Tyranny at work

Would you like to forfeit your house?

Imagine a guest with a marijuana cigarette secretly tucked in his pocket visits your house. The police storm in, seize the cigarette, and arrest your guest for drug possession. The police then announce that the government now owns your house.  “What?!” you wail, “I did nothing wrong. How can you take my house?”

You are told that civil-forfeiture law allows government to take property that harbored an “abatable nuisance” – illegal drugs, in this case. An officer explains that “Your house, not you, committed a wrong. To help stem drug trafficking, it must be seized. Your doubts about our ability to confiscate your property will be dispelled by reading the Supreme Court’s March 4th decision in Bennis vs. Michigan.”

Certain that such tyranny is impossible in America, you rush to readBennis. Your heart sinks. Chief Justice Rehnquist explains that the Constitution permits Michigan to use civil forfeiture to strip Tina Bennis of her ownership of an automobile in which her husband John had a tryst with a prostitute. Civil forfeiture allows government to take property from someone without convicting that someone of a crime.

Everyone concedes that Mrs. Bennis was unaware that John used the car for illegal sex – for which he was convicted and fined $250. Still, according to the Court, Michigan violated neither the Due Process nor the Takings clauses of the Constitution by taking the innocent Mrs. Bennis’ property without as much as a “thankee, ma’am.” The court reasoned that the state’s confiscation and forfeiture of Mrs. Bennis’ car is constitutional because courts have long upheld civil-forfeiture seizures of some properties.  But these were historically confined to properties whose owners could not be tried in domestic courts. Not until Prohibition – long after the Constitution was adopted – did government generally wield civil forfeiture against people who could easily be criminally prosecuted.

Traditionally, no one can be punished unless first convicted. And government cannot convict someone – nor forfeit his property – who is denied an opportunity to defend himself before an impartial jury. But what to do about criminals outside of a domestic court’s jurisdiction? This was a pressing question for courts in cases involving smuggled goods as well as ships used for smuggling or piracy on the high seas. Owners of these properties were typically outside of domestic jurisdiction. Unless the law found a practical way to punish these foreign owners, smuggling and piracy would continue unabated.

The root of all evils (medical evil that is)

Mummy Says John Horgan Is Wrong about Fat andCarbs in Food

By Karen Schrock  | Thursday, May 19, 2011 | 

I was struck today by the juxtaposition of two recent articles here at ScientificAmerican.com. In “Thin Body of Evidence,” John Horgan expresses his skepticism about journalist Gary Taubes’s claims that carbohydrates, not fat, are the cause of obesity, heart disease and other health problems faced by many Americans. In “Mummy Says Princess Had Coronary Disease,” scientists who performed a CT scan on a 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummy express their puzzlement that this ancient princess had advanced atherosclerosis (hardened arteries) despite her civilization’s “healthy” diet that included wheat, barley, bread and beer—and only small amounts of meat.

Atherosclerosis is linked to high blood levels of triglycerides (a type of fat molecule) and low levels of HDL cholesterol, the “good” cholesterol. Eating a lot of carbohydrates (such as wheat, barley, bread and beer) is well known to raise triglycerides and lower HDL. Eating fat (such as found in meat) counteracts these effects, raising HDL and lowering triglyceride levels. The Egyptian princess’s diet, therefore, is the perfect recipe for high triglycerides and low HDL—and for atherosclerosis.

These facts about diet and blood lipid levels are not controversial—they have been known for decades and verified repeatedly by scores of studies. So why were the anthropologists surprised by the mummy’s atherosclerosis? And why is Horgan resistant to the idea that carbohydrates cause obesity and desease? The answer lies in two all-too-human tendencies: over-reliance on personal experience and resistance to information that contradicts our beliefs.

Horgan and the anthropologists who studied the mummy are falling victim to their preconceived notions about nutrition—that whole grains are healthy and animal fats are dangerous. They can hardly be blamed; those ideas have been trumpeted as truths for three decades in this country. But those notions were never based on good science, and now evidence is mounting that they are just plain wrong. Taubes details that evidence masterfully in Good Calories, Bad Calories (Knopf, 2007) and Why We Get Fat (Knopf, 2010).

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Truth, Freedom, and Falsehood in Economic Analysis and Policy Making

 Big Government and Truth

by Robert Higgs

For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

In regard to goodness and beauty, I have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion. For guidance in seeking goodness, we may look to saints, theologians, moral philosophers, and moral exemplars of our own acquaintance. For demonstrations of beauty, we may turn to nature and to artists, great and small, who have adorned our lives with the grace of music, poetry, and the visual arts. My own professional qualifications, as an economist and an economic historian, do not equip me to contribute anything of value in these areas.

I do feel qualified, however, to speak with regard to truth, because the search for truth has always served as the foundation of my intellectual endeavors. Moreover, my study, research, and reflection within my own professional domains have brought home to me a relationship that others might do well to ponder and respect—a relationship, indeed, an array of relationships, between truth and freedom, such that anyone who seeks the triumph of truth must also seek to establish freedom in human affairs.

When I began my academic career in 1968, my research specialty was the economic history of the United States. I was expected to publish the findings of my research in reputable professional journals. For a young man just beginning to master his field, carrying out publishable research was a daunting task. Thousands of other writers had already contributed to building up the literature in my field, so adding something of enough importance to merit its publication in a good journal was hardly an easy task.

I discovered, however, that one way to proceed was by identifying significant mistakes in the existing literature and correcting them. Moreover, I soon found that many such mistakes had been made. To put this statement in another way, I found that the existing sources often failed to tell the truth about one thing or another, and in some cases the falsehoods propounded by one writer led later writers, who relied on those false statements, to make errors of their own.

Liberation by the numbers

Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity

by ADAM THIERER 

One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]  As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story.  It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining.  In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available:

§  Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.^[1]

§  YouTube: every minute, over 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site.^[2]

§  eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.^[3]

§  Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month)^[4]

§  Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days^[5] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)

§  Apple: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.^[6]

§  Yelp: as of March 2011 the site hosted over 17 million user reviews.

§  “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”^[7]

§  Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[8]

[1] Ken Deeter, “Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes,” Facebook.com, February 7, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919. Also see:http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

[2] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

[3] eBay, “Who We Are,” http://www.ebayinc.com/who

[4] Matt McGee, “By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz,” SearchEngineLand, February 23, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709

[5] http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/happy-birthday-twitter.html Also see:http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html

[6] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[7] Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, February 10, 2011,http://annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/110210Hilbert.aspx.

[8] Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.

Advantages of the separation of supermarkets and state

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

A thought-provoking analogy from Donald Boudreaux:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

Paganism in action

"Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape."

Matt Ridley

Yet another quote of the month

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

Ronald Reagan

History as "community organizing"

One of these young men grew up to be a great world leader, presenting the face of Western Civilization to its barbaric enemies.
The other never did grow up

History or "Herstory"

The Scourge of the Feminist Word Police

By Jacob Laksin 

If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died ^[1] last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.
Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”
Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing ^[2]. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.
Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”
Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”
Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.
Not the least of the problems with the feminist theories of language popularized by Swift is that they were based on a fallacy. Contrary to feminist claims, there was nothing sexist about generic nouns like “man,” which had been used for centuries to describe humans collectively. Nor did pronouns like “he” exclude women, a point author E.B. White made in his classic style guide for good writing, the Elements of Style ^[3]:

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.

Now it was. History may have been on White’s side, but the culturally ascendant “herstory” was not, and it was feminist pseudo-linguists like Swift who won out in the end. The result was a steady decline in clarity and a surge in the kind of reader-proof, politically correct verbiage that today defines academic jargon — a writing style “somewhere to the left of gibberish,” ^[4] as an exasperated graduate student once put it.

Spain’s Socialist Utopia Mugged by Reality

A massive wave of social unrest in cities across Spain, dubbed the Spanish Revolution, reflects the failure of the social welfare state model to provide Spanish youth with a future, much less a present

By Soeren Kern  

Throngs of Spanish youth have gathered in more than 150 cities across Spain to protest skyrocketing unemployment, cutbacks to social welfare benefits, and rampant corruption among Spain’s political elite. The massive but mostly peaceful protests (photo galleries here ^[1], here ^[2], here ^[3] and here ^[4]) by disaffected youth represent the first significant manifestations of social unrest since a decades-long housing bubble burst in late 2007 and plunged the Spanish economy into a deep and prolonged recession ^[5].
The self-styled May 15th Movement ^[6] took to the streets of Spanish cities on Sunday, May 15, to demand “real democracy now” ^[7] and a new economic policy ahead of municipal and regional elections on May 22. United by anger over a youth jobless rate that is hovering at around 45 percent — and the inability of a largely inept political class to do anything about it — the May 15th Movement is a conglomeration of several smaller protest groups, including Democracia Real Ya! ^[8] (Real Democracy Now!) and Toma La Plaza ^[9] (Take the Square).
The Spanish protesters have been inspired by the pro-democracy movements in the Arab world, and are using social media networks to coordinate the demonstrations. (One of Twitter’s most popular conversation topics in recent days has been the hashtag #15m ^[10], or May 15, which marks the start of the #SpanishRevolution ^[11].)
The largest protests have been in Madrid, where tens of thousands of demonstrators have converged on the city’s emblematic Puerta del Sol ^[12] square (which protesters have renamed “Plaza SOLución” ^[13]). Similar protests are under way in other major Spanish cities, including Barcelona, Bilbao, Granada, Palma de Mallorca, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Valencia, Vigo, and Zaragoza. The protestors have vowed to remain mobilized at least through the May 22 elections, in defiance of a ban ^[14] that Spanish authorities have placed on the demonstrations.
After forcibly evicting some 150 protesters from the square in Madrid ^[15] on May 17, police changed their approach and have mostly stood by as the activists vowed to resist peacefully if authorities make any further attempts to dislodge them. A spokesperson for the May 15th Movement has described the protests as a “peace encampment” ^[16] while youth have been chanting famous slogans of resistance that date back to Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war, when General Francisco Franco laid siege to Madrid. Protesters have also circulated flyers citing a provision of Spain’s post-Franco constitution that gives citizens the right to protest without prior authorization.
Up until now, anti-government protests in Spain have been relatively few and far between, partly because of the strong ties that labor unions have with the ruling Socialists ^[17]. But Spain’s nascent youth democracy movement is a spontaneous grassroots groundswell that is not left versus right but rather young versus old. The youth movement is highly inclusive and its members — who represent all of Spain’s socio-economic classes — have expressed disgust with both the governing Socialists and the main opposition conservative Popular Party. A ubiquitous protest slogan has been: “PSOE y PP, la misma mierda es,” ^[18] which loosely translated means “Socialists and Conservatives, they are the same crap.”
The protesters do have a point. For example, corruption in Spain is endemic ^[19] and politicians from both major parties have been implicated in scandals in all of Spain’s 48 provinces. The Justice Ministry currently is investigating more than 700 cases of high-level corruption ^[20], including 264 cases involving Socialists, 200 involving Conservatives, and hundreds more involving smaller regional parties.
Spain’s ailing economy too is a symptom of much broader problem, including the inability of the social welfare economic model to create jobs, as well as a highly paternalistic labor market that benefits an older generation seeking to preserve the status quo. Although Spain’s economic crisis has affected workers in all age groups, youth unemployment is more than double the overall jobless rate of 21.2 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Around half of Spain’s youth are unemployed and the other half that is working often does so under highly exploitative employment conditions.
Spain’s status quo is preserved by a dysfunctional economic, political, and judicial system as well as an unwritten social contract whereby many college graduates work in poorly paid apprenticeships (often earning the minimum wage of €641 ^[21] or $900 a month), sometimes for ten years or more, leaving them no other option than to live at home with their parents, sometimes until their mid-thirties. (By way of comparison, 63 percent of all Spanish workers earn less than €1100 per month ^[22], creating the neologism mileurista, a one thousand euro earner.)
In its Regional Economic Outlook for Europe ^[23], the International Monetary Fund on May 12 warned that youth unemployment in Spain raises the prospect of a “lost generation.” Colloquially, the current generation of Spaniards between the ages of 18 and 34 is known as the “Generación ‘ni-ni’: ni estudia ni trabaja,” ^[24] roughly translated as “The Neither-Nor Generation: Neither Studying Nor Working.” According to a recent survey, more than half of Spanish youth say they have no purpose in life and nearly all of them believe they are worse off than their parents.
Opinion polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists ^[25] on May 22, as voters punish them for the government’s handling of the economic crisis and the painful austerity measures aimed at avoiding a debt default. Polls published in the centre-left El País and the center-right El Mundo newspapers predicted broad losses for the Socialists including in strongholds such as Barcelona, Seville, and the Castilla-La Mancha region. According to El Mundo, the Socialist Party is “on the edge of a catastrophe.” ^[7]
Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced on April 2 that he would not stand for a third term in general elections scheduled for March 2012. Some in the party believe a new leader could halt the fall in the Socialists’ popularity.

Do as I say ...

 Deconstructing Chomsky

 by David Solway

Those who regard Noam Chomsky as one of the world’s premier thinkers might be advised to reconsider. It is, of course, mainly his political writings that have earned him his current reputation for crusading fearlessness, uncompromising candor, and lacerating intelligence. That they consist largely of cant and drivel erected on a foundation of dishonesty escapes his acolytes’ attention completely, likely because he speaks to their prejudices and because they have not done their homework. And possibly because they are influenced by the New York Times, which beatifies Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But then, that’s the Times, for which the provision of evidence was never a desideratum.“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence,” to quote Christopher Hitchens’ aphorism on the beatification of Mother Teresa, whom he regards as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” — epithets which would more aptly apply to Chomsky. I will, however, provide evidence for my dismissal of Chomsky as a world-class quack, as did Hitchens with Mother Teresa in his devil’s advocate volume on the saintly imposter.
As I’ve written before, Chomsky’s dishonesty is palpable. He rages furiously and sanctimoniously against the U.S. “war machine,” but as Peter Schweizer reveals in Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Chomsky wrote his world-famous Syntactic Structures on grants from the American military establishment. America is, for Chomsky, “the land of Pentagon contracts, lucrative real estate holdings, stock market wealth, and a tax-sheltered trust for his children.” Yet, despite his fierce denunciations, he squats there like an orb spider, his web sagging with the weight of juicy flies. He makes disingenuous millionaire Michael Moore look like a small-time piker.
As for his political ravings, the sheer nonsense of most of his claims is outstripped only by the abyssal gullibility of his auditors and readers, who do not realize that Chomsky is a contaminated witness. “It would be easy to demonstrate,” writes David Horowitz in an article titled “The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky,” “how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written, the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced,”  expressing “a pathological hatred of his own country.” A recent book has accomplished precisely such a demonstration. Chomsky’s doctoring of sources, dubious or obscure references, misquotations, convenient abridgments, significant omissions and gross misinterpretations have been abundantly documented in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, a volume which should be consulted by those who are still impressed by Chomsky’s glowing nimbus and public prominence as a “libertarian socialist.”
Noted jurist and author Richard Posner concurs with the book’s findings. In his Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner writes that Chomsky’s tone and one-sidedness is “all too typical” of his oeuvre. “Chomsky’s use of sources is uncritical, and his methodology unsatisfactory — it consists simply of changing the subject.” Nor does Chomsky feel obliged to defend his assertions no matter how outrageous or tendentious since “[h]e never acknowledges error.” Chomsky appears to regard himself as a political sage, perhaps even a prophet, whose insights cannot be questioned and whose pronouncements are infallible. One recalls his confident prediction to an MIT audience in a lecture of October 18, 2001, scarcely a month after 9/11, that the U.S. was preparing a “silent genocide” against Afghanistan, planning “to murder three or four million people.” This should tell us all we need to know about his powers of divination.
According to Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Society, Chomsky is one of those public intellectuals who has ranged “beyond the confines of his specialty” and made “inflammatory comments on things for which he had no qualifications.” But the shabby scholarship alone, evident both in the pulpiteering style and the abject referencing, as well as the apodictic claptrap he purveys, should have set off alarm bells for responsible readers and prompted them to do a bit of supplementary research. If they had, they would have realized that Chomsky is so far off the wall he makes Humpty Dumpty look like a paragon of stability.

The outrage of betrayal

Esperanza y Cambio

by Richard Fernandez

He came to power by blaming his predecessor for sending troops to Iraq. The new leader promised comprehensive health care reform and to bring his country’s welfare safety net in line with Western Europe’s. But the global financial crisis came and denied him his chance of greatness. Compelled by circumstances, he began to belatedly imitate the policies of his predecessor simply in order to survive. We are of course talking about Spain’s Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

When Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took power seven years ago, he and his Socialist Workers Party set out to perfect the welfare state in Spain. The goal was to equal— or even surpass — lavish social protections that have long been the rule in Spain’s Western European neighbors.

True to his Socialist principles and riding an economic boom, Zapatero raised the minimum wage and extended health insurance to cover everything from sniffles to sex-changes. He made scholarships available for all. Young adults got rent subsidies called “emancipation” money. Mothers got $3,500 for the birth of a child, toddlers attended free nurseries and the elderly won stipends to finance nursing care. …

We are a lot poorer without Michael

Environmentalism is a religion

by Michael Crichton 

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.  

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.