Nicholas Wade's Updated Genesis

This week I am reading Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn. It’s a review of recent developments in archeology, particularly the important contribution that biogenetics is making to our knowledge of our ancient ancestors.

For instance, tracking of the Y chromosome in men indicates that we are all descended from one man. And tracking of mitochondria in women indicates that women are all descended from the same woman. And it seems likely that all people except those in Africa are descended from a band of hunter-gatherers that crossed the southern end of the Red Sea from Africa to Arabia about 50,000 years ago.

It is intriguing that the Biblical speculation of Adam and Eve, and even the Mosaic Red Sea crossing receive echoes in the latest science.

Nicholas Wade is a science correspondent for The New York Times and so it is significant that he tells his readers that, like it or not, ancient man engaged in constant warfare. That behavior, of course, is shared by our great ape cousins. Male chimpanzees frequently engage in border raids on the territory of neighboring troops. They do it for a practical reason. A bigger territory means more food, and more food means more baby chimps making it to adulthood.

But over the years, humans have become more “gracile,” meaning that our skulls and skeletons have become less robust. In other words, we have become more oriented towards cooperation and less to competition and conflict.

But here’s an interesting speculation. The big problem for humans is to develop the trust circle for cooperation, and particularly cooperation outside kinship. How do you control and sanction the freeloader? The human solution, he suggests, is religion.

Maybe that explains why the rising European bourgeoisie of the last millennium developed their own religion, Protestant Christianity, to define their trust network. And maybe that explains the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in the emerging economies of the world. The big problem for the people in the huge new cities is to establish trust networks to replace the old kin-based trust in the village.

If AMLO Wins in Mexico

The reason that the US has an immigration problem is that Mexico’s economy stinks. One critic wrote years ago that the problem with Mexico is that it has tried everything, everything fashionable to come out of Europe. Everything, that is, except democratic capitalism. That has never been in fashion.

At least since the Mexican wipeout of 1994 (remember that?) Mexico has begun to fix its economy. But the trouble is, according to Robert Samuelson, that as much as two-thirds of Mexico’s workers are employed in the “informal” sector, i.e., the sector that doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t have access to regular finance, and cannot grow without attracting the attention of predatory government officials. And the formal sector isn’t much better. Take
Pemex, the state-owned monopoly oil company. Without competitors or complaining shareholders, its operations are lax. In 2004, Pemex had $69 billion in sales and 137,722 employees, according to its Web site; in the same year, Exxon Mobil had $291 billion in sales and 85,900 employees.

Do that math on that. Exxon Mobil gets $3.4 million in revenue per employee. Pemex gets $0.5 million per employee. In other words, Exxon Mobil gets about 7 times as much in revenue out of each employee as Pemex.

And now it looks as though lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is likely to win the Mexican presidential election on July 2.

According to Enrique Krause he is proposing to slash salaries at the top of government.

Mr. López Obrador has also talked of revising Nafta's agricultural provisions and subsidizing exporters with cheap fuel (a practice prohibited by Nafta). He has declared that he will "allow" private investment, but not national or foreign interest in strategic areas that urgently require it, like oil and gas.

He also proposes a mammoth microcredit program (run by the government perhaps?) and bullet trains to the northern border.

But he is also proposing a presidency founded on his personal charisma, with referendums and plebiscites. We have a word for that. It is called fascism.

The problem for Americans is that when the lefty economics of AMLO fails, then we will see even more Mexicans crossing the border to find economic sanity. And who will be asked to pick up the mess south of the border?

Blair's Swansong: Third Way Just Hype

Clintonian Third Way politics came to an end in 2000. Now the Third Way politics of Tony Blair is coming to an end. It is time to come to judgment about Third Way politics. Was it really a Third Way between capitalism and socialism? Did it succeed in charting a new way? Or was it all just hype? The answer is pretty clear. It was mostly hype.

For years you couldn’t say that. Blair promised so much, and you wanted to believe him. But now the sands are running out for him. And the Third Way achievement has been to increase government employment by 800,000 workers. These workers have been absorbed into the government health system and the government education system. But the health system and the education system are still centrally run and directed, so the vast additional resoures—that have increased the British public sector to the level of Germany—have had little effect on the delivery of services.

And now the scandal of crime and illegal immigration has made a mockery of Blair’s promise to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,” a powerful sound bite that ended up meaning nothing.

Writes Simon Jenkins in The Times:

The two communities I know best, one in London and the other rural, are no longer policed in any recognisable sense, certainly not as they were in Blair’s golden 1950s. Police are never seen and phones are never answered. For Blair to put this down to terrorism and globalisation is ludicrous. Since the 1990s progressive centralisation has ended beat patrolling, disbanded the police solicitor network and bureaucratised the overnight magistrates’ courts.

Blair blames the “establishment” for all this, writes Daniel Finkelstein.

Last Friday Mr Blair attacked “the political and legal establishment”. He said that it “didn’t understand”, that it was “in denial”, that it was “out of touch”. And he argued the Establishment was letting down everyone else, “ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk”, and failing to get the balance right between victims and offenders.

Well, of course. But isn’t Blair part of the political and legal establishment? If reform is needed, isn’t it natural that the reform would be a reform of the establishment? It’s a little late in the Blair administration to be suddenly waking up and realizing that the problem all along was in themselves.

We can see in the death throes of Tony Blair our own struggles in the United States. The great conservative reforms of the last generation were all enacted in the teeth of opposition and scorn from the bien pensant elite. The supply-side economics: it was voodoo economics. The “broken-window” policing: it was racial profiling. The welfare reform: it would mean children starving in the streets. And the campaign to value once again the nuclear bourgeois family: why that is just bigoted.

But we know now that the Third Way was just hot air. It was the bien pensant elite complimenting itself on its enlightened world-view. Both President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were excellent in their heyday in winning the hearts and minds of the media. But when it came to the boring stuff of boots on the ground, actually formulating policy and seeing it through to completion, they were nowhere to be found.

And that means that ordinary people suffer, with bad schools and lousy health care while the Third Way suits settle into a well-deserved retirement.

NYT: Put a Sunshade in Orbit

Last week an Academy of Sciences panel reported on the validity of the “hockey stick,” the global temperature graph for the last 1000 years authored by climatologist Michael Mann.

So what did the panel decide? Well, it kinda punted. Yes, the global temperature is definitely increasing. In fact it is definitely warmer than 400 years ago. But we are uncertain about temperatures in the 900 to 1600 timeframe. And we are really uncertain about temperatures before the year 900. More research is needed.

The panel did its work well. The lefty MSM could claim that it’s the hottest in 2,000 years. And the conservative Washington Times could claim that the hockey stick is broken.

But now The New York Times has come out with a Popular Mechanics style report gushing over the whacko “geoengineering” proposals for reversing global warming.

Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Er, just a minute, chaps. Aren’t we all supposed to be deeply influenced by the environmentalists’ latest wheeze, the “Precautionary Principle?” Given the radical uncertainty about anything connected with climate change, shouldn’t we think twice before parking giant sunshades in orbit?

Don’t all these proposals also violate an organic, planet-friendly approach, the kind of approach that living things have always taken to global climate change, that is, adapting to change? But let us not confuse the issue.

Martin A. Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, said of geoengineering at a recent meeting in Washington, "Let's talk about research funding with enough zeroes on it so we can make a dent."

So that’s what it’s all about. Zeroes on research dollars. As they used to say about the power of the Rolls Royce. It has “enough.”

Warren Buffett Plans to Dodge the Death Tax

Everyone is oo-ing and ah-ing about Warren Buffett’s noble decision to give his wealth away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But how noble is that?

James Taranto recalls that Buffett is supposed to be opposed to ending the death tax. Yet by giving his money away to the Gates’s foundation he is just as surely dodging the death tax as if the death tax were repealed.

If Warren Buffett is is favor of the death tax then he should just sit there and let the government take his wealth, or 55 percent of it, when he dies, and not engage in tax avoidance schemes.

The argument against the death tax is that it penalizes the owners of small businesses. If you own a business worth about $20 million then when your heirs have to pay the full death tax then they will likely have to sell the business to pay the death tax.

But that doesn’t apply to a publicly traded company like Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway which is traded on the stock market. The heirs, who may or may not be involved in management, just sell stock on the open market to pay the death tax and the business goes on as before.

Let’s repeal the death tax or failing that reduce it to five percent so that we doesn’t force heirs to sell the family business or the family farm.

All In A Day's Work to Betray Intelligence Assets

The declassification by the New York Times of the secret US program to monitor terrorist financial transactions seems to be perking along nicely. Hopefully, we are going to find that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the newspapers that declassified the secret program, seriously misjudged the national mood.

Hugh Hewitt has a telling point on the two newspapers. The two editors just don’t know much about the world except the lefty elite echo chambers in which they have worked pretty well all their lives.

The trouble with folks like Keller and McManus making these decisions is that they just don't know much about things other than newspapers... Between the two we get about 70 years of work exclusively inside of newspapers, and the vast majority of that within two ultra-liberal newspapers... [N]either has worked in government or even in any place of business other than newspapers. They are creatures of the MSM, through and through.

What they have done is lived in that thin world of liberal condescension, one that thinks itself rather above the grubby nationalism of the average American. In that rarified air, people don’t really have contact with the real world.

Hewitt acquitted himself well on CNN with Geneva Overholzer, pointing out that the media does not have exemption from the laws of the land. The First Amendment says that there cannot be prior restraint on publication. But not that newspapers can publish anything they want. Overholzer has the curious idea that the media “challenge power.”

The media in this country have always been at their strongest when they do challenge power.

Oh yes? When has the media ever challenged power? When has it ever done anything more than run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?

The fact is that the media spend 95 percent of their time sucking up to their sources (i.e., power) and 5 percent burning their sources when there is blood in the water.

You won’t find the media challenging the real institutional power in this country. Like the AARP. Like the plaintiff bar. Like the teachers’ unions.

And the question still is: Who is betraying national security secrets to the New York Times?

Horowitz and the True Believer

Activist David Horowitz is in the middle of a campaign to take the universities back from the left-wing radicals. His strategy is the Gandhian approach of challenging the university to live up to its ideals: Academic freedom, open inquiry, full range of views, and no political indoctrination from the front of the class. In this link he engages Peter Steinberger, a political science professor and Dean of Faculty from Reed University. And he gets everything he bargained for. Says Prof. Steinberger:

[N]o one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Similarly, no one could possibly deny the existence of “power relationships and injustice.” I repeat: no one. To assert that there is racism in the world is no more controversial than to assert that there is nitrogen in the world.

Now this is a very revealing statement. You would expect a moderate Dean of Faculty to say: “yes, we keep a lefty on faculty to serve up the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia stuff to the students. You need at least one true believer around for balance.” But you do not expect a Dean of Faculty to be drinking the KoolAid.

In fact, conservatives do deny the existence of the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse. Or at least we say that overt conflict on the basis of race, sex, class, and sexual orientation is so far mitigated by modern society that it is not worthy of serious people’s energy.

In fact, conservatives would say that light-to-moderate discrimination is a spur to effort, rather than a barrier to a decent life.

We say that, of course, society is deeply affected by power relationships. But we say that the rule of law substantially mitigates the absolutism of power. And we go further and say that once you start up your “diversity,” your “outreach,” your affirmative action bureaucracies, you are introducing a power which is more unjust and capricious than the status quo ante.

We conservatives say that, by shining such a strong light on power relationships and injustice, liberals are ignoring the forest for the trees.

And when we hear someone say “No one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism... I repeat: no one,” we say to ourselves: “left-wing radical whack-job.”