Eating beef 'is less green than driving'

They’re coming to take you away, those lefty global warming types, those watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag.

Now some Japanese scientists have computed that, according to the Daily Telegraph, eating meat contributes to global warming. 

Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday.

The reason, of course, is that a lot of methane gets released into the atmosphere during the life of  a humble cow, on account of the anaerobic digestion going on in the multi-chambered bovine GI tract.

Well?  Is that too much?  Shall we give up our meat to save the planet?

Or should we emulate Charlton Heston? You’ll only take my meat out of my cold, dead hands.

And here’s another fact.  A lot of methane gets discharged into the atmosphere as a result of wet rice cultivation.

Should we stop eating rice?

Dem House Solves College Costs With Subsidies and Regulation

With college costs soaring way above the rate of inflation and many graduates finding that they can’t find jobs to pay off their loans, what would you do if you were Congress?

Naturally, you would increase the already vast subsidies for higher education and you would get tough on price gougers with new regulations, as reported by Ruth Mantell of Marketwatch.

The House passed a student-loan bill Wednesday that would boost college financial aid by about $18 billion over the next five years and cut federal subsidies to lenders.

If you are willowy blonde Anya Kamenetz, writing a youth-oriented financial advice column on Yahoo called “Generation Debt,” this all seems right and proper.  She quotes Democrat George Miller.

"This bill is a remarkable step forward in our efforts to help every qualified student go to college," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the legislation. "With this bill, we are saying that no one should be denied the opportunity to go to college simply because of the price."

 And the delicious thing for Kamenetz is that if you can’t afford to pay back your student loan, you don’t have to.

[G]raduates whose earnings don’t exceed 150 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for a single person) would be exempt from repaying student loans.

Isn’t that nice?  Another subsidy program which will sluice more money into the bottomless pit of government education.  But there will be strong controls to penalize colleges that increase their tuition too much!

Starting in 2011, any college with high, outlying tuition increases would have to submit a report to the education secretary explaining why. After two consecutive years, the college would be placed on "affordability alert status."

That will set them quaking in their shoes.

Twentysomething Kamenetz has perfect MSM credentials: an Ivy League education and a stint with the Village Voice.  But the commenters on Yahoo weren’t too impressed.

They could see what was going down.  They knew that more subsidies means more subsidies.  They were contemptuous of the idea that you should only repay your student loan if you could afford it.  Why that would mean that kids would sign up for basket-weaving and never try to earn a thing after they graduate!

It’s the great challenge for conservatives in the next generation.  To educate Americans to the idea that more subsidies equals bigger government and less room to breathe, that the more the government helps us the more we have to turn to the government for help.

It seems too complex an idea to communicate, and yet the Yahoo readers seem to get it.

Who Is Norman Borlaug?

Everybody knows Paris Hilton.  But who the heck is Dr. Norman Borlaug?  Like, whatever?

Step away from that remote!  And listen.

Norman Borlaug is the guy behind the green revolution, the advances in grain breeding that has produced staggeringly large increases in crop yield in the third world.

It started in Mexico, as Elizabeth M. Whelan reports.

Over the course of 20 years, he developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat. The results were spectacular: Mexico evolved from a wheat importer to a net exporter by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, Dr. Borlaug’s work nearly doubled wheat production in Pakistan and India, saving millions from starvation.

You’d expect the media and the liberals to be all over this guy like a cheap suit, but somehow it never took. 

Perhaps it’s because he helped people help themselves.  Our MSM buddies much prefer people who help people by handing out other peoples’ money.  You can’t do much media without emotionally compelling victim situations that can only be solved by handing out other peoples’ money.

Perhaps it’s because a lot of the funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation.  You know, evil oil money.  Remember how the evil John D. Rockefeller put the father of magazine feature writer Ida M. Tarbell out of business more than a century ago?  Who can forget?  

And then there’s the GM connection.  Who knows how much of that high-yield grain is Frankenfood! 

This week, Dr. Norman Borlaug was awarded in the Capitol Rotunda the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian award.

I’d say he deserved it.

The Not-so All-Night Debate on Iraq

The United States Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body, and last night they debated a motion to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq.

But it turned out not to be quite the extravaganza we were promised, according to Shailagh Murray, Paul Kane and Debbi Wilgoren in the Washington Post. 

Reid, the majority leader, initially had threatened to schedule votes throughout the predawn hours. But he agreed shortly after midnight to delay even procedural votes until 5 a.m. That meant most senators could grab a few hours of shut-eye, so long as a few remained in the chamber[.]

Sen. Reid went to bed and a handful of senators kept the debate going, alternating Republican and Democratic throughout the night. 

That’s the way the WaPo reported it.  At The Captain’s Quarters, Ed Morrissey wrote about calling Majority Leader Reid’s bluff.  According to Morrissey Reid figured that Republicans would call for a quorum and when it failed would go home for the night and allow Reid to accuse Republicans of “dodging the debate.”  Instead, Republicans showed up for debate and Reid went home.

The overnight session has done nothing except to annoy Republicans into a more unified caucus, and to make Harry Reid look like a fool. One might have expected a Senator from Nevada to recognize a busted flush when he saw it.

At least the MoveOn.org folks got their media event.

In the Belly of the Beast

The reason we need the welfare state, liberals tell us, is because we need a safety net to protect us from the excesses of the free enterprise system.  Without the rights and the protections of an activist government people would suffer.  Corporations have no mercy.  The moment you can’t do the job, you are out on the street.  That’s why we need workers’ rights and consumers’ rights and a host of benefits provided and enforced by government.

No doubt we do need protection from corporations.  And fortunately governments are only too glad to pass laws to curb their power. So when someone gets chewed up by a corporation they can hope for redress. 

So, we’ve taken care of Big Business.  But what about Big Government?  What about Big Education and the good folks hiding behind Our Teachers?

Unfortunately Big Ed can chew you up and spit you out just like the robber barons of old.  Of course, they don’t have the company goons, like they did in the old days. No, they are much more sophisticated.  They can rough you up and kick you out without leaving a mark on you, at least not on the outside, as Nancy Coppock found out.

Nancy worked as “a middle school remedial reading teacher in a small Texas town outside this major university town.”

I took my job very seriously because to me, the best thing I could do for mid- to below-average students, many minority and poor, was to make sure they could read to the best of their ability.

You can say that again.

One special ed student, Duane, had extreme emotional problems.  Cunning and streetwise, Nancy was still “able to shame the young man into accepting just discipline” and the school principal noticed and recognized her for her achievement.

Then came the day when Duane suddenly “plunged a sharp pair of scissors downward toward my face” and stopped just inches from Nancy’s eyes.

Nancy reported the incident but asked that the boy not be punished.  She wanted to settle the problem herself.  But she never got a chance.  The boy was not punished, yet eventually came “into the office and demanded to be punished.”

Nancy approached the boy’s psychiatrist and requested a chance to attend a session with the boy; the boy needed absolution, she told him. 

Oops!  Back up Nancy.  Wrong religion!

I was told it would be *inappropriate *for me to attend another session and was sent on my way. Evidently, the doctor went straight to the school counselor, who then typed up a memo listing the reasons why I should be sent home from school because I was dangerous to Duane.

Then “I was informed that I was to not return to work until a psychiatrist had examined me and found me suitable for work.”  Then nobody would talk to her at school.  Then she was being tested by a psychologist.  Then she was telling the principal that she wasn’t being treated fairly.  Then she was told: “Well that’s your opinion.”  She decided to quit at the end of the term, but she got to teach Duane until then.

On the last day of school, Duane cried like a big baby, wondering what he was going to do without me... He was in anguish because he knew I had been punished for what he had done.

They spat Nancy out.  But they saved the system, and it can continue to make a difference in the lives of kids.  That’s a relief.  Duane went on to commit a robbery and shot at a pursuing policeman; but at least the school did all it could.

One thing is certain.  The school district needs additional funding so that it can deal better with at-risk kids.

The thing about people and corporations is that, however bad they are, you can shame them, and fine them, and tax them, humiliate them, and cut them down to size.

In fact the dirty little secret about people is that, from time to time, if you extend a little love to them they will kneel at your feet.

But government is shameless and it is sovereign. 

Who will protect us from the government?

It's a Regional War, Stupid

From the very beginning of the war on terror, it was obvious that the war was not just a war against Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but a war to prevent the emergence of a single regional hegemon in the Middle East.  Democrats profess not to know this, and Republicans barely seem to know it.  But President Bush does, according to Michael Ledeen.   In his press conference Monday, the president said:

The fight in Iraq is part of a broader struggle that’s unfolding across the region.

The fight is, of course about the expansionary ambitions of Iran.  It has been the policy of the United States for decades to oppose the emergence of a single controlling power in the Middle East, for the obvious reason that such a hegemon would come to control all the oil in the region.

First it was Saddam Hussein who was the problem.  That is why we went to war in the first Iraq war, to prevent Saddam from moving south from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia.

Now that Saddam’s regime has been liquidated, the problem is Iran.  So whether the United States stays in Iraq or retreats, the problem is still the same.

And it’s likely that the Middle East will remain a problem until the end of the oil age. 

Germany and France on Collision Course

The euro has climbed to stratospheric levels in recent months, approaching $1.40 to the euro.  But  Ambrose Evans- Pritchard thinks it will all end in tears.  The high euro is sitting on the back of a revived German economy, achieved by a signal achievement of German companies in moderating the wages of German workers.

By screwing down wages, Deutschland AG has deflated costs since 1995 by 20pc against France, 30pc against Spain, and 40pc against Italy.

Unfortunately the other countries in the euro are hurting badly, France in particular, and they want a weaker euro.  In particular the French love their Airbus.

Airbus chief Louis Gallois said a rate above $1.35 means death for European aviation. "If there is a prolonged slippage in the dollar much beyond that, then we need to ask ourselves if we can still build airplanes in Europe," he said.

The problem all along for the euro is that it needs harmonized economies to succeed.  But the EU nations are not harmonized economically.  Each country sports it own beloved home-grown market distortions reflecting its correlation of political forces.

The Germans are sensitive to the need for a successful economy. They had three economic meltdowns in the twentieth century and it seems to have concentrated their minds.

Plus they are, or were, the most advanced country in Europe.

However it may seem from the point of view of schadenfreude a economic row between Germany and France really would not be fun for anyone.