the workplace that millions
of Americans are experiencing.

There has been a quiet revolution in business technology
over the last generation, in which business skills that used to be considered an
“art” have become paint-by-numbers technology. What used to be called “a good
bedside manner” in client relations is now called “managing client expectations.”
There are lots of similar little changes in business practice
that have been systematized and refined over the last
generation and most of it has happened under the radar. The symbiosis between big
business and the little guy reported by Reynolds is just one example of this trend.

No doubt our liberal masters will wake up one day and demand to change it all, like they
did a century ago when they woke up to the horror of jumped-up barrow boys
like telegraph clerk Carnegie
and bookkeeper Rockefeller running mega-corporations.

A century ago they cut the upstarts down to size with anti-trust law
and economic regulation. Will they do something
similar this time around? Or will it be too late?

What's the Big Deal About Stem Cells?

Ever since Ron Reagan Jr. appealingly promised at the Democratic National Convention in 2004
that embryonic stem cell research would yield miracles, the question has lingered.
Just what is going on in the politics of stem cell research? Is it just the
Democrats creating a wedge issue, dividing pro-life Republicans from the practical
majority of Americans who would reflexively support research on “new hope” for
Alzheimers, cancer, AIDS sufferers?

The conservative line, rehearsed here by Michael Fumento,
is that embryonic stem cell research hasn’t produced anything whereas adult
stem cell research has already produced promising cures. Therefore we can afford not
to tread in the questionable area of “harvesting” embryos. Democrats clearly want
to sell the idea that anyone who isn’t in favor of stem cell research is anti-science.

Behind the posturing is the maneuvering of the research interests who
see a chance for a lot of government research funding. And now Senator Frist has
come out in favor of embryonic stem cell research funding.

But the question still lingers. What is really going on under the blankets?

China Converts to Christianity

It’s not a story that leads in The New York Times. It’s not an issue that you’d expect to furrow the brow of Katie Couric on NBC’s Today Show. But China is converting to Christianity. How much? How fast? According to Richard Spencer

State-sanctioned Protestant and Catholic churches in China count up to 35 million followers, making Christianity the third most practiced religion in the country after Buddhism and Taoism. Islam ranks fourth.

Even more significant is a steadily growing network of underground or “house” churches, which are said to have up to 100 million members.

That is considerably higher than the numbers estimated in David Aikman’s book Jesus in Beijing, published in 2003, which estimated 70 million in the “house” churches, with estimated growth at seven percent per year.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we count the worldwide explosion of Christianity as a marker. Whenever you see people making the transition from the life of the sun to the life of the clock, from the life as a fatalistic peasant to life as a purposeful citizen you will find enthusiastic Christianity: in the favelas of Latin America, in the burgeoning shanty towns of Africa, in the exploding economy of China. Read all about it in Chapter 15: The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism.

Life must have a purpose, especially life in the self-governing global world market, whatever the liberals say.

Moderate Democrats Put Party over Principle

Five years ago a group of moderate Democrats signed onto a declaration of principle
on Social Security at FDR’s old Hyde Park mansion. They said, according to
Michael G. Franc

“We believe in shifting the focus of America’s ... social insurance
programs from transferring wealth to creating wealth.” President Bush couldn’t
have said it better. That’s exactly why he and his allies in Congress have
proposed adding personal retirement accounts to the Social Security system: so workers
can get a better return on their retirement tax dollars.

You can see the full text of the Hyde Park Declaration
here.

So where do Evan Bayh, John Kerry, Mary Landrieu, Joseph Lieberman, and Blanche Lincoln stand
on President Bush’s propsoal to reform Social Security? They have joined the extremist
liberal Democrats who have declared themselves utterly opposed to the President’s program.

No doubt in 2000 they thought they were getting on board with soon-to-be-elected President Gore’s
program. That would be different wouldn’t it.

Of course you can understand why Democrats would be nervous about privatizing Social Security.
If the average American senior got her monthly check from Fidelity rather than from
the U.S. Treasury, why would she vote for a Democrat?

The Power of Ideas against Terror

It was 58 years ago that Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Iran’s greatest
living writer, Ahmad Kasravi. Six months later, Kasravi was dead. Writes
Amir Taheri:

At the time of his murder Kasravi was one of Iran’s leading intellectuals.
A veritable Renaissance man, he was a senior jurist at the high court, a distinguished historian,
a magnetic orator, a master of the Persian prose, and a best-selling author.

So why did Khomeini arrange his murder? Was it because Kasravi was a critic of Shi’ism? Was it
because Khomeini’s book had been published to yawns while “publication of any of
Kasravi’s book[s] was a national event with reverberations throughout society?”

Thirty years later, Khomeini’s thugs were digging up Kasravi’s grave and burning his books, and
Khomeini was executing his enemies by the thousands. But today “Kasravi is re-emerging as one of Iran’s best-loved and most read authors,”
while Khomeini’s unreadable work remains unread.

Today, we know, Iran is a nation in a pre-revolutionary situation, its people seething with rage
and despair while the world turns its gaze away. And Iranian writers like Amir Taheri burn with
a hope that the dreadful night of Iranian darkness will clear away and reveal a new dawn of hope. They
hope that: “Terrorism is, in fact, the tool of the intellectually lazy politicians.”

They hope that

A thousand years from now Kasravi will still be remembered as a great Iranian writer
and thinker while Khomeini would have become a footnote in history

And we can hope with them.

Judge Obstruction: Now They Tell Us

Now they tell us. The Democratic tactic of obstructing judges is hurting them at the polls.
Manuel Miranda
reports that Republican pollsters observed the effect back in 2002.
In the 2002 mid-term elections

In three states, Missouri, Minnesota, and Georgia, single-issue, pro-life voters
came out to vote in unusually large numbers in a mid-term election. Their margin was, in fact,
larger than the Republican margin of victory in all three states.

In an election framed around national security and lower taxes, only one issue moved these
marginal voters to the polls: judges.

In Texas, John Conrnyn was on the ropes and out of money until he focused his campaign on Democratic
obstruction of the Appeals Court nomination of State Justice Patricia Owen.

In Colorado, Wayne Allard increased his Hispanic vote by 20 percent and won election in a squeaker
by campaigning against Democratic obstruction of Miguel Estrada for an Appeals Court seat.

It feels like it is Dirty Harry time on the Judge Roberts nomination. Go ahead. Make My Day.