The Iran Cloud Gets Bigger

A somber Mark Steyn writes about the Iran business, and wonders about what lies ahead as Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the west does nothing. In an article in City Journal he thinks about Facing Down Iran.

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?


For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

The problem really is, as it was in the 1930s, that the center ground of public opinion doesn’t want to do anything about the gathering storm. Back then people had had enough of war and they believed that we ought to live in a world without war. Today we have major sectors of educated public opinion in the west that believe that nobody wants war, nobody wants conflict, and if they do it is because they are oppressed victims of the west.

Given the reality of western public opinion and its aversion to conflict we shall not rise to oppose Iran until the mullahs have used nuclear weapons and there is no choice left but to go to war, just as Britain and France went to war against Hitler, finally, when the writing on the wall became the real, live invasion of Poland.

Again and again humans have confidently rung down the curtain on conflict and war. But conflict and killing have always been at the center of life. Living things live by eating other living things. In the west we have pushed the killing out of sight, and there are plenty of people who insist that we eat without killing, or at least without killing animals. (But isn’t killing a plant ultimately the same thing?)

The enthusiasts of Islamism insist that killing is OK if it is in the service of Islam. As Steyn writes, killing is OK even if it means the use of nuclear weapons:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

Let us take the Iranians at their word, that they intend to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. That means that the “unthinkable” is going to become reality.

Probably before the United States uses nuclear weapons we will see nuclear weapons used on a non-Iranian city. And then, unfortunately, nuclear warfare will not be unthinkable any more.

Romney's Health Care Solution

First Governor Romney put up his education proposals in the Wall Street Journal. Now he has done the same for health care.

Actually he has written an article describing the universal health care program recently enacted in Massachusetts.

It all started when Romney talked to Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, who told him to figure out how to do health insurance. When Mitt objected, Tom said: “You can find a way.”

So Mitt set to work, and found out why the uninsured were uninsured. First of all, he found that

Some 20% of the state's uninsured population qualified for Medicaid but had never signed up.

That was easy. He set up web pages so that people could sign up for Medicaid when they turned up at the ER.

Another 40% of the uninsured were earning enough to buy insurance but had chosen not to do so. Why? Because it is expensive, and because they know that if they become seriously ill, they will get free or subsidized treatment at the hospital. By law, emergency care cannot be withheld. Why pay for something you can get free?

So Mitt set out to change the law to allow high deductible insurance without all the mandatory benefits so insurers could lower their premiums.

Another group of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts consisted of working people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford health-care insurance.

For them Romney proposed a subsidy, to be paid out of the state’s $1 billion uninsured-care fund. But would $1 billion be enough?

Jonathan Gruber of MIT built an econometric model of the population, and with input from insurers, my in-house team crunched the numbers. Again, the result surprised us: We needed far less than the $1 billion for the subsidies.

Of course, no policy reform would be complete without valuable assistance from the conservative Heritage Foundation. The Heritage guys came up with “a 'connector,' allowing citizens to purchase health insurance with pretax dollars, even if their employer makes no contribution.”

Can Mitt Romney keep this up? First he puts out a six point program on education that we reviewed yesterday, then he explains his uninsured health care solution. What could be next? The White House?

How Will Immigration Issue Break?

On Monday April 10th, the streets of America were again filled with demonstrators demanding U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrants. The battle of immigration continues.

There are two questions here. How will the demonstrations affect the fate of immigration bills now in Congress, and what will be the political effect down the road?

Democrats are encouraged by the demonstrations. Writes Charles Hurt in the Washington Times,

Democrats on Capitol Hill favoring citizenship for illegal aliens say they have been buoyed by the massive rallies across the country... Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and a leading backer of such legalization bills, invoked civil rights icon Martin Luther King when he spoke at yesterday's rally on the Mall.

But then Democrats love huge political demonstrations. It reminds them of their finest hour in the 1960s civil rights revolution. Indeed, a show of force in the streets always sways the political class. It instinctively yields to the most passionate political actors. We can expect a comprehensive immigration reform of some kind this year, one that addresses border security and also addresses legalization of residency status.

The other question is the overall political effect on the 50-50 nation. In the New York Post John Podhoretz takes the organizers of the demonstrations to task. If the Democrats think it will help them at the polls they are wrong. “They are riling up the GOP base, which has been pretty disheartened lately and needed a bit of riling.” But when it comes to the long term political impact Podhoretz reserves judgment.

The direction all this will take in years to come is unknowable. It may align Hispanics with the Democrats in the long term. On the other hand, it may drive more Democratic voters of modest means into the Republican camp, offsetting the Democratic gain.

Exit poll data show that Hispanics vote more Republican the more they prosper. Only blacks remain Democrat whatever their economic status. So what would happen if blacks decided that a pro-immigrant Democratic Party was an anti-African American party?

The truth is, we don’t know. The outcome of every battle is unknowable until it is over.

Romney's Six Point Education Plan

They say that Bill Clinton’s great success in the presidency was that he acted like a governor. After the failure of tax increases and Hillarycare in his first two years he focused on close-to-home issues like midnight basketball and 100,000 cops that are the sort of issue that you expect city mayors and state governors to deal in. Still, it probably helped him win the soccer-mom vote.

George W. Bush did the same thing, campaigning for No Child Left Behind, and passing a pale shadow of his plan once elected.

Now comes presidential hopeful Governor Mitt Romney with more governor stuff, a carefully placed article about education in the Washington Times.

If you are a Democrat, then education is simple. More funding for education—and your number one special interest, teachers.

But a Republican like Mitt Romney has to be more careful. He can’t say that teachers are rent-seeking scoundrels comparable in greed to the worst robber barons of the 19th century. He can’t say that partly because it’s not nice and partly because there are hundreds of thousands of nice teachers who believe what their union has told them, and really believe that they are underpaid and overworked. So a Republican has to weave and dodge. He will want to curb the rent-seeking; he will want to recommend school choice, but he will want to be nice about it. So here’s what Romney comes up with.

1) Make teaching a true profession.

Translation: break the union.

2) Let the leaders lead.

Translation: break the union.

3) Measure up.

Translation: unless we can test we don’t have a clue what they are doing with our money.

4) Let freedom ring.

Translation: Break the union.

5) Pull in the parents... For our lowest-performing schools, I've proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America's education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on.

6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning.

Good luck with the union, Mitt old chum.

Mitt Romney is coming up with some unexceptional ideas here. But at least they take one small step along a long road back from the dreadful mess we have got ourselves into. It is the mess that Horace Mann got us into 160 years ago with the idea that government-driven education would be better than parent-driven education. What a grand idea it seemed back then. What a dreadful waste of $500 billion a year it has turned out to be.

And what an injustice it is to impose the system upon our nation’s children.

The End of Health Care As We Know It

It had to happen. Writer gets funny lump in his jaw. Writer gets brush-off from doctor. Writer checks up on Google and self-operates to remove stone from salivary duct.

Are you sweating yet, you priests and pharisees from the health priesthood? Have you paid off the mortgage on the McMansion and the starter castle yet? Better get a move on!

It’s a delightful story, told by Sean Thomas in the Daily Telegraph. It all started when

I suddenly developed a weird swelling under my jaw. And I mean suddenly. In a matter of hours, I went from looking perfectly normal to having the appearance of a mating canetoad, with a mammoth bulging on the lower right side of my face.

But then it went away. But pretty soon, it was back, and not just once, but regularly at meal times.

Disturbed, I started Googling. Within a few hours, I had self-diagnosed. What I had, it turned out, was a salivary calculus, or sialolith, a stone in the salivary duct running from the submandibular gland (under my jaw) to my mouth.

Now you would think that the British National Health Service, the health provider of choice for our young sufferer, would leap into action. But no. First he went to the ER, and they sent him to his provider. Yes, it turned out, he had diagnosed correctly, but the physician wouldn’t remove it. He’d get referred to a maxillofacial, and get an appointment in a month or two.

Well! By this time our eager medical student had discovered by more dedicated Googling how to remove the offending stone. Two months? To heck with that.

Five days ago, I summoned up the courage and attacked my stone with two matchsticks and a plastic fork from Pret à Manger. Slowly, I squeezed the blob along the duct. At 4pm, it finally popped out in a squidge of blood and lots of spittle: 2mm wide, it was. All that misery for a 2mm wide stone.

Piece of cake, eh? And why not? Now, how long do you think it ought to be till you can just go down to your local self-serve medical clinic, sign a simple release form, and do it yourself?

I know. Dream on, pal.

Global Warming Stuck on Pause

Just when it looked like we were all going to fry in the oven of global warming comes a scientist to say that global temperatures have stopped climbing.

Since 1998 global temperatures have actually dropped a tad, according to climate scientist Bob Carter in the Daily Telegraph. What of that, you say? Temperatures increased in the 28 years previous to 1998.

That’s very true. But then there was global cooling from 1940 to 1965.

The problem, Carter asserts, is that there is not much independent climate science being reported.

Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.

And many climate skeptics feel too intimidated to speak out.

The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

The problem is that, as Daniel B. Botkin writes in Discordant Harmonies, contrary to the idea of a harmonious steady-state environment, “Nature changes over essentially all time scales.” And we don’t know why.

We do know that over the last few million years the world has usually been a lot colder than it is right now.

And you can take that to the bank.

Da Vinci Code Unbroken

What a relief. A high court judge in Britain has determined that Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code did not infringe the copyright of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. So now the legal cloud is lifted from the movie.

But do we know the real truth behind the Da Vinci Mystery? For instance, isn’t it odd that both books were published by Random House? Isn’t it strange that the mysterious expert in DVC, Sir Leigh
Teabing, is an anagram of Baigent and Leigh? Isn’t it a little too hard to accept Dan Brown’s claim that he only consulted HBHG in the later stages of writing DVC, considering that so many of the ideas developed in HBHG turned up in DVC?

According to the London Daily Telegraph

HBHG, published in 1982, deals with a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child and that the bloodline continues to this day, with a secret society protecting their heirs against wicked conspiracies enacted by the Church.

Sounds pretty much what DVC is all about. But the judge said that, even with the similarities, Dan Brown’s book did not “breach the copyright of Baigent and Leigh’s book.”

Do you think that Dan Brown, “the highest-paid writer in history,” sold the movie rights for a fixed sum, or do you think that he also figured on a percent of the gross? Wikipedia says the rights fee was $6,000,0000. But will we ever know the truth?