Gaia vs. the Big Death

Environmentalists take their zealotry to new lows.

By  Charles C. W. Cooke

Discussing North Korea recently, the journalist Christopher Hitchens reflected darkly that, bad as things are in the Communist country, “at least you can die.” Well, it seems that Kim Jong Il and his merry band have one up on the West. For, here in the free world, even death does not guarantee you escape from the unwanted attentions of the green movement. A Scottish company, whose staff have clearly spent many a long, dark night of the soul fretting over the hazards posed by the greenhouse-gas emissions and energy consumption of funeral-parlor cremation ovens, has developed a new system that literally liquefies human bodies.

The system, which dissolves corpses in heated alkaline water and then smashes the bones up for good measure, has been successfully tested in Australia, and parent company Resomation Ltd. is trying to get the law changed in Europe, the United Kingdom, and all 50 U.S. states to expand the practice. The technique was allegedly “developed in response to the public’s increasing environmental concerns.” I must confess that the mercury content of the burning corpse has never been at the top of the bereaved’s list of concerns at any funeral I have attended, but perhaps I am underestimating the comfort that knowing your late loved one is in for three hours of chemical dissolution — and some good mechanical bone-cracking to boot — can bring to the disconsolate, especially if the procedure is undertaken in the name of environmental purity. Come on Gaia, let’s stick one to Big Death!

Florida will be the first U.S. state fully to enjoy widespread employment of the process, after an Ohio state court deprived Buckeyes of the honor on the grounds that it violated state law. Still, Ohioans managed to dispose of 19 bodies in this manner before the injunction took force. Once dissolved, the remains are so clean that they can be poured into the municipal water system, and resomation inventor Sandy Sullivan assures his critics that the liquefied body tissue poses no environmental risk. Residents of Florida will no doubt take comfort in that the next time they switch on their taps for a cooling glass of water.

The green “solutions” do not end there. Other proposals include freeze-drying the body with liquid nitrogen and then vibrating it until it shatters into fragments, which are passed through filters that separate the remains into different out-trays, a form of afterlife garbage disposal that sounds as if it had come from the more surreal pages of the Onion. The key “advantage” of the procedure, developed by Swedish creator Susanne Wiigh-Masak, is that the body can then be poured into a shallow grave and become soil. In order to test the efficacy of the process, developers fitted a pig with an artificial metal hip, before killing it and pushing it through the contraption. Thus she proved her “organic” credentials.

These, along with the fad of “natural burial” — in which coffins, embalming fluid, and all the salutary advances of the past thousand years are rejected in favor of shallow graves and what effectively amounts to composting — are part of an ongoing and regressive attempt to impose a narrow conception of “sustainability” on even our most private moments. Currently, such systems are voluntary, and families remain free to choose how they dispose of their dead. But if the history of the green movement is anything to go by, such choice will not last long, especially when reducing carbon emissions is the motivating factor. In Agamemnon, the father of tragedy, Aeschylus, noted that “death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.” If he could have seen where things were going, he might not have drawn such a clear distinction.

Athens vs Sparta

The onward march of the Obesity Orwellians

When kids are snatched from their parents simply for being too fat, it’s clearly the expansion of the state, not our waistlines, that is out of control.

By Rob Lyons

‘Parents of seven told: your children are too fat, so you will never see them again.’ So declared the Daily Mail on Monday. And this case is by no means the first one in which children’s excess weight has been used to justify taking them from their parents. Nor is this the only way in which the issue of obesity is being used to intervene in the lives of families today.

The family who featured in the Daily Mail story, who cannot be named for legal reasons, first came to prominence in 2008 when the first threats were made to take their children into care. The parents had actually approached social services themselves, because one of their children had developmental problems. However, the social workers soon focused on their weight. The mother, in her forties, weighed 23 stone, while the father, in his fifties, weighed 18 stone. In 2008, their 12-year-old son weighed 16 stone, his 11-year-old sister weighed 12 stone, and a three-year-old girl weighed four stone.

After being given three months to bring their children’s weights down, to no avail, the family was moved into a two-bedroom ‘Big Brother’-style house where only three of the children were allowed to stay at any one time and their mealtimes were constantly monitored. All seven children were taken into care in 2009 and now it has been revealed that some of the children will be permanently taken out of contact with their parents through fostering or adoption.

There is no doubt that there are other problems in this family besides obesity. However, these are very far from neglected or abused children. This would seem to be a loving family suffering from some difficulties relating to one another. The council has consistently argued that it would not have intervened in the way it did on the grounds of obesity alone. However, it is quite clear that the draconian manner in which the family has been treated is to a significant extent based on concerns about the children’s weights.

While such cases are still unusual, this is not an isolated incident. In 2004, the parents of a nine-year-old girl in Derbyshire were threatened with having her removed due to her weight. In 2007, Newcastle social services made a similar threat in relation to an eight-year-old boy, Connor McCreaddie. In 2008, UK council bosses declared that very fat children should be monitored and taken away from their parents if necessary.

It should be blindingly obvious to medics and social workers that children simply cannot become as fat as these children without some significant genetic predisposition towards piling on the pounds. The drastic act of taking a child from his or her parents should only ever happen when there is clear evidence of serious neglect or abuse. Yet in the cases of many of these fat children, there is little or no evidence of any such neglect or abuse. Instead, obesity itself is taken to be sufficient basis for extreme state action.

The case of Anamarie Regino, a three-year-old girl from New Mexico in the US is instructive in this regard. As Paul Campos relates in his book, The Obesity Myth, Anamarie was taken from her home because it was assumed that her extreme obesity must have been the fault of her parents. Her mother was accused, without evidence, of force-feeding her. However, because Anamarie did show signs of losing weight, she was allowed to return to her parents. Six years later, in 2010, the Albuquerque Journal reported that Anamarie is still struggling with her weight. By then aged 12, standing five feet three inches tall and weighing over 300 pounds, Anamarie had a body mass index (BMI) of around 55. Doctors have still not been able to explain why she is so large.

How taking children like Anamarie, Connor and the Dundee kids away from good homes could ever be seen to help them is a mystery. As Campos writes in relation to Anamarie, the case says ‘a great deal about the hysteria that fat elicits among so many doctors, social workers and other members of helping professions’. The sickness here is not with the children or the parents; rather, it is the hysteria about obesity among social workers, medics and council chiefs that needs treatment.

This obesity hysteria is a sickness that increasingly infects relations between the state, parents and children at many levels. For example, it is now standard practice to weigh children at school and to send letters home to parents. Last week, the Daily Mail reported on Lewis Wighton-Turner, an 11-year-old boy whose parents were told by his school that he was considered clinically obese. The fact that young Lewis takes part in three different sports clubs and has completed an amateur triathlon suggests he might actually be quite healthy.

Then there is the ongoing lunacy around school meals, sparked by Jamie Oliver’s crusades on both side of the Atlantic and the belief that burgers, fries and turkey twizzlers are killing our kids. When parents understandably reacted against these apparently lethal meals by giving their children packed lunches, the result was to turn teachers into snoops inspecting lunchboxes.

The school curriculum now seems to be obsessed with healthy eating and exercise, to the detriment of good education. Children have it drilled into them that they should be fretting about food and bodyweight constantly. Children with a bit of a podge are now led to believe that they could grow up to be sickly, miserable, unlovable specimens for whom the clock will be constantly ticking towards an inevitable early death.

All this from an overreaction to normal variations in body shape combined with the authorities’ determination to persuade us that we are all vulnerable and in constant need of their protection - even from our own loving parents. On this flimsy basis, families are at best being guilt-tripped about what they eat and how they raise their children, and at worst are being torn asunder. It’s not our expanding waistlines but the ever-expanding state that we should really be worried about.

No way out

Why policy advice is futile, and what you should do instead

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER 

The Washington Post recently featured my book in the Political Bookworm column of their online edition. You can see it here. Naturally, I am very pleased about this. There is, however, one sentence, the last in Steven Levingston’s article, that I should probably comment on:

“In all he says, it is hard to know if this [paper money collapse] is his wish or his fear.”

Now let me be very clear that I am convinced that paper money collapse is inevitable. Our present system of elastic money is not only suboptimal it is also unsustainable. As I show in my book through a systematic and fundamental analysis, elastic money must lead to the accumulation of imbalances, to capital misallocations, and to resource mis-pricings, and those must lead, over time, to economic disintegration and chaos.

The present system must end, it will end, it will now certainly end badly and probably soon. As it is inevitable it doesn’t matter what I wish. To wish that this would not happen would be as sensible as to wish that the present summer would not end, and that the days would not get shorter. I don’t wish it and I don’t fear it. The system must go. Good riddance. What I do fear, however, are the political consequences and the societal fall-out from the crisis, and I particularly fear the responses it will provoke from governments and state officials.

Of course, the fiat money crisis is not a natural catastrophe. It is entirely manmade. It is the direct consequence of political decisions and political action. In particular, it is the inevitable consequence of the decision to abandon a gold-based monetary system, a system of essentially inflexible and apolitical money, and to replace it with entirely elastic and constantly expanding paper money under the control of central banks. It is the direct consequence of the erroneous belief – which, sadly, is still the guiding principle of modern central banking and reflected in ninety percent of the financial commentary in the media– that low interest rates and additional credit are good regardless of whether they are the outcome of true saving and capital accumulation, or simply the outcome of fiat money creation.

I am quite glad that Levingston raised the question of my own personal attitude to what is going on because it gives me the opportunity to clarify my position. His point is also somewhat related to something I encounter more often now that I present my book to various audiences or that I give interviews on its subject matter. I think there often exists an assumption that one cannot simply predict some unpleasant outcome in the field of economics and not offer at least a bit of hope that things may turn out differently, of promising the possibility of a way out that would spare us all the painful consequences of past actions, of decades of misguided policy, of cheap credit and limitless money. There is the unspoken belief that after all my research on the topic I must have some good policy advice up my sleeves. Often people ask me, so what should be done? If what central bankers and politicians are doing presently is, as you say in your book and on your website, counterproductive, what should they do instead? What is the solution? Just as in the case of the Washington Post blog, I suspect that the fact that I speak so little about specific policy reforms leads people to believe that I don’t care about where we are going, or I might even look forward to the disaster.

What should be done

There is only one solution and that is to stop the printing of money and the artificial suppression of interest rates, to return to hard money, to allow interest rates and market prices to again reflect the true extent of voluntary savings, and to thus allow the liquidation of the accumulated imbalances from previous money expansion. But because we had a four-decade long period of unprecedented fiat money creation globally, these imbalances are now so big that the necessary liquidation would be very painful – too painful for the political class – which got us into this mess in the first place – to ever deem it acceptable. The overstretched banking industry, the overextended asset markets, insolvent governments – all of this is screaming for a cleansing liquidation and recalibration – and has done so for years. A crisis has now become unavoidable. But politicians still think that the power of the state is unlimited, that what they don’t find acceptable will simply not be allowed to occur. Only in the realm of politics is the belief widespread that reality is optional, and reality must simply be made to conform to the wishes of the political elite. Of course, policy cannot create a new reality. What policy does at the moment is try to postpone the inevitable correction ever further. “Not on my watch” is the modus operandi. This will make the final crisis even worse.

I quoted Ludwig von Mises on this on a couple of occasions but I will do it again. In his magnum opus of 1949, Human Action, the grand master of Austrian School economics said:

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Bizarro World

Post-9/11: Life as a comic book

By J. Raimondo

We're living in a comic book world, where American superheroes confront an "Axis of Evil," and the Evil One (Lex Luthor?) is defeated but lives to fight another day. I hear that comics have fallen on hard times, and that today's sophisticated kids just can't be bothered (too much like reading), but, really, if it wasn't for my early infatuation with the world of DC Comics – Supermanespecially – the post-9/11 world would seem completely inexplicable. I remember one story-line that had Superman trapped in "Bizarro World" – another dimension, existing alongside our own, in which everything was weirdly skewed, perversely inverted: a parody of our own. As preparation for the world of 2002, I couldn't have had a better education, for what else are we to make of this story of the airline passenger facing 20 years for using the lavatory without permission….?

A FELONY URINATION

Richard Bizarro, who got up out of his seat to take a whiz, has become "the first person arrested under a new flight regulation adopted for the Olympics," Fox News reports. Bizarrely, he faces "up to 20 years in prison on charges of interfering with a flight crew." On a Delta airlines flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, Mr. Bizarro got out of his seat 25 minutes before landing, in violation of the 30-minute rule newly imposed on Salt Lake City flights by the Federal Aviation Administration as a precautionary measure during the Olympics. (The same rule is permanently in effect for all travelers to the Imperial City).

For this he's facing 20 years? Ah, but urination without authorization is just the beginning of his crimes: according to one of the witches disguised as flight attendants, Bizarro not only "ignored her orders" but also "stared at her for about a minute before returning to his seat." The Fox News story also ominously adds that Bizarro is "6-foot-2 and 220 pounds" – another crime, along with unauthorized staring, in the Bizarro World we're living in. Goodness gracious me, I'll be surprised if he doesn't get life without possibility of parole!

Oh, but here's my favorite part:

"Because of the incident, air marshals aboard the plane ordered all passengers to put their hands on their heads for the rest of the flight."

WELCOME TO BIZARRO WORLD

If this seems utterly inexplicable to you, then you don't understand the central organizing (or is that disorganizing) principle of Bizarro World. As the link above explains, this is:

"A planet where alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep, ugliness is beautiful and the world's greatest hero is a chalk- faced duplicate of Superman."

In the normal world – that is, the world prior to 9/11 – airlines competed for business, each one claiming to treat their customers like royalty. In the Bizarro World we landed in after 9/11, however, the airlines are competing to see which one is the meanest, and, from what I can see, the competition is positively cutthroat.

BOOK HIM!

The FBI claims that "the incident [what incident?] was seen by two of three undercover air marshals on board …One of the agents said he saw Bizarro give what appeared to be a 'thumbs up' to another passenger as he returned to his seat, prompting the marshals to take control of the cabin." Aha! Unauthorized hand signals! Give that man another 20 years!

HIJACKERS OR SKY MARSHALS? YOU DECIDE

Bizarro, for his part, told the Salt Lake Tribune that he thought the sky marshals were hijackers. When three men, "old enough to be his grandchildren," started yelling and demanding that everyone put their hands on their heads, "I believed I was witnessing a hijacking of our airplane," he said. Bizarro, in spite of his name, just doesn't get it: everything's changed, you dolt! Up is down. Down is up. Ugly is beautiful, and vice-versa. Sky marshals act like hijackers – makes sense to me….

A "Phyrrhic victory for America"

A progressive case for Obama's foreign policy greatness?

BY GLENN GREENWALD

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky today says that while President Obama "hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view" (he apparently hasn't read Steve Benen or Ezra Klein lately), the war in Libya highlights how "one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president."  Tomasky's argument is somewhat cautious and expressly contingent on unknown, future events, but is nonetheless revealing -- both in what it says and what it omits -- about how some influential progressives conceive of the Obama presidency.

First, I'm genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make that assessment is known yet, including: how many civilians have died, how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Gadaffi?  Does anyone know how many civilians have died in the NATO bombing of Tripoli and the ensuing battle?  Does anyone know who will dominate the subsequent regime?  Does it matter?  To understand how irrational and premature these celebrations are in the absence of that information, I urge everyone to read this brief though amazing compilation of U.S. media commentary from 2003 after U.S. forces entered Baghdad: in which The Liberal Media lavished Bush with intense praise for vanquishing Saddam, complained that Democrats were not giving the President the credit he deserved, and demanded that all those loser-war-opponents shamefully confess their error.  Sound familiar?

No matter how moved you are by joyous Libyans (just as one was presumably moved by joyous Iraqis); no matter how heinous you believe Gadaffi was (he certainly wasn't worse than Saddam); no matter how vast you believe the differences are between Libya and Iraq (and there are significant differences), this specific Iraq lesson cannot be evaded.  When foreign powers use military force to help remove a tyrannical regime that has ruled for decades, all sorts of chaos, violence, instability, and suffering -- along with a slew of unpredictable outcomes -- are inevitable. 

Tomasky acknowledges these uncertainties yet does not allow them to deter him, but that makes no sense: whether this war turns out to be wise or just cannot be known without knowing what it unleashes and what follows.  Just as nobody doubted that the U.S. could bring enough destruction to Iraq to destroy the Saddam regime, nobody doubted that NATO could do the same to Gadaffi; declaring the war in Libya a "success" now is no more warranted than declaring the Iraq War one in April, 2003.

Then there's the issue of illegality.  Tomasky pays lip service to this, dismissing as "ridiculous" Obama's claim that he did not need Congressional approval because the U.S. role in Libya didn't rise to the level of "hostilities." By that, Tomasky presumably means that Obama broke the law and violated the Constitution in how he prosecuted the war.  Isn't that rather obviously a hugely significant fact when assessing Obama's foreign policy?  The Atlantic's Conor Freidersdorf argues that no matter how great the outcome proves to be, Libya must be considered a "Phyrrhic victory for America" because:

Obama has violated the Constitution; he willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by the framers.