New Hope for Malaria Sufferers

I know. It’s rather bad form to equate the tragedy of malaria with the tragedy of psoriasis. But there really is good news on the malaria front. Only there’s a minor problem.

First the good news. Scientists have found a way to synthethize artemisinic acid, a precursor to artemisinin, “the most effective therapy for the world’s second-most deadly infectious disease.” The problem is that the process uses genetically modified yeast or bacteria. And we all know how dangerous that can be.

It’s estimated that the new method will reduce the cost of a dose of the malaria drug by 90 percent from about $2 to about 25 cents.

The report in the London Times on this breakthrough by Mark Henderson indicates that the new method should be ready in about ten years. It was funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

We could also help in the meantime and save lives by allowing the use of DDT.

Employers Hiring Older Workers in Britain

In Britain, older workers are rushing into the work force. According to Allister Heath in the London Spectator, “pensioners accounted for 85 per cent of the employment growth in Britain during” the last six months. A full 60,000 of them went back to work.

Why are they going back to work? Who knows? For some it is a choice, and for others it is probably from necessity. Real-estate taxes have been going up pretty sharply in Britain due to escalating home prices.

But maybe the rise in older worker employment is not just the desire of older workers for jobs but a conscious strategy of employers to seek out “seasoned citizens” as employees.

One third of companies are giving school-leavers basic training in literacy and numeracy and nobody is fooled by the government’s propaganda about increasing standards any more.

In fact, employers are finding that older workers with just a basic high-school education—“O-levels” in Britspeak—are more literate and numerate than college graduates. One employer said that

Pensioners tend also to be more articulate, better presented, and have a better attitude to work than many of today’s school-leavers or university graduates; if he could, he would recruit only Polish immigrants or British pensioners.

At the home improvement store B&Q they opened a store in the town of Macclesfield staffed exclusively with people over 50. There were no problems with getting the oldsters to use computers.

The Macclesfield store did better than other B&Q stores in almost every way. Profits were higher by a fifth; staff turnover was six times lower; there was more than a third less short-term absenteeism; and, most remarkably of all, theft collapsed by more than half.

It all gives you a new perspective on an old excuse: “I’m living on a fixed income.”

Dem Vote 43.9% in CA 50 Special Election

How much trouble are Republicans in for this Fall? Maybe not as bad as some have feared. In the special election to fill disgraced Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham’s seat the Democrat came in with only 8 percent more votes than in the general election in 2004. That means that the election will go to a runoff in June. Writes political scientist Jay Cost:

The Democrats had everything going for them in this election. They had a corrupt felon-incumbent, they had low turnout, they had a well-financed challenger, and they had a divided Republican field. They had a district that has, in the last 10 years, skewed Republican less and less. And they only managed to get about 8% more of the vote when they needed 14% more. In 2004, Busby pulled in 36%. This time around she won 43.9%.

Cost gets specific:

There is no other way to understand this but as a loss for the Democrats.

That is because CA 50, as Cost has written before, is the “type of seat the Democrats need to capture to take the House” in November. It is Republican but has been trending slowly Democrat over the last few years. Therefore Cost predicts:

no win in CA 50, no Democratic takeover. I still hold that position.

Meanwhile Tom DeLay has decided not to run in Texas and Bush’s numbers appear to have hit the floor.

The question is: how will the immigration issue play in November?

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.