Are the Mullahs Desperate?

With the mullahs in Iran staging another hostage incident, you have to wonder if it is deja vue all over again. 

Embarrassing as it is for the Brits, maybe that’s all the Iranian mullahs know how to do: Stage another hostage crisis.

That’s what Austin Bay thinks. 

But this latest hostage-taking incident smacks of desperation, not revolutionary fervor.
Late spring 2007 finds the Iranian "revolutionary government" facing an extraordinary range of internal and external problems.

 There are several, shall we say, insurgencies going on inside Iran.  (Could the bumbling Bush have anything to do with that?)

But the mullahs have an even bigger problem.

The mullah’s core problem is the Iranian people. Under-30 Iranians have had it with the mullahs’ failed revolution.

According to RMC Chappie Eric Voegelin that is important.  A legitimate government is not a government that wins elections.  It is a government that is accepted by its people as legitimate.

Then there is the humiliation of the Arabs next door in Iraq making halting progress towards democracy.  If there is one thing your average Iranian knows, it is that he is superior to the Arabs.

The problem with all these thug regimes built upon natural resource sales is that they aren’t learning how to make it in the real world of products and services, exchange and trust.

Sooner or later it catches up with you.  Ask the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

What About Those Free Trade Deniers?

How come that fashionable New York Times columnists are so quick to make moral monsters out of people that question the authority of global-warming enthusiasts?

Nobody seems to give a damn about another kind of denier, the free-trade denier, as >Donald Luskin complains.

Such people are in fact standing athwart 250 years of economics, and an overwhelming consensus of living economists. These protectionists are denying the enormous gains in standards of living and human freedom that are the direct result of free global trade.

 When Maureen Dowd made a nasty little remark about people who didn’t agree with her about global warming she implied that the climate-change deniers were putting us all at risk.

But you can make a good argument that the free-trade deniers are far more dangerous.

There is a good argument that free trade is the one big thing that has powered the extraordinary rise in human well-being in the last 200 years, and we are talking about life expectancy as well as crude material wealth.

But free-trade deniers are allowed to write in major national publications and are accorded respect in national councils.  Where’s the shame?  Where’s the blame?

Of course there’s a common thread here. 

The free-trade deniers and the global-warming people are all folks with a taste for compulsion.  They want to take our money and spend it for us.  One day they want to spend it on helpless workers.  Another day they want to spend it on saving the planet.

But it is always Other Peoples’ Money.  And it is always about compulsion.

Bigger, Bolder, Brighter for 2007

Don’t tell me.  April 1 is a foolish day to launch a site redesign.  But what’s a father to do?  It’s spring and every young man’s fancy turns to spring cleaning the old site to make it brighter, bolder, and more compelling.

So now we have a new logo and a new top menu with two level menuing.

And we have a blog column, an oped column, and over on the right a list of the latest links that I’ve tagged on del.icio.us.

The new color is firebrick, #B22222.

I’ve no idea what it looks like.  I’m colorblind.

Jet Jockey Travolta On Global Warming

What’s not to like about John Travolta.  He urges his fans to “do their bit” for global warming according to London’s Evening Standard.

Er just a minute fellahs. Did you know that Travolta has a known association with jet airplanes, and actually flies them himself?   

But although he readily admitted: "I fly jets", he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.

 And here are two of them all tucked up for the night at Travolta’s Florida residence which looks, frankly, more like an airport control tower than a home.

Mind you, that Boeing 707 in the picture is getting to be a museum piece.  And loud!

I know what you are thinking.  Al Gore, eat your heart out!

Dueling Realities on Health Coverage

What does our nation need on health care?  Or rather, what should we force other people to pay for?  That is what we are talking about when we talk about health care plans and presidential candidate.  

Columnist Roger Simon went to listen to the Democratic candidates talk about it.  Here is what John Edwards promised.

I would cover all Americans. There would be shared responsibilities: Employers must cover their employees or pay into a fund. The government would create health care markets, and you could choose your health care provider. Some would be private and some would be Medicare-plus -- kind of single-payer (i.e., government-run) plan. Everyone in America will be required by law to be covered by a health care plan.

It would cost, he said, “$90 billion to $120 billion per year in government costs.” 

Hillary Clinton, she of HillaryCare fame, was more circumspect.

A lot of people like what they have now. We don’t want people feeling that government will come in and tell me what to do and what doctor I want to go to. We will give people a choice. We have to look at that as a framework.

So although she was all in favor of a universal system she put its implementation out into the future.

I want universal health care coverage by the end of my second term

On another planet is Robert J. Cihak, retired physician.

Look for “disruptive innovation” in your health-care future, he advises.

About a year after his diabetes diagnosis, he started using his own handheld blood glucose meter. He used it to observe how his blood sugar responded to... food... exercise... and other life activities... He then knew much more about his body’s response to his diabetes than his doctors ever could.

But of course, he’s not allowed to get his own “HbA1c test (glycosylated hemoglobin)” test.  For that he has to go into hospital for a three-hour procedure.  And then the results are reported to his doctor, not to him, the expert.

But then a new company offered a $16 do-it-yourself test kit. He "put two drops of blood on a strip, mailed it back to them, and three days later, they sent me my HbA1c score."

Do you get the feeling that the Democrats will have their universal health care just about put in place by the time that medical advances make it completely obsolete?

Kinda like their government pension scheme, and their government education scheme?

Let’s see now.  Let’s get the current government spending numbers on all that, before we get universal health care.

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2007
Amounts in billions of dollars

Pensions: $872.7
Health Care: $844.4
Education: $744.8
source: usgovernmentspending.com

Hey.  What’s another $100 billion on top of that?

Business Boring? Please!

The chap at the BBC explained why they don’t put much business on TV. “It’s seen as just a bunch of boring men in suits, sitting behind desks.” Not enough sex, presumably, and not enough progressive values.

Oh please, writes business editor Jeff Randall:

Business is full of brilliant, eccentric, dynamic, flawed, creative, venal, visionary, devious, generous and crooked people. It’s drama. It’s greed. It’s lust. It’s envy. Boring, it ain’t. Business is the constituency of control-freaks, show-offs, workaholics, plotters, schemers, bullies, wimps, winners and losers. Some are obsessed about becoming super rich. Others couldn’t care less. Their drug is glory.

The most boring 15 months he worked was as sports editor.  Sports is boring

I soon discovered that dealing with most sports folk was mind-numbingly dull, compared with swimming alongside sharks such as Tiny Rowland and Bob Maxwell. Like Lord Byron, they were mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Our modern society seems to have an infatuation with dull.  It loves the mayhem of sports on TV.  But don’t ever get into the real thing, like battling Islam for world domination!

Well, real life has a way of elbowing its way into the living room whether you like it or not.  And that is when you need the dangerous people to get you out of trouble—mad, bad, eccentric, creative, devious, and all the rest.

The War Will Go On

In a sense, military historian Victor Davis Hanson has it backwards.  Never mind about the tactical considerations of Iraq vs. Afghanistan, he says.

Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.

Wrong, Mr. Hanson.  On the contrary, whatever we do in Iraq, the global war of Islamic terrorism against us will go on. 

After all, we don’t give a damn about whether Islam lives or dies.  As far as we are concerned we are the future and the Islamists are a bunch of parallel-cousin-marrying barbarians.

It is the fact that the Islamists won’t live and let live that we are in this war, pace the Noam Chomsky brigade.

But, of course, we are just quibbling.  Hanson is making the point that Iraq is just a battle, a tactical or operational question.  We can win it or lose it. But win or lose in Iraq the war with an enraged Islam will go on.

Most likely, it will take a western city or two damaged by a dirty nuclear bomb before the West gets mad enough to get serious.

The trouble with barabarians is that you don’t know when to take them seriously.  Usually they are just a nuisance.  But sometimes they can take down an empire.  It happened to the Roman Empire, and it happened a few times to the Middle Kingdom, most notably when Genghis Khan and his chaps took over in the 1200s and inspired Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

and so on.

Strategically speaking, the next item on the agenda is what the Democrats will do when they are next in power.

Because that is a very different thing from being in opposition.