It's India Week

Both the London Times and the Economist (sub) have done features on India this week as it comes off three years in a row of 8 percent GDP growth. Is it for real, they ask? Yes, but. Writes David Aaronovitch:

Isn’t IT India a little like Bollywood India — lots of glitz but as substantial a representation of reality as the Ice Cool man and his fleck-free hair? This week the subcontinent was admonished with typical grandness by The Economist. “India,” it concluded, “needs to grow much faster. Otherwise, poverty will persist for decades and social tensions will mount.”

Well yes. India does have its problems. The Economist tells the story of the desperate slowness of moving freight across the sub-continent.

The lorry is loaded at 2pm in central Kolkata. But cannot leave until after 10pm, because heavy vehicles can use city streets only at certain times.

After innumerable delays with closed border crossings, night road closures “to avoid the danger of attacks by bandits or Maoist insurgents” (in central India?) the truck arrives on the morning of day eight, “having achieved an average speed of 11km per hour and spent 32 hours waiting at tollbooths and checkpoints.”

India is building a “golden quadrilateral” limited-access highway to connect Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai. Sounds as though it can’t come quick enough.

But what about those Maoist insurgents? What’s that all about?

When Laws Hurt The Ones They Help

What a landmark that Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was. Passed in 1990 when Bush I was president it empowered disabled people and let them come out of the shadows into the mainstream of life for the first time in history. Or something like that.

Only it didn’t. According to John Stossel it made employers shy away from hiring the disabled. Why was that?

One poll found that since the ADA was passed, the percentage of disabled men who were employed dropped. "Once you hire them, you can never fire them. They are lawsuit bombs," one employer said. "So we just tell them the job has been filled."

See how that works? People protected by the ADA will sue under ADA to claim that they were discriminated against. So now we need a law to target employers who lie about positions being filled.

Or take the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. Remember, that was the oil tanker that ran upon a reef because its captain was drunk. Exxon has paid, big time, for the disaster caused by its drunken employee, Joseph Hazelwood.

But guess what?

Exxon gave Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab; when Hazelwood then let the Exxon Valdez run aground, a jury found that he'd recklessly gotten drunk before taking command — and that the company had been reckless to give him the job.

Well, serves Exxon right, anyway. They should never have given Hazelwood such a sensitive job. Read on, pal.

So then the company decided people who've had a drug or drinking problem may not hold safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it — employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their right to hold safety-sensitive jobs. Employers can't win. They get sued if they do, sued if they don't.

What do you think? How about we repeal the Americans with Disabilities Act and start over.

The Day After 50

In the special election held yesterday to fill the seat in the House of Representatives vacated by the disgraced Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Republican won by 50 percent to 45 percent. According to Robert Tanner:

With 90 percent of precincts reporting, [Republican] Bilbray had 56,130 votes, or 50 percent. [Democrat] Busby trailed with 51,292 votes, or 45 percent.

It’s not a famous victory but it is good enough that the Today Show did not feel the need to report on it. Whereas, if it had been closer, say 49 percent to 48 percent, or a Democrat victory, then we would be hearing all about it. We would be told that the election showed that it is all over for Bush and for evil Republicans.

After a horrendous winter and spring, this result is a big shot in the arm for Republicans.

Maybe there is a lesson here for Democrats and their “culture of corruption” campaign. It’s interesting that the two Republican embarrassments were swiftly dealt with and swept away. The Democrats got what they wanted with Tom DeLay. His battles with the Democratic prosecutor in Democratic Austin, Texas, made him a liability, and so he stepped down as Majority Leader, and now is not running for reelection. Randy Cunningham was in the news one day, pleading guilty, in the news another day, being sentenced, and now his seat is back in Republican hands.

Hey, those bumbling Republicans can sometimes really hit their marks.

But look at the Democratic embarrassments: Representatives Cynthia McKinney and William Jefferson. McKinney suffers from a terminal case of “Do You Know Who I Am?” and was unwilling to go quietly when properly stopped by a Capitol Hill policeman for not showing her badge at a security checkpoint. And William Jefferson is playing hard to get in the investigation of his alleged bribery.

A similar situation obtains with the unfolding Fannie Mae investigation. As Jim Gerahty writes, it was a Clinton appointee, Franklin Raines, Chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Association, who was responsible for the $10.6 billion overstatement of earnings. But instead of going quietly he tried to block the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) investigation. And he had friends, Democratic friends, on Capitol Hill. The report from OFHEO said that

By deliberately manipulating accounting to hit earnings targets, senior management maximized the bonuses and other compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders. The manipulation contributed significantly to the compensation of former chairman and chief executive Franklin Raines, which totaled more than $90 million from 1998 to 2003 - including some $52 million directly tied to hitting earnings targets.

What do they say about corporate greed? Writes Gerahty:

Let’s recall that the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate had such a close relationship with Raines that he was ready to make him Treasury Secretary.

Raines finally resigned from Fannie Mae in 2004. But no perp walk yet.

Oh, and guess who the Vice Chairman was at Fannie Mae until she quit in 2002? Jamie Gorelick. Yes, that Jamie Gorelick, the author of the wall between domestic and foreign intelligence which stopped the Feds from connecting the dots before 9/11.

So which was worse? Enron or Fannie Mae? And why haven’t we heard outraged Democrats or populist journalists raging about the corporate fat cats putting Fannie Mae’s widows-and-orphans mortgage bonds at risk?

Why is it that we all felt shame and outrage about Randy Cunningham bribery conviction, but not about William Jefferson alleged malfeasance?

There’s a culture problem here for the Democrats. They just don’t believe that they have to follow the rules. And nobody is surprised, or even outraged, when they don’t.

Horrors! Organic Has Been Kidnapped by Wal-Mart!

Over the last century many upper-class Americans have agitated for the classification of certain areas of the nation as wilderness, that is, areas that should remain unaffected by humans.

Starting about half a century ago many upper-class Americans have agitated for the replacement of conventional farming techniques by “organic” techniques, that is, as defined by Wikipedia, farming that “excludes the use of synthetic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.”

But now Wal-Mart is going to start selling organic food, at about 10 percent more than conventional food, and you can imagine that the folks at the New York Times Magazine aren’t happy. Writes Michael Pollan, a journalism professor,

Assuming that it's possible at all, how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word.

Well, that is the environmentalists’ story, and they are sticking to it.

The trouble is that the organic narrative is false, just as the wilderness narrative is false.

Our idea of wilderness is based upon the way we imagine the United States looked when the white man first arrived in the seventeenth century. But the land in those days had been painstakingly modified by native Americans for their own benefit. The inhabitants of what we now call New York State used to burn the underbrush regularly to make the environment more hospitable for the deer that they hunted for food. And the Plains Indians modified the Great Plains to make it more hospitable for buffalo.

So it is with agriculture. Humans have cut down vast forests over the last few thousand years to clear their fields; they have bred—that is to say genetically modified—wild animals into domestic slaves. And they used whatever came to hand when it came to controlling weeds. Was that sustainable?

It is certainly a sad thing that intensive farming techniques confine animals in pens and factories and reduce wild grasses to monoculture wheat fields. But the original sin was committed centuries ago when the first man tamed the first wild beast and the first farmer began to cultivate rather than just harvest the wild grasses in the hills of Mesopotamia.

It is totally phoney-baloney to drive a stake in the ground circa 1850 and define every change in farming practice since then an attack on sustainability.

The truth is that there is no such thing as sustainability. Nature fluctuates in all time scales.

And one result of intensive farming practices is that farmland in the United States is being returned to forest.

Still, when Wal-Mart is selling organic food it is surely time for journalism professors and fashionable New York Times reader to move on to something else.

Nights of Passion

While the Germans are constructing special huts near World Cup venues to assist the world’s oldest profession, Dana L. is fulminating against the administration that prevents her from immediately neutralizing the consequence of a night of passion. It’s that kind of day.

The elite toleration of prostitution by our western elites, writes Roger Scruton, is easy because the elite never has to deal with its consequences.

Our legislators do not live in the areas of cities where prostitution is flagrant; they do not have to deal, in their daily lives, with the network of pimps and racketeers who live from the earnings of their female slaves; they do not have to fear for their daughters.

But the toleration of prostitution is socially harmful because it disturbs the basic transaction between the sexes.

The prostitute used to be seen as the enemy of respectable women. She threatened the bargaining power of her sex, by offering cheaply what others were trying to offer at the highest possible price, namely marriage.

That is Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good money. Our modern elites have been delighted to interfere with this awe-inspiring transaction. It doesn’t really affect them and their daughters. And anyway, they are ambarrassed by traditional bourgeois marriage.

But in the mean angry streets of the welfare state the assault on marriage and the toleration of prostitution is demoralizing and brutalizing men and women in their millions.

In safe and comfy liberal land, Dana L. is mortally offended, in the way that only liberal women can be. She got to tell her story in the Washington Post.

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want.

She didn’t want an abortion, but she did want to abort her child. It’s just that when the married mother of two called her OB/GYN after a night of passion to get a prescription for a morning after pill, the receptionist told her that her doctor did not prescribe that pill. “No reason given.”

There wasn’t time to get a prescription from her midwife’s practice, so a month later she found herself pregnant.

So she had to submit to the humiliation of an abortion. To top it off, the abortionist was an hour and a half late.

It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.



And to think that, all these years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, this is what our children have to look forward to as they approach their reproductive years.

Dana L. is a lawyer and a writer who lives in Virginia.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a lot to say about this self-centered approach to life in Smart Sex.

The End of Appeasement is Not Yet

Ever since the disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s wise heads have said “Never Again.”

So President Bush crafted a forward strategy to combat the Islamicist movement’s threat to advance Islam by the Prophet’s method, by fire and the sword.

Only, of course, because Islam is politically, militarily, and economically weak, its strategy is a strategy of terror, the chosen strategy of movements without an army, without a country, and without an economic base.

It ought to be easy to isolate and eliminate the terrorists. But the problem is that appeasement is alive and well. The cultural elite of the West is not willing to sign up for a war on terror. It prefers to appease.

So we have the “quagmire” in Afghanistan, the opposition to the Iraq adventure, the hyping of every setback, the validation of the Muslims-are-victims strategy of western Muslim organizations, and now the piling-on over the alleged Haditha massacre.

You can see how appeasement worked in the 1930s. There were always people—educated, sophisticated people—available to argue against the hawks like Winston Churchill. And not surprisingly, people listened to both sides and took the easy way out.

So it is today, with sophisticated opinion relentlessly dripping scorn upon the forward strategy of George W. Bush, and characterizing the inevitable setbacks of his noble endeavor as incompetence and criminality.

In her book Londonistan excerpted in the London Times Melanie Phillips shows how the new appeasement works in London.

It started in the 1990s with the

“gentlemen’s agreement” that if [Islamic radicals] were left alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them.

Well, so much for that. The attacks of 7/7 showed up that little error. But the problem goes into the very attitude of the cultural elite in Britain, “its intelligentsia, its media, its politicians, its judiciary, its Church and even its police.”

The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or “Islamophobia”. They simply ignore the statements and signs that show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicise the West.

They don’t want to face up to this because it requires admitting that we are in a real war, with real costs, and real uncertainty. But it requires admitting something even more difficult. It means admitting that we are in a religious war. Religious wars, remember, went out with the Enlightenment and the end of religious superstition.
How can we be in a religious war if we are sophisticated elites who are beyond religion?

So the elites choose the easy way out: appeasement.

And it doesn’t help that the Muslims have learned how to exploit the “victim culture” by which militant minorities can mau-mau the majority culture with the support of the leftist elite.

Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. So when radical Islamists refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.

If we step back and think clearly about this we can see that the West will not stop its appeasment until the “invasion of Poland” moment. We know what that will be. It will be an appalling outrage involving a use of nuclear materials.

Only then will the West be able to end its appeasement and go onto a true war footing. The elites will have to end appeasement. The people will demand it.

Conservatives should understand that there is a huge opportunity in this. We have said, from 9/11 onwards, that we are in a war, a long war, a World War IV. Our lefty friends have equivocated. The extreme left is in bed with the Islamists; the moderate left just doesn’t like America, and believes that violence never solves anything. They are caught because their secular religion tells them that nothing is worth dying for.

And if that is not enough, their culture of abortion and selfish creativity means that nothing is really worth living for either.

The coming conflagration will discredit the secular religion of Marxism/socialism/postmodernism once and for all. We conservatives will say that the left was wrong. It had always been wrong, and always will be wrong.

Because our Judeo-Christian-Anglo-Saxon democratic capitalism at which they sneer is worth dying for. And it is also worth living for.

Little Rich Kids Now Have Tutors

Forget home schooling. Now it’s private tutors for little rich kids, according to a trend-spotting article by Susan Saulny in The New York Times.

You see, the rich are on the move, shuttling between their houses, and so they find it more convenient to hire personal tutors for their children.

[It’s] an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor.

You know what is coming next, don’t you? Socialization, of course.

Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.

Ah yes. The vital importance of children all becoming savages together at a monopoly government school. "Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," says Dr. Snyder.

Actually, let’s tell the truth here. Public education has political goals, going back to the founding of public education by Horace Mann. Public education has always been about elite special interests wanting to control the education of children. They wanted then, and they want now, to control what is going into little minds. And parents need to be elbowed out of the way.

So this trend among poor little rich kids is probably a good thing. Any kind of education has to be better than liberals force-feeding our children with their hateful politics and their cruel welfare state.

It could be, of course, that imams force-feeding children with Islamicist hate in Saudi-funded madrassahs is worse. More research is needed.