Reproductive Rights for Men

OK girls, what price Roe v. Wade now? A father has just sued to avoid paying child support on the grounds that he never wanted the child and shouldn’t have to pay for that unwanted child.

In other words, he is pro-choice in the sense of NARAL Pro-Choice America and he is demanding his right to choice. Just as a woman can make the choice after conception whether to take her baby to term, so this young plaintiff is demanding his pro-choice rights too. According to CNN:

The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood.

Well, that’s not the point, Jennifer Brown of the pro-abortion Legal Momentum insists, according to CBS 11 in Dallas:

"Roe is based on an extreme intrusion by the government — literally to force a woman to continue a pregnancy she doesn't want," Brown said. "There's nothing equivalent for men. They have the same ability as women to use contraception, to get sterilized."

Well, that’s up to the Supreme Court to decide, according to the concept of the Living Constitution. After all, things have changed since the 1973 Roe decision and the Constitution must change with it.

But conservative Mona Charen isn’t impressed.

The point (and it is not one the feminists will find in their quiver) is that sexuality requires responsibility — and that doesn't just mean using birth control. It means that if you engage in sex you have an automatic obligation to any child that may result. Pro-choice women have been vociferously rejecting this responsibility for decades. It should come as no surprise that men are inclined to do the same.

Now that’s a thought.

The Sensible Man's Global Warming Policy

Now that Kyoto is dead and the president’s “so-called ‘Asia-Pacific partnership on clean development and climate’, a counter-Kyoto grouping of the United States, China, India, Australia, Japan and South Korea,” is starting to look like the coming thing, it’s a good time to take a serious look at global warming. Here is a well-staffed take from Britain’s Lord Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher.

It is well established that since about 1860 there has been a significant warming in global temperature, around 0.6 deg Celsius—which coincided with the start of reliable temperature records.

But the earth has experienced warming before.

It is well established, for example, that a thousand years ago, well before industrialisation, there was what has become known as the mediaeval warm period, when temperatures were probably almost as high as, if not higher than, they are today. Going back even further, during the Roman empire, it was even warmer — so much so that the Romans were able to produce drinkable wine in the north of England. More recently, during the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was what has become known as the little ice age, when the Thames was regularly frozen over in winter, and substantial ice fairs held on the frozen river became a popular attraction.

And, of course, we don’t know why it was warm in Roman times and cold in the Little Ice Age.

So what should we do about global warming, if there is global warming, and if it has harmful consequences.

Far and away the most cost-effective policy for the world to adopt is to identify the most harmful consequences that may flow from global warming and, if they start to occur, to take action to counter them.

In other words, if the ocean really does start threatening low lying areas with inundation, we take action to mitigate the inundation.

That, coincidentally, is what the president’s policy is designed to do.

The Real Issue on Aborted Dubai Deal

The awful spectacle of the Republican Party scuttling to the right of the Democrats on national security over the Dubai ports deal obscures the real issue.

That Democrats are clueless, wrong on national security and wrong on economic policy. Again.

When President Bush infuriated the compassionate classes with his warning to the world that “you are with us or you are against us” he was articulating the overarching strategy of the United States.

That strategy is to invite the world to join us in our commonwealth of trust and good faith. We will trust those who are trustworthy, and we will fight those who are not.

The aborted Dubai port deal symbolizes this policy in spades. Dubai Ports World is, as Robert M. Green reminds us, probably the “global best practice” company in container port operations. They are right in the middle of the huge effort to upgrade the security and the efficiency of global trade.

Carved from the Dubai Ports Authority, the company's reputation for technological implementation dates back to its project to automate many of its processes in the 1990s. At that time, Dubai became one of the first ports in the world to implement so-called e-shipping, digitizing most of its planning, scheduling and operations while "building out" a CRM (customer relations management)/Web portal system that was one of the first of its kind used by a port.



According to American e-commerce experts who followed the UAE technology implementation as it has evolved, it was Dubai's willingness to invest in IT that allowed it to offer container shipping and related services at lowered costs for its customers. Last year, a Homeland Security official called the two-terminal Dubai facility "modern and extremely efficient ports."

This sort of story indicates that DB World is clearly showing, by its actions, that it belongs on the side that is “with us” rather than against us.

But you can see where the Democrats are coming from. If DB World represents global best practice in the ports business it is a threat to their union paymasters moving the cargo and driving the cranes and trying to continue as pencil-and-paper clerks in the face of a massive adoption of e-commerce practices. And it is also a threat to the monopolistic stevedoring companies that have comfortably extracted rent from the cosy port management trade for decades.

For ordinary Americans, DB World could be thought of as the Wal-Mart of the ports business. But for the port unions and companies, DB World is the grim reaper.

Well, after a week or so of political firestorm the Democrats have got their way, for the moment. No Wal-Marts in our ports! And no terrorist foreigners!

But we forget, as we obsess about terrorists and golden temples, that underneath all the froth and the confected rage of the well-educated Islamicist terrorists out for their bit of fun —just as European anarchists had their fun in Europe a century ago — a monster is stirring. That monster is what Marx called the productive forces. In the end, the monster will not be denied.

You can rail if you like at the Wal-Marts and the DB Worlds just as the fashionably radical railed against Standard Oil and U.S. Steel a century ago. But when these companies are bringing down the cost of doing business, you are railing against a force of nature.

One way or another, the world has to adapt to the new facts on the ground. When John D. Rockefeller reduced the price of oil by 90 percent and Andrew Carnegie reduced the price of steel by two thirds, the world changed. When Wal-Mart changes the face of retail with its relentless cost-cutting, and DB World galvanizes the freight forwarding business with its early adoption of web-based information management, then you’d better get with the program.

But for the progressive soul of the Democratic Party, that is inconceivable.

In Britain, Forget About the Social Safety Net

The big idea of the welfare state is its safety net. In the old days, we all know, people lived in fear of sickness, knowing that a single visit to the hospital could wipe them out.

Thank goodness that is over. In compassionate Britain for instance, with “free at the point of service” national health care you can never lose your house from paying your medical bills.

Or can you?

According to James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In, you can lose your house and everything.

In Britain, the National Health Service will indeed pay for all your medical costs. But if you end up disabled, or needing long-term care, they will kick you out of hospital, by reclassifying you. They will say that you don’t need “medical” care but “social” care. So there.

And when you are in social care, in a private nursing home, they can come for your house.

Bartholomew tells of horror stories televised on Britain’s Panorama program. Lots of people thought they would get their cradle-to-grave protection from the NHS.

But then they had got severe Alzheimer's Disease or had endured disabling strokes or had been knocked down by a car and become totally paralysed. They were treated, for a while, as patients in NHS beds - for free. But then they were shunted out into private nursing homes and told that they would have to sell their homes and pay for their care.

The TV program showed a clip of

a fresh-faced Tony Blair boldly declaring in 1997 that he did not want a Britain in which old people needing care had to sell their homes. Well, that is precisely what, after nine years of his rule, we have got. It was all blather and lies.

So in reality, Britain is just as mean and Wild West a country as the United States, where you have to spend down your assets before you can have your nursing home care paid by Medicaid.

Liberals Shocked, Shocked at Spring Break Bacchanalia

Back in the day, when liberals were young, they were advising young people to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Or was it drop in and turn off?

Anyway, after telling young people to let it all hang out, after a generation of sex education showing teenagers how separate sex from marriage and the bearing of children, now all of a sudden liberals have decided that they don’t like it.

Here we have millions of college kids taking the liberals’ advice and getting it on with everyone in sight, and liberals have decided that it is all wrong. The whole thing is symbolized for liberals by the epidemic of binge drinking among college students, which comes to a climax during the party season of Spring Break.

Never mind the boys, of course. The problem is college girls gone wild, writes Cheryl Wetzstein. (There’s a name for the wet T-shirt, beer-drinking season!)

Spring break has become an unhealthy "binge-fest," says the head of a major medical association, citing a poll that shows that 74 percent of female college students agree that alcohol is an excuse for outrageous behavior.
"Spring break is broken," Dr. J. Edward Hill, president of the American Medical Association, said yesterday.

Oh my!

And here’s the shocker. According to an AMA survey of 664 current and former college co-eds:

Seventy-four percent said women used drinking as an excuse for "outrageous behavior," such as public nudity, dancing on tables and participating in drinking contests.

What do these liberals expect? They smash the traditional culture of the respectable middle class. They marginalize men as oppressors and rapists. They create co-ed dorms. They actively encourage GLBT culture. They teach young women that the finest and noblest thing in the world is to kill their babies so they can have a career. They turn college into a political indoctrination experience. They fire the President of Harvard for suggesting that more research was needed to better understand innate male/female differences.

And then they are shocked at “girls gone wild?”

Give me a break.

Harvard Heading for Toilet

Many of us hoped that the fall of Larry Summers would not mean the end of Harvard University as we know it. We hoped that the Harvard Corporation, the governing body of the university, would act to preserve the univesrity’s ancient tradition of scholarship. But perhaps we were being too optimistic.

In The Weekly Standard retired Olin Foundation executive director James Piereson gives us the bad news.

The Harvard Corporation is a corporation very like the university faculty. There are a couple of liberal Democrats, policy wonk types, and there is a “feminist” seat and a “black” seat.

The membership of the Corporation, in other words, runs the gamut of political opinion from A to B, from liberal Democrat to left-wing Democrat, and seeks to represent the same groups as are active on the arts and sciences faculty. It stands to reason that they would be willing to force out their president.

That means that Harvard is going to get worse and worse. Harvard is completely under the control of the “progressive” class that emerged at the end of the 19th century and ruled the politics and culture of the United States for the entire 20th century.

Those of us who live to divest this proud oligarchy of its power, its privileges, and its sinecures had better understand that we have a fight on our hands. And we had better understand that the progressive class may not go as quietly as the landed aristocracy.

But at least we are the good guys.

Of course It's a Civil War

In the wake of the bombing of the Shia temple in Samarra, the MSM is polling the American people and discovering that an “overwhelming majority of Americans believe that fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war,” according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.

Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are outraged. To him, it’s all about the MSM pushing their “action line” that the war in Iraq is a mistake and we are losing, and Bush should be impeached. So the MSM is saying:

”We're the ones that want the civil war! We've been hoping for it for three years. We're hyping it, and now we got 80% of Americans thinking it's going to happen.”

Come on Rush. Of course there’s a civil war in Iraq. Has been ever since our forces drove into Baghdad in 2003 and the Saddam regime suddenly disappeared and went underground.

But because of the power of the United States the Saddamite and Al Qaeda factions cannot conduct an open civil war with armies marching to and fro across Iraq. They would if they could, but they do not have the power to execute a conquer and hold strategy. Instead, they must use the raiding strategy of IEDs and suicide bombs and work on the international left-wing media to declare a disaster.

Our strategy is to build up a new regime in Iraq that will have legitimacy, in the sense used by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, and will have an army and police force strong enough in operational and moral capability to put down an outbreak of frank civil war. It would have the power to prevent any armed group, army or militia, from coming out of hiding and converting from a raiding strategy to conquer-and-hold.

Actually, when you think about it, there will, eventually, be an attempt to convert the current insurgency to frank civil war. It will come when we draw down our forces. Our strategy is that when that happens, the Iraqi government security forces will be strong enough to put the insurgents down and score decisive victory in the ongoing Iraq Civil War.