The eternal story

OBAMA TURNS HIS SIGHTS TO ISRAEL

 By David Harsanyi

Word is that President Obama will deliver a comprehensive speech on the Middle East any day now. And as you know, there’s nothing — and I mean nothing — Americans want to talk about more during a prolonged economic downturn than Palestinian statehood. Hey, the White House might not be able to sign a budget, but it’s going to fix 2,000 years of strife halfway around the globe. You just watch.

According to a Bloomberg report, Obama will urge Israel to halt West Bank settlement expansion and return to the 1967 “borders.” (There were never any 1967 borders, but that’s another story.) If this is true, the president of the United States will be asking an ally — though he probably bristles at such a narrow-minded concept — to accept a Judenfrei West Bank, washed of all aggressive settlers, prosperity and progress. The president, if the report is true, will be asking the Jews to surrender the old city of Jerusalem and place it under new management. Hamas-Fatah management.

Why, one wonders, wouldn’t Israelis jump all over such a fabulous offer?

It‘s not that Hamas is a belligerent terrorist organization that won’t accept the existence of Israel — the Jews are blessed with similar neighbors in Syria, Hezbollahstan and soon-to-be Muslim Brotherhood Land. It‘s that no treaty with Hamas is worth the parchment paper it’s scribbled on. Obama would never send a treaty with Hamas to the Senate, so why would we expect Israel to enter into one?

The Arabs, though, will also demand the ‘right of return’ for refugees. In truth, whether the Israeli government leans left or right, the probability of any return of “refugees” is as remote as the chance of my “returning” to a ghetto in autonomous Transylvania.

Crocodile Dundee in Detroit

Lottery millionaire charged in Detroit landlord's killing

Steve Pardo and Mike Wilkinson / / The Detroit News

Three months ago, Freddie Young became a lottery millionaire.

Today, the 62-year-old Detroiter is residing not in a luxury home but in a jail cell, accused of gunning down the owner of an apartment complex for evicting his daughter.

Young was one of 13 people in the P1 Gold Lottery Club — a group of postal workers and retirees who landed a $46.5million Mega Millions jackpot in February, Detroit police confirmed.

He allegedly confronted Greg McNicol, a 45-year-old Australian who was renovating a 10-unit apartment complex on Beniteau — not far from Young's home on Traverse. McNicol was arguing with Young's daughter, Ayana, 20, over nonpayment of rent.

Apartment resident Florida Benton said McNicol was more than a landlord — he was a person with a good heart who lived in the "worst apartment" in the complex while he made repairs on the other units.

She wonders why a newly minted millionaire would allegedly get so worked up over unpaid rent in a run-down complex.

"My question is: If (Young) had that type of money, what was his daughter still doing here?" Benton said. "It is just as easy to put someone in a new residence tomorrow as it is to come down here and shoot someone in cold blood."

Young faces a May 26 preliminary examination on charges of first-degree murder and using a firearm while committing a felony. He faces up to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, if convicted on the murder charge.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy issued a statement about the incident and McNicol.

"By all accounts, he was a landlord hoping to have a positive impact in the community," the prosecutor said. "This is extremely discouraging and I sincerely hope that this does not have a chilling effect for others who want to do business in the city of Detroit."

Food stamp nation

Food Stamp Millionaires

by Ralph Alter

If you have any uncertainty regarding the responsibility for the nearly bankrupt status of the state of Michigan and its cultural and philosophical epicenter, Detroit, take a gander at the state's food stamp program. Sarah Jones at politicususa provides a self-pitying screed suggesting that Michigan governor Snyder is responsible for the fact that some college professors are on food stamps. She provides as an example, Dr. Mike Evans and Kenlea Pebbles, married Central Michigan University professors with two children. The Evans-Pebbles earn a salary of "under $40,000 a year."

Due to the Evans-Pebbles family's poor choice of vocation and inadequate family planning:

Their two children...qualify for reduced price school lunches, MI Child health insurance, and other tax-subsidized services.

One might think that a person capable of earning a doctorate might be able to support himself and his family without leaning on the taxpayers to carry part of his load. Not in Michigan. Just imagine the retirement benefits accruing to this family a decade or so from now.

But you don't have to be a struggling college professor, slaving over student papers 20 hours a week to provide for the kids to get Michigan food stamp freebies. No, the porous safety net established by the liberal hacks that have brought Michigan to the sorry state it's in today doesn't even keep the really big fish from slipping through.

Leroy Fick of Bay County admitted he still swipes his electronic (food stamp) card a year after winning a ($2 million) jackpot on "Make Me Rich," (Michigan's TV lottery show.)

Fick says the Department of Human Services told him he could continue to use the card, which is paid with tax dollars.

One has to wonder at what income level a person no longer qualifies for food-stamp assistance in Michigan. Food stamp nation indeed.

Leap in Void

Environmentalist Schizophrenia

by Gary Jason

Several recent noteworthy articles sharply illuminate the increasingly schizophrenic environmentalist worldview.
The first is an amazing cri de coeur from one of Britain's most famous environmentalists, George Monbiot.  In it he frankly admits that the environmentalist movement is in a quandary.  Take the issue of nuclear power.  Enviros typically hate it, but they refuse to deal with the fact that the only alternative is -- fossil fuels!  (Yes, wind and solar power help a tiny bit, but neither can be scaled up to supply the requisite energy in the foreseeable future, and they need to be subsidized at an enormous level.)
Monbiot rightly notes that the enviros have an inconsistent worldview.  On the one hand, they want a decarbonized economy to reduce pollution and save the landscape, but this can be done only by business and government building projects, and the enviros resist both government and business development.
To those enviros who dream of dramatic reductions in what we gluttonous materialists produce and consume, Monbiot notes that the enviros don't really tell us what is essential to living reasonably and what is not.  He says, "An honest environmentalism needs to explain needs to explain which products should continue to be manufactured and which should not be, and what the energy sources for these manufactures should be."  Curiously, it doesn't occur to Monbiot that the phrase "an honest environmentalism" is an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Then there are enviros who predict (nay, yearn for!) an imminent economic collapse because we are running out of fossil fuels.  They feel that such a collapse will both punish wicked humanity and cut the number of homo sapiens down to size.  (Some enviros have put their dream number of people on the planet at 400,000 -- meaning that their dream is the nightmare scenario in which 99.99% of all humans just die.)

Branded Men and big losers

by Alexander Boot

One of modernity’s toxic effects is that words now mean whatever we want them to mean. They cease being a means of communication and become an instrument of power. Lewis Carroll realized this fact:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

Modern politicians and “brand builders” both use language in that unreal way—the former to gain power over the electorate, the latter over the market. And the unreality starts with the word “brand.”

“Brand,” with its “personality” matched to the “market profile,” is a modern invention. Branding has little to do with product characteristics because the public has been house-trained to think in terms of brands, not products. A pub-crawler selects a brand of lager not because it’s necessarily the best, but because the “brand builders” have activated the correct response mechanisms. What those mechanisms are differs from brand to brand, but only superficially. What matters aren’t semantics but semiotics; not substance but form; not reality but make-believe.

Sex & Money

The Dirty Old Man and the IMF

by Patrick J. Buchanan 

Saturday was a bad day for the New World Order.

New York police boarded the first-class cabin of an Air France jet bound for Paris to collar Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, a Grand Master of the Universe and the Socialist Party’s hope to defeat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.

Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known, was hauled back to New York and identified in a police lineup by an African maid at the Sofitel hotel as the man who emerged stark naked from the bathroom of his $3,000-a-night suite and tried to rape her.

DSK’s political allies are howling entrapment. Yet his rap sheet is long. Called the Great Seducer, he was charged with the sexual harassment of a co-worker at the IMF and accused by a young French novelist of behaving like a “rutting chimpanzee” and trying to rape her when she contacted him about a book she was writing in 2002.

The novelist, Tristan Banon, now 31, is a goddaughter to DSK’s second wife. She took a lawyer’s advice not to file charges then. But, says The Guardian, Banon is about to file them now.

“Time to shut down the IMF and get back what’s left of our gold.”

Monday, The New York Times wrote, “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”

What is this satyr doing running the IMF? How was a man of his Eurotrash reputation approved by the United States government? Such conduct may be pooh-poohed over the pond, but has our country dropped that low?

They've already given.

by Walter Williams

The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back.

Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won't do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.

A competing liberal implied assumption about the sources of income is that income is distributed, as in distribution of income. There might be a dealer of dollars. The reason why some people have more dollars than others is because the dollar dealer is a racist, a sexist, a multinationalist or a conservative. The only right thing to do, for those to whom the dollar dealer unfairly dealt too many dollars, is to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they refuse to do so, then it's the job of Congress to use their agents at the IRS to confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners. In a word, there must be a re-dealing of the dollars or what some people call income redistribution.

Death and taxes

Slaves to Words

by Thomas Sowell

We could definitely use another Abraham Lincoln to emancipate us all from being slaves to words. In the midst of a historic financial crisis of unprecedented government spending, and a national debt that outstrips even the debt accumulated by the reckless government spending of previous administration, we are still enthralled by words and ignoring realities.

President Barack Obama's constant talk about "millionaires and billionaires" needing to pay higher taxes would be a bad joke, if the consequences were not so serious. Even if the income tax rate were raised to 100 percent on millionaires and billionaires, it would still not cover the trillions of dollars the government is spending.

More fundamentally, tax rates— whatever they are— are just words on paper. Only the hard cash that comes in can cover government spending. History has shown repeatedly, under administrations of both political parties, that there is no automatic correlation between tax rates and tax revenues.

When the tax rate on the highest incomes was 73 percent in 1921, that brought in less tax revenue than after the tax rate was cut to 24 percent in 1925. Why? Because high tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring in as much hard cash as lower tax rates that they do pay. That's not rocket science.

Then and now, people with the highest incomes have had the greatest flexibility as to where they will put their money. Buying tax-exempt bonds is just one of the many ways that "millionaires and billionaires" avoid paying hard cash to the government, no matter how high the tax rates go.

Eco-fascists and crony capitalists on steroids

Big Government's Latest Gift: The $50 Light Bulb

by Dave Blount

Through taxation, regulation, and inflation, Big Government makes everything we buy more expensive, dramatically reducing the standard of living we would have were this still a free country. The reason we haven't rebelled is that this effect is normally almost invisible, like the fortunes the State bleeds from our paychecks. But the impending light bulb ban pushed through Congress by eco-fascists and crony capitalists like GE brings statism's effect on prices out in the open with $50 eco-bulbs:

Two leading makers of lighting products are showcasing LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace energy-guzzling 100-watt light bulbs set to disappear from stores in January.

Their demonstrations at the LightFair trade show in Philadelphia this week mean that brighter LED bulbs will likely go on sale next year, but after a government ban takes effect.

The new bulbs will also be expensive — about $50 each — so the development may not prevent consumers from hoarding traditional bulbs.

Our socialist rulers constantly remind us how much they care about the poor. Yet if it weren't for them, far fewer of us would be poor. Those who are will find themselves sitting in the dark when bureaucrats have priced lighting out of their reach.

ENTITLEMENT SENSE

By Mark Steyn

I like to think that upon arrival in this great republic I assimilated pretty quickly. Within four or five months, I was saying “zee” and driving on the right more often than not. But it took me longer to get the hang of the word “entitlement.” You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use — “sense of entitlement” — in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.

Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible government — that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect. Recently, in the London Telegraph, Liam Halligan bemoaned the way commentators focus on America’s $14 trillion of debt — i.e., the “debt ceiling” debt — without factoring in the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That makes America’s real debt some $75 trillion, or five times GDP. Our own Kevin D. Williamson puts the FDR/LBJ entitlement liabilities a little north of $100 trillion. Once you add in state and municipal debt, you need to add a zero to that reassuringly familiar $14 trillion hole. The real hole goes ten times deeper: $140 trillion — or about twice as much as America’s total “worth.”

The inevitable end of Empires

Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. 

by James Warner

A little background – in the summer of 1875, Orthodox Christians in Herzogovina revolted against their Ottoman overlords. In 1876, the Slav principalities of Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey, and there was an uprising in Bulgaria. In Russia, there was fervent support for the Serbian cause. Russians voluntarily sent money and medical supplies to the Orthodox Slavs, and many Russian volunteers went to the Balkans to fight. Russian newspapers took up the Serb cause, as is reflected in this fictional discussion between Koznyshev and Prince Shcherbatsky from Tolstoy's novel Anna Karennina:

"All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one.  Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction."
"Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing", said the prince. "That's true.  But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them."

From the summer of 1876 to the spring of 1877, there was heated public debate in Russia over whether to engage in the conflict in the Balkans. Fyodor Dostoevsky was passionately in favor of military intervention, for humanitarian and patriotic reasons – Leo Tolstoy, although not yet a fully-fledged pacifist, could not see the point of Russia getting involved.
Dostoevsky was in tune with the popular mood. His serialised publication A Writer’s Diary, which ran around this time, often reminds me of the U.S. “war blogs” of 2002-3. It’s fascinating how Dostoevsky’s various motivations for supporting the war merge and reinforce each other. His most laudable motive is his acute empathy with suffering, the sense of humanitarian urgency he has about putting an end to atrocities committed by the Turks. But he segues easily from reporting horrific massacres to fantasizing about a Russian conquest of Constantinople, the center of Orthodox Christianity. Dostoevsky admires Russian heroes and despises foreign diplomats, and condemns those who “rattle on about the damage that war can cause in an economic sense.” He is sublimely confident the Serbs will welcome Russian intervention, and that those who don’t are an unrepresentative class out of touch with their own people. He has no sense that atrocities are occurring on both sides.
Dostoesvsky feels that a national malaise has been conquered in Russia, and that the extent of popular support for the Serbs is proof of the spiritual superiority of the people to the intelligentsia. He is angry with those Russians who feel sympathy for the Turks. He is completely certain of victory and of being on the side of history, and has suggestions about what to do once the Ottoman Empire is completely crushed. He is convinced of his own country's exceptionalism, that the pro-war movement “in its self-sacrificing nature and disinterestedness, in its pious religious thirst to suffer for a righteous cause, is almost without precedent among other nations.” and has a hard time crediting the good faith of anyone who sees things differently. Sometimes he talks in terms of a “crusade,” and indulges the apocalyptic dream of a final war between Christianity and Islam.
In England, the leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, was appalled by Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria and thought England should help drive the Turks out of that country -- but the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, in a spirit of realpolitik, maintained the official British policy of siding with Turkey against Russia. That Disraeli was a Jew provided Dostoevsky with some scope for conspiracy theorizing.

Nearly Half Of Detroit’s Adults Are Functionally Illiterate, Report Finds

100,000 Detroit High School Graduates Are Illiterate

by BigFurHat 

Detroit’s population fell by 25 percent in the last decade. And of those that stuck around, nearly half of them are functionally illiterate, a new report finds.

According to estimates by The National Institute for Literacy, roughly 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan — 200,000 total — are “functionally illiterate,” meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills. Even more surprisingly, the Detroit Regional Workforce finds half of that illiterate population has obtained a high school degree.

The DRWF report places particular focus on the lack of resources available to those hoping to better educate themselves, with fewer than 10 percent of those in need of help actually receiving it. Only 18 percent of the programs surveyed serve English-language learners, despite 10 percent of the adult population of Detroit speaking English “less than very well.”

Additionally, the report finds, one in three workers in the state of Michigan lack the skills or credentials to pursue additional education beyond high school.

In March, the Detroit unemployment rate hit 11.8 percent, one of the highest in the nation, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month. There is a glimmer of hope, however: Detroit’s unemployment rate dropped by 3.3 percent in the last year alone.

(Comment: Maybe it just dropped because the illiterate couldn’t fill out the unemployment forms.)

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder have been aggressively attempting to reinvent the once-great Motor City. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that then newly-elected Mayor Bing planned to tear down 10,000 of the city’s 90,000 abandoned properties.

Crony capitalists and corrupt politicians unite

By Lori Aratani

Fans of cheap rotisserie chicken and bulk toilet paper can rejoice. It looks as if a new Costco will be coming to Wheaton in 2012.
The Montgomery County Council defeated a proposal Monday that would have blocked the county from giving millions in funding to shopping mall giant Westfield to help secure the deal.
The vote is a significant victory for County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), who had lobbied for a plan that will give Westfield $4 million over two years. The subsidy raised eyebrows in some quarters because it comes as the county faces a $300 million budget shortfall for its next fiscal year and is cutting a variety of programs.
Leggett’s plan received reluctant approval from council members last fall, but momentum seemed to shift after two new members — Hans Riemer (D-At Large) and Craig Rice (D-Upcounty) — were elected in November.
The deal appeared to be in jeopardy last month, but the Leggett administration moved to make its case. Officials argued that pulling out of the agreement could damage the county’s reputation and undermine efforts to attract businesses.
That seemed to sway Riemer and Rice as well as Council President Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring).
“I don’t think [Westfield needs] the money to bring Costco to Wheaton,” Riemer said Monday. “But the integrity of the county is at stake, and I don’t think it’s my right to jeopardize the integrity of the county.”
Six members voted against a measure that would have blocked the award of $2 million, half of the proposed incentive: Ervin, Rice, Riemer, Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda), Nancy Floreen (D-At Large) andGeorge L. Leventhal (D-At Large). Three voted for it: Marc Elrich (D-At Large), Nancy Navarro (D-Eastern County) and Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville).
“This has been a long and tortured experience with Westfield and Costco,” said Ervin, who had previously opposed offering Westfield the subsidy. In the end, she said she thought it would set a bad precedent to change course after promising the money.
Council members opposed to the subsidy said the county might have put its pride ahead of its people.
“The idea of giving $2 million of our scarce dollars to Westfield is a mistake,” said Elrich, who led the opposition to the subsidy. “We can take this $2 million and put it to better use in our community.”
As a condition of receiving the money, Westfield officials must work closely with the neighborhood to address concerns about noise, traffic and other possible impacts.
Monday’s vote did not include a decision on whether the project will include a gas station, which many residents who live near the shopping center oppose. A decision on that part of the project will move through a separate process later this year.
Under the plan, Westfield will receive $2 million in 2011 and $2 million in 2012 to pay for construction costs related to Costco’s move to Westfield Wheaton mall. Costco will take the second-floor space that was occupied by a Hecht’s department store. Money from the county will be used to pay for renovations to the first floor of that space so the mall’s owners can try to attract a second tenant.
Under an agreement reached by Costco and Westfield in July, a store could open early next year.
Leggett has touted the project as a way to bring jobs and revenue to the eastern part of the county. County officials say rebuilding the former Hecht’s space, which has been vacant since 2006, to accommodate Costco and other retailers would bring up to 300 construction jobs and 475 retail jobs to the area at a time when such jobs are scarce.

The Sanctification of Awful Men

by Dr Zero

Saturday brought the bizarre saga of Sweden announcing a rape charge against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, then withdrawing the warrant within a matter of hours, downgrading the international media hurricane to a tropical storm of “molestation” charges.  Molestation isn’t “severe” enough to get you arrested in Sweden, so it was all much ado about nothing.

Some have speculated this was more than just a bureaucratic snafu.  Was the Swedish government co-operating with the military and intelligence services of the United States, hoping to discredit Assange with false rape charges?  I hope nobody working for the CIA is incompetent enough to believe that would work.  Even hard evidence of rape would not “discredit” a hero of the international Left.

The murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner wasn’t enough to “discredit” Mumia abu Jamal.  His release from prison remains a romantic obsession of the hard-core Left, which sees no reason for a soul brimming with the people’s poetry to rot in stir over one little dead cop.

The Left seethes in frustration that small, judgmental minds continue to hold Roman Polanski’s assault of an underage girl against him.  His fashionable politics and artistic talent should have long ago erased the memory of that messy business at Jack Nicholson’s place.  In a 1979 interview, Polanski wailed, “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”  He was wrong about the “killing somebody” part, as Mumia abu Jamal could explain.

Those foolish enough to take Michael Moore seriously are happy to swallow hypocrisy and deceit that would be obvious to a small child.  They are not repulsed by the spectacle of a greedy man making millions from selling them propaganda designed to keep them bitter and poor.  Profiting from lies told in the service of a “larger truth” does not “discredit” him.

The Left is happy to watch people like Al Gore rake in billions from the global-warming scam.  No amount of hard data, or evidence of fraud, will discredit the clergy of the Church of Global Warming.  Their sacred ideal is the construction of an absolute international authority, empowered to defend the Earth from grubby little people who keep asserting privileges that should be reserved for the elite, such as driving cars.  No action taken in the service of this ideal can “discredit” the priesthood.

Following the government’s nutritional advice can make you fat and sick

The Washington Diet

By Steven Malanga
Last October, embarrassing e-mails leaked from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene disclosed that officials had stretched the limits of credible science in approving a 2009 anti-obesity ad, which depicted a stream of soda pop transforming into human fat as it left the bottle. “The idea of a sugary drink becoming fat is absurd,” a scientific advisor warned the department in one of the e-mails, a view echoed by other experts whom the city consulted. Nevertheless, Gotham’s health commissioner, Thomas Farley, saw the ad as an effective way to scare people into losing weight, whatever its scientific inaccuracies, and overruled the experts. The dust-up, observed the New York Times, “underlined complaints that Dr. Farley’s more lifestyle-oriented crusades are based on common-sense bromides that may not withstand strict scientific scrutiny.”

Under Farley and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York’s health department has been notoriously aggressive in pursuing such “lifestyle-oriented” campaigns (see the sidebar below). But America’s public-health officials have long been eager to issue nutrition advice ungrounded in science, and nowhere has this practice been more troubling than in the federal government’s dietary guidelines, first issued by a congressional committee in 1977 and updated every five years since 1980 by the United States Department of Agriculture. Controversial from the outset for sweeping aside conflicting research, the guidelines have come under increasing attack for being ineffective or even harmful, possibly contributing to a national obesity problem. Unabashed, public-health advocates have pushed ahead with contested new recommendations, leading some of our foremost medical experts to ask whether government should get out of the business of telling Americans what to eat—or, at the very least, adhere to higher standards of evidence.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, public medicine, which concerns itself with community-wide health prescriptions, largely focused on the germs that cause infectious diseases. Advances in microbiology led to the development of vaccines and antibiotics that controlled—and, in some cases, eliminated—a host of killers, including smallpox, diphtheria, and polio. These advances dramatically increased life expectancy in industrialized countries. In the United States, average life expectancy improved from 49 years at the beginning of the twentieth century to nearly 77 by the century’s end.

As the threat of communicable diseases receded, public medicine began to turn its attention to treating and preventing health problems that weren’t germ-caused, such as chronic heart disease and strokes, the death rates for which seemed to be soaring after World War II. Some observers cautioned that the apparent increase might be the result of diagnostic advances, which had improved doctors’ ability to detect heart ailments. This possibility, however, failed to deter the press and advocacy groups like the American Heart Association from declaring the arrival of a frightening epidemic.

How EU officials simply forgot about Christmas

The European oligarchy’s failure to include Christmas in a diary for schoolkids sums up their separation from the demos.
by Frank Furedi 

A year ago the European Commission (EC) printed more than three million school diaries for distribution to students. They are lovely diaries which, true to the EU’s multicultural ethos, helpfully note all the Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Chinese festivals. The diary also highlights Europe Day, which falls on 9 May. But the diary is not without some very big gaps. For example, it makes no reference to Christmas - or Easter or indeed to any Christian holidays.

However, the importance of 25 December is not entirely ignored. At the bottom of the page for that day, schoolchildren are enlightened with the platitude: ‘A true friend is someone who shares your concern and doubles your joy.’

Not surprisingly, many Europeans are not exactly delighted by the conspicuous absence of Christian festivals from a diary produced for children. In January, an Irish priest complained to the ombudsman of the EC and demanded an apology for the omission of Christian holidays and the recall of the diaries. A month later, the commission apologised for its ‘regrettable’ blunder. However, the ombudsman dismissed the demand to recall the diaries, arguing that a one-page correction sent to schools had rectified the error.

Negative Productivity

by Anthony de Jasay

As of January 1, 2011, the French "legal" minimum wage or smic was raised by 1.6 percent to 9 euros ($12) an hour or 1,365 euros per month. About 10 percent of wage-earners, condescendingly called smicards, are paid the minimum wage. Their take-home pay is amputated by what is called "their" contribution to "social" insurance. Of course the remaining and greater part of "social" insurance premiums is just as much "their" contribution, but for cosmetic reasons is called the employer's contribution. The division into employer and employee contributions is stark economic nonsense. Both parts come out of the pay the worker would get if there were no compulsory insurance or if he paid the premium directly rather than through the employer paying it on his behalf. However, many or most workers fall for the cosmetic and live with the illusion that the benevolent, "socially" just government orders the employers to give them something on top of the wage.

With retail prices lifted by a value-added tax of 19.6 percent, the purchasing power of the smic is hardly above the bare subsistence level in an urban environment. People who have a heart must find it shamefully low. Yet people with a head regretfully find it too high; for within the great mass of unemployed, the proportion of the unskilled who would be candidates for the smic is much higher than the average, i.e. the skilled and the unskilled taken together. Average unemployment is at 9.5 percent, but among the unskilled it can locally be 25 percent or more. Is then the minimum wage too low or too high?

The answer is that it is both, due largely to the caring, "socially"-just hand of the government. Paying 1,365 euros a month to a smicard costs his or her employer anything between 2,200 and 2,500 euros due to the highly complex social insurance schemes whose premiums the employer pays on his employees' behalf. The result is that it is cheaper to go capital-intensive, install automatic checkout counters in supermarkets, automatic ticket controllers at subway stations and giant street-cleaning machines to sweep the streets, rather than employ smicards to do these lowly tasks.

Suppose for a near-delirious moment that freedom of contract is suddenly and miraculously recognised as a firm rule. Among many other things, "social" insurance against illness, old age and unemployment ceases to be compulsory. The wage, with or without deductions for insurance, would become freely negotiable. Would a smicard give up all his entitlements under the various "social" schemes in exchange for a rise in his take-home pay? Some would not at almost any price, but some, probably many, would rather take a raise from 1,365 to 2,000 euros in cash than persist with the old system. The effect on employment of the unskilled might be very substantial indeed.