About "rights"

The article I posted the other day about health care myths made a point about rights that I've seen made elsewhere. In particular, his point #6

Myth #6 Health Care is A Right

Nope, it's not....

luckily it doesn't take a superb philosopher to understand that health care simply is not a "right" in the sense we normally use that word. Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission (illegal search and seizure, loud boy-band music in public spaces). They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don't choose to provide it to you, you then have a "right" to steal from them.

All well and good, but if you ever watch crime shows and listen to people being "read their [Miranda] rights", you'll hear, among other things:

...You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense..."

That is giving the accused the right to the services of a highly trained professional. If someone is accused of a crime, he is guaranteed the right to the services of this professional, at no charge if he can't afford to pay, regardless of, among other things, public sentiment. Thus, Adolf Hitler, if he were tried in an American court, would have the right to the services of an attorney, paid for by you and me.

I think everyone reading this agrees this is as it should be, at least in principle.

But it seems to be an exception to the definition of rights given above.

Update

I e-mailed the author with these thoughts, and got the following in response (quoted by permission):

Thank you for reading my piece and writing to me.

Your example of government provided attorneys is a very interesting one, probably the most interesting of the many comments I've received, and the one that had me the most befuddled. But ultimately I don't agree it's damning. First, it's not in the Constitution as you said but a court interpreted "right". That doesn't eliminate your point but makes it somewhat less foundational (the founders weren't handing out others material goods). More importantly, the government only provides this "good" when you are accused of a unproven crime and they are trying to take away your freedom. The material good is only useful to combat a larger government imposition. Seems to me like not a "net" giveaway. Also, for instance, they do not provide attorneys for civil cases, so clearly something different is going on here.

Again, I enjoyed thinking about that, it was a hard one!

- C

I think he has a very good response. At least it parallels my thoughts for why the right to legal counsel would be an exception to the general rule.

I'll have to remember to run that point past Walter Williams next time he uses that definition of "rights".

Being a Journalist means never having to do math

Which is a good thing, because journalists can't do math.

Reporters and editors at our major newspapers are neither smarter nor more knowledgeable than the general public. In fact, I think they are, in general, less so. Today's case in point is a correction that the New York Times has run repeatedly in recent years. Yet, somehow, they never seem to learn:

An article on July 5 about the California governor's race misstated the size of the outdoor tent where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger smokes cigars when working at the Capitol. The tent is about 15 feet square, not 15 square feet. (In other words, the tent is about 225 square feet.)

I say this in all seriousness: why should we take direction on any complex issue of public policy from a group of people who literally do not know what a square foot is? They are not smarter than we are. They are dumber.

About those interrogations

From Powerline:

Earlier this year, the Washington Post proclaimed, in a story by Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of the harsh interrogation of detainee Abu Zubaida. I took on that article here.

Today Warrick and Finn are back to give us what they call a "more nuanced look" at the interrogation of Abu Zubaida. As Marc Thiessen shows, this more nuanced look amounts to something close to a retraction of the authors' claim that no significant plot was foiled as a result of this interrogation.

In today's piece Warrick and Finn report that Abu Zubaida gave up information that led to the arrest of Jose Padilla. He did so, moreover, only after he was subjected to sleep deprivation. Thiessen points out that this reporting directly contradicts the claim of FBI agent Ali Soufan that he got the information about Padilla from Zubaida before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied by the CIA.

There are those who still make the blanket statement, "torture doesn't work".

Sleep deprivation works.

Therefore, it's not torture.

QED.

Palin on Energy

From the Washington Post, Sarah Palin on the Cap and Tax legislation.

I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.
American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president's cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.
....
The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

An idea whose time has come

Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.

How can lawmakers vote on something so important without a thorough understanding of what's in it?

Not the everyday "We hereby rename this post office in honor of so-and-so" or "We officially declare this Goldfish Month." The big things, like an almost $800 billion stimulus plan, or an energy package that Politico said "would transform the country's economy and industrial landscape."

Actually reading such legislation, as the founders might say, should be self-evident.

But apparently not. So a little nudge is in order, especially with health-care reform looming.

One nudger is Colin Hanna, a former Chester County commissioner and president of the conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. He has begun a campaign (www.pledgetoread.org) that asks members of the House and Senate to promise the following:

"I . . . pledge to my constituents and to the American people that I will not vote to enact any health-care reform package that:

"1) I have not read, personally, in its entirety; and,

"2) Has not been available, in its entirety, to the American people on the Internet for at least 72 hours, so that they can read it too."

Let Freedom Ring isn't alone. A consortium of liberal and good-government groups is backing readthebill.org, and a libertarian group, DownsizeDC.org, essentially wants the two planks of Hanna's pledge enacted as federal law.

I recall from my civics classes that there used to be three readings of any bill that was introduced before it could be passed by the Congress.   The bill would actually be read out loud, because it was not unheard of for a member of Congress to be illiterate!

I think we would be well served if every bill under consideration had to be read, out loud, on the floor, before voting could take place.  It would, at the very least, limit the amount of damage any session of Congress could do.

And ideally, I'd like to see a rule passed declaring no one could vote on a bill unless he had been present during the entire reading of that bill.

If it's not worth sitting through, it's not worth enacting into law.

Obamacare, the trap

From Paterico's Pontifications:

When discussing his proposed government takeover of the US healthcare system, Pres. Obama always hastens to assure people that if you like your current coverage (as the overwhelming majority of people routinely tell pollsters they do), you will be able to keep it. However, if you lose your individual coverage, you will be unable to buy new insurance. And the mentality that outlaws new individual insurance may be inclined to do the same for employer-provided insurance in the future. Not that the Left will have to resort to that. If Obamacare passes, insurance will generally become a function of government. And any "public option" that passes will unfairly compete with private insurers — bypassing the laws that apply to private insurers, sticking taxpayers with hidden administrative costs, paying below-market Medicare rates (which in turn inflate private costs), and so on, until they have crowded competition out of the market.

We can be glad that the Democrats were so brazen about their intent as early as page 16 of their bill, as they have just made life easier for people fighting the nanny state. It is tempting to ask what might be in the remaining 1,002 pages of the bill. However, as the Leftist strategy here seems to be to strongarm moderates into not filibustering a final House-Senate bill, the real question is whether our elected representatives will read — or even give Americans a chance to read — the final product before a vote is taken. The moderates really have the power to dictate the final product. The issues are whether they have the guts to do so… or whether voters can scare them into doing the right thing.

Fighting global warming.

Why one politician has changed his mind, and is now fighting the fighters.

Around three months ago one of my advisors pulled me aside and asked me what I thought was driving climate change. I smiled and said automatically that it was obviously a result of increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

I had never really looked at the science and just assumed what was reported in the media to be true. Well wasn't I in for an enormous shock.

My advisor presented me with data and some comments from a number of scientists which suddenly had me asking many questions. This led me to do some further reading and I ultimately decided to head over to Washington on a self funded trip so I could find out more about the science behind climate change.

In the US I met with numerous scientists on both sides of the debate. Some media outlets would have you believe that I met only with climate skeptics who they accuse of being paid off by the fossil fuel industry. These claims are wholly inaccurate.

Moreover, I strongly believe in giving everyone a fair hearing even if it isn't the most popular view. I believe it's my role as a a politician, to wade through all of the spin and come up with my own conclusions after hearing all of the facts.

Amongst the many presentations, one item really stood out. I was presented with a graph based on data that IPCC use which showed carbon dioxide emissions sky rocketing over the last 15 years while global temperatures had remained steady.

The chart Senator Fielding says sparked his doubts about climate change

This graph left me nothing short of flabbergasted. Up until this point I had truly believed that human made carbon dioxide emissions were responsible for climate change.

Dialysis rationing in England

A post at the American Thinker Blog.

Rationing experimental procedures is one thing. But how about kidney dialysis? The following is from a comment left on my blog about health care reform. It is from a long time commenter on my site who quotes from the Canadian Medical Association Journal about the dialysis crisis  in the UK:

"An acute shortage of dialysis machines is causing numerous premature deaths in the UK, a study by the country's National Kidney Research Fund indicates. More than 100,000 people have kidney disease but only 34,000 are receiving dialysis or have had a kidney transplant.
Of the 71 UK kidney treatment units surveyed, 12 have been forced to turn away patients. Other units reported that they have been forced to take emergency measures to accommodate increasing numbers of patients. Some offer patients  dialysis only 2 times a week instead of 3, while others hold overnight treatment sessions. Most units reported they were working at full capacity, with no appointment times for new patients. "Some providers acknowledged that the final options for such patients are conservative management and/or death," the report said."

Health Care Myths

This link is to a preliminary draft of an article:

Myth #1 Health Care Costs are Soaring

No, they are not. The amount we spend on health care has indeed risen, in absolute terms, after inflation, and as a percentage of our incomes and GDP. That does not mean costs are soaring.

You cannot judge the "cost" of something by simply what you spend. You must also judge what you get. I'm reasonably certain the cost of 1950's level health care has dropped in real terms over the last 60 years (and you can probably have a barber from the year 1500 bleed you for almost nothing nowadays). Of course, with 1950's health care, lots of things will kill you that 2009 health care could prevent. Also, your quality of life, in many instances, would be far worse, but you will have a little bit more change in your pocket as the cost will be lower.

Want to take the deal?

In fact, nobody in the US really wants 1950's health care (or even 1990's health care).

They just want to pay 1950 prices for 2009 health care.

They want the latest pills, techniques, therapies, general genius discoveries, and highly skilled labor that would make today's health care seem like science fiction a few years ago.

But alas, successful science fiction costs a lot.

....

Myth #2 The Canadian Drug Story

Ah … one of the holy myths of the "US health care sucks" crowd.

This should be fun.

The general story is how you can buy many drugs in Canada cheaper than you can buy them in the US.

This story is often, without specifically tying the logic together, taken as an obvious indictment of the US's (relatively) free market system.

This is grossly misguided.

Here's what happens. We have a (relatively) free market in the US where drug companies spend a ton to develop new wonder drugs, a non-trivial amount of which is spent to satisfy regulatory requirements. The cost of this development is called a "fixed cost." Once it's developed it does not cost that much to make each pill. That's called a "variable cost."

If people only paid the variable cost (or a bit more) for each pill the whole thing would not work. You see, the company would never get back the massive fixed cost of creating the drug in the first place, and so no company would try to develop one. Thus, companies have to, and do, charge more than the variable cost of making each pill.^[2]

Some look at this system and say to the drug companies "gee, it doesn't cost you much to make one more pill, so it's unfair that you charge much more than your cost." They are completely wrong and not looking at all the costs.

So, let's bring this back to our good natured friends to the North (good natured barring hockey when they'll kill you as soon as look at you^[3]). They have socialized medicine and they bargain as the only Canadian buyer for drugs, paying well below normal costs. Drug companies that spent the enormous fixed costs to create new miracles are charging a relatively high cost in the free and still largely competitive world (the US) to recoup their fixed cost and to make a profit.

But socialist societies like Canada limit the price they are allowed to charge. The US-based company is then faced with a dilemma. What Canada will pay is not enough to ever have justified creating the miracle pill. But, once created, perhaps Canada is paying more than the variable cost of each pill. Thus, the company can make some money by also selling to Canada at a lower price as it's still more than it costs them to make that last pill.

However, this is an accident of Canada being a less-free country than the US, able to bargain as one nation, much smaller, and next door. If we all tried to be Canada it's a non-working perpetual motion machine and no miracle pills ever get made because there will be nobody to pay the fixed costs.

....

Myth #3 Socialized Medicine Works In Some Places

This is a corollary to the "Canada as parasite" parable above. The funny part is socialized medicine has never been truly tested. Those touting socialism's success have never seen a world without a relatively (for now) free US to make their new drugs, surgical techniques, and other medical advancements for them. When (and I hope this doesn't happen) the US joins in the insanity of socialized medicine we will see that when you remove the brain from the body, the engine from a car, the candy from the striper, it just does not work.

So, please, stop pointing to all those "successes" that even while living off the US still kill hard-working people who could afford their own health care while they stand in line for the government's version (people's cancers growing while waiting 10 weeks for a routine scan, which these people could often afford on their own if allowed, is a human tragedy). Even the successes you gin up for them would not be possible without the last best hope of humankind (the US) on the front lines again making the miracles for the world.

....

Myth #4 A Public Option Can Co-Exist with a Private Option

This one has been the subject of some hot debate. Let's first define it.

Part of the current junta's plan is to add a "public option" for health insurance. That is health insurance provided by the government (actually provided by you and your neighbors – this is a good thing to remember whenever you find yourselves thinking anything comes from the government, really, if you take away anything from this essay take away this!). They claim this "public option" can co-exist fairly alongside private health insurance, increasing competition and keeping the private system "honest", and not deteriorate to a single payer (socialized medicine) system. They are wrong, or very dishonest, as in unguarded moments they admit that the single payer socialized system is what they really want. The New York Times disagrees with me, thinking the two can co-exist. But the New York Times still thinks Stalin was a pretty decent Joe.

....

The government does not co-exist or compete fairly with private enterprise. It does not play well with others. The regulator cannot be a competitor at the same time. It cannot compete fairly while it owns the armed forces and courts. Finally, it cannot be a fair competitor if when the "public option" screws up (can't pay its bills), the government implicitly or explicitly guarantees its debts. We have seen what happens in that case and don't need a re-run.

The first thing the government does is underprice the private system. You can easily be forgiven for thinking this is a good thing. Why not, cheaper is better right?

Wrong.

They will underprice private enterprise by charging less to the purchaser of health insurance, not by actually creating it cheaper.

Who makes up the difference?

Well, you and your family do if you pay taxes, or your kids will pay taxes, or their kids will pay taxes. The government can always underprice competition, not through the old fashioned way of doing it better, they never do that, but by robbing Peter to pay for Paul. They are taking money from your left pocket and giving you a small portion of it back in your right pocket. They do it every day before breakfast, and take a victory lap for the small portion they return.

....

Myth #5 We Can Have Health Care Without Rationing

Rationing has to occur. This sounds cold and cruel, but it is reality.

A=A.

If you have a material good or service, like health care, that is ever increasing in quality, and therefore cost, there is no way everyone on Earth can have the best at all times (actually the quality increases are not necessary for rationing to be needed, it just makes the example clearer).

It's going to be rationed by some means.

The alternatives come down to the marketplace or the government. To choose between those alternatives you judge on morality and efficacy.

Everyone on both sides seems to hate the rationing word. People favoring free markets point to the explicit rationing that occurs in other countries with glee, while those favoring socialism point to the number of uninsured who get their health care through emergency rooms and the like (a form of rationing). Both sides are wrong to complain about rationing per se, that's a fact of life. But there are differences.

It is an uncomfortable truth that tough choices will have to be made. There is no system that provides for unlimited wants with limited resources. Our choice is whether it should be rationed by free people making their own economic calculations or by a bureaucracy run by Congressional committee (whose members, like the Russian commissars, will, I guarantee you, still get the best health care the gulag hospitaligo can provide). Free people making their own choices only consume what they value above price, using funds they have earned or been given voluntarily. With socialized medicine health care is rationed by committees of politicians trying to get re-elected and increase their own power, and people consume as much of it as the commissars deem permissible. I do not find these tough alternatives to choose between.

Myth #6 Health Care is A Right

Nope, it's not. But we are at the nuclear bomb of the discussion. The one guaranteed to get me yelled at or perhaps picketed by a mob waving signs printed up with George Soros's money. Those advocating socialized medicine love to scream "health care is a right." They are loud, they are scary, but they are wrong about rights (as the 1980 kid in me resists the temptation to type "TO PARTY" – you had to be there).

This is more philosophy than economics, and I'm not a philosopher. But, luckily it doesn't take a superb philosopher to understand that health care simply is not a "right" in the sense we normally use that word. Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission (illegal search and seizure, loud boy-band music in public spaces). They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don't choose to provide it to you, you then have a "right" to steal from them.

But what about their far more fundamental right not to be robbed?

....

And In Conclusion

At this point you might accuse me of offering only complaints about the Administration's plans, without constructive suggestions of my own. There is truth to that. But I make no apologies. If people believe crazy things it's first and foremost important to change that before progress can be made. But also, I think we're doing okay enough without radical changes, certainly not hastily panicked changes towards socialism, and also because I lack the expertise to recommend the detailed practical steps that would be productive (in contrast it requires no expertise to see that the myths above are indeed lunacy).

The tragedy of the Moon

Charles Krauthammer mourns the abandonment of the moon by the US.

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you had told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest ... the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

....

No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

....

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." We came, we saw, we retreated.

How could we?

Yes, I think that would be a good use for some of that "stimulus" money.

Peter Hitchens on Marriage

Peter Hitchens, blogging at the Mail Online looks at how our default assumptions about marriage have changed.

There used to be things we never had to think about. It never crossed anyone's mind that marriage could be either wanted or accomplished by anyone except a man and a woman, and it isn't very long since divorce was very rare indeed, and everyone assumed that marriage was for life. The phrase 'till death us do part', at the heart of the Church of England marriage service, was the title of a long-running situation comedy, and nobody thought it odd or unfamiliar, as I think they would now. It was what most people had said at their own weddings.

I am always advising people to read the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which the Church's liberal establishment longs to be rid of but cannot quite stamp out. ... But 'The form of solemnization of Matrimony', the Anglican marriage service, is also a carefully-constructed contract, an explanation of the purpose of marriage and a guide to how it is to be done. The Church is of course trying its best to stop people using this service now, offering instead various bland and denatured rituals and hoping that couples won't be aware of the tougher, more serious and much more beautiful version in the Prayer Book.

And it has simultaneously retreated, shamefully, from its own insistence that marriage is for life by becoming increasingly sloppy about the remarriage of divorced persons in church, and even about the marital status of its own clergy. De facto, if not de jure, the C of E now believes that marriage isn't for life. Even so, the 1662 service remains the lawful standard against which all other wedding ceremonies can (and in my view should) be measured.

...Which brings me to the question of how it can be all right for a man and woman to marry when they have no intention of having children, and are possibly incapable of it, while it is wrong for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman.

Well, here you run up against a number of problems. The answer seems to me to be blindingly obvious, and not to need any explanation to the conscious, intelligent person. Marriage, for most of us, is defined as a union between two people of opposite sex. A lifelong union of two people of the same sex, whether you approve of such a thing or not, is by definition not marriage. Children would of course be a likely result of a marriage, and are one of its main purposes. But they are not a necessary condition of it, as many childless married couples can testify. So that does not mean that the union of two opposites is the same as the union of two who are not opposite.

For those of us who grew up before the cultural revolution, it just is so that marriage is between a man and a woman. How could two men, or two women, be married? Until very recently, you might as well have asked 'Why can't bumble-bees do algebra?' Or 'Why can't buses jump over rivers?' Answers such as 'Because they just can't' or 'That's not what buses are for' or indeed 'Why would they want to?' occur, along with a feeling that the questioner is perhaps having a laugh at our expense....

Only in this unhinged age is it necessary to go, almost all the time, not just to first principles, but beneath even them, which demonstrates just how deeply revolutionary the cultural and sexual revolution is. It questions, and intends to loosen, the foundations of the pillars of civilisation. Let us hope it has a good replacement handy, for when those pillars finally fall.

But if I am compelled to put the blindingly obvious into mere words, this is how I would do it. A man and a woman marrying when they are past childbearing are honouring marriage and (perhaps in the case of two widowed people seeking companionship in later life) are hoping to emulate as much as possible of this complex relationship between the two very different sexes, in which each surrenders an important part of life in return for gaining something much greater. In the days when such things mattered, I imagine that many such couples did so also as their tribute to 'respectability'. They didn't want anyone to misunderstand the nature of their household, or to believe that they were defying a convention which they in fact respected. For the same reason many such people no longer get married at all.

The church's view that man and wife are 'one flesh' is not merely a metaphor for the children that they may produce. It is a statement that a man and a woman united in this way are greater than the sum of their parts, partly because they are so different from each other and have so much to learn from each other. The differences between the two sexes - the fact that each necessarily possesses characteristics the other necessarily lacks - are crucial to this formula. A man living with another man for their whole lives may learn all kinds of things. But he will not, I think, learn what a man married to a woman learns. Mind you, homosexual civil partnerships are not contracted for life, any more than heterosexual civil marriages are, since both can be lawfully dissolved, and I think this makes them very different things from lifelong religious marriages. There's an argument for saying that heterosexual civil marriage has more in common with homosexual civil partnership than it does with lifelong Christian marriage.

A man who seeks to marry a man (or a woman who seeks to marry a woman) is also in my view making a conscious or unconscious (and in most cases conscious) propaganda gesture against the existing idea of marriage. Such a relationship cannot produce a child of both parents at any age. It has to be primarily sexual in purpose. ...

 don't myself doubt that this is a major reason for the liberationist campaign for single-sex marriage - propaganda of the deed. I've often pointed out that the supposed benefits of civil partnerships, in terms of the treatment of 'next of kin' could easily have been achieved by other, less revolutionary legislation. The real point of the change was to emphasise that this is now a post-Christian society, a fact that is becoming more evident almost every day. The numbers of Civil Partnerships are actually quite small, after an initial rush, and several such partnerships have already been dissolved. I suspect that such partnerships will become less and less common as time goes by, and their propaganda effect weakens....

It's interesting, and it goes very deep. But ultimately we must recognise that a revolution is under way and that this is part of it, and that we must decide whether we support or oppose this. Revolutions will not allow you to be neutral about them for long, as they reach so deep into your private life.

And also here:

Should I be supporting homosexual marriage? No, because I believe that marriage is primarily for the procreation of children, and homosexuals, by definition, cannot do that. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Extend it to any other combination, and it isn't marriage. Also, marriage needs to be privileged to survive. A privilege which is not reserved to the people who have been given it is not a privilege, any more than a story which appears in all the newspapers at once is an 'exclusive'. If you can give the legal and moral privileges of marriage to a homosexual relationship, then you've really no argument for withholding them from a heterosexual couple who prefer not to be married. It is for precisely that reason that many heterosexual libertines (with no personal sympathy for homosexuals) are now fully signed up supporters of the Homosexual Liberation Movement.

Marriage and safe society

A letter in the Wall Street Journal:

 

Since the publication of the 2007 CQ Press survey that labeled Detroit the nation's "most dangerous" large city, I have worked with a group trying to identify the obstacles to significant crime reduction.

El Paso, the third "safest" city in the survey, is about as poor and the people as undereducated as in Detroit. The most distinctive socioeconomic difference between El Paso and Detroit is the Texas city's far greater number of married couples as a percentage of total households: 48% versus Detroit's 24%.

Looking at the 2007 survey's 10 "safest" and 10 "most dangerous" large cities, the "safest" city, San Jose, Calif. has the highest number of married couples as a percentage of total households; the second "safest," Honolulu, has the second highest number; the third "safest," El Paso, the third highest number. The five "most dangerous" large cities have the lowest number of married couples as a percentage of total households. Today, 91,000 of Detroit's 288,000 households are headed by single females, with no husband present.

....

These public policies have afflicted whites as well as blacks. Thus the total out-of-wedlock birth rate in 1960 of 5% had grown by 1992 to more than 30%. The figure for blacks has now reached more than two-thirds of births.

Islam and gays

Peter Whittle, writing in the London Telegraph notes that gays don't want to mention Muslim homophobia.

When question time came around, I made the point to the panel that a recent survey by Policy Exchange had showed that 72 per cent of young Muslim men thought that homosexuality should be recriminalised. As the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Mosques showed last year, there are some pretty disturbing things being said by some Imans about what is best for gays, ie death. Given the rapidly increasing proportion of the population which is Muslim, did they not think that there might be some possible problem in the future?

Needless to say this was neatly side-stepped. Or should I say, not really answered at all. Nick Herbert made the point that we should be careful not to generalise about the whole Muslim population (72 per cent seems pretty general to me). Immediately the issue was turned into something else, in a way we're all too familiar with, which is how important it is not to demonise Islam.

There are major double standards going on here. I'm not remotely religious, but I can see how it's considered perfectly legitimate to demonise the whole of the Catholic Church, say, or even Christianity in general. But when it comes to Islam, everybody gets very tongue-tied.

"Bioconservatives" and aging

"Bioconservatives" are those who oppose research into remaking the genetic and chemical balance of human beings -- for such ends as enhancing memory and intelligence, and for postponing aging.  According to this post at Distributed Republic, they'll lose.

And this is a sponsored link that showed up in my gmail browser a few minutes ago:

Rapamycin - www.selleckchem.com - mTOR inhibitor,immunosuppressive 100mg $70; 500mg $275-- Bulk Also

Now, I know nothing about that website, could be straight scam artists for all I know. But what's notable to me is that within days of a publication of a story suggesting that the drug could be life extending, there's already an (illegal) market developing in it. Imagine something safer, and more effective. How quickly would people get their hands on it?

There are those out there who oppose research into extending human longevity. Good luck with stopping the spread of that technology, because it'll get out. Personally, I'd rather it be developed in the United States rather than in China or Singapore, but it doesn't much matter. Even the ultra-risk averse FDA won't stop an anti-aging hospital seastead, or the discreet delivery of pharmaceuticals from overseas when the demand is strong enough. And it will be.

This is the case not only for anti-aging drugs, but it will be the case for stem-cell-based treatments, cloning, genetic modification, and so on. Basically, any scientific technique that promises an improvement in the quality and quantity of life will be available from someone, somewhere.  You may have to travel to Bombay or Singapore, but it will be available. 

What will the Federal government do?  Block the re-entry of citizens who have gone abroad for purposes of "biomolecular tourism"?

Plimer on Climate

This piece, from The Spectator, is an interview with Professor James Plimer, a global warming skeptic with serious credentials.

The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,' says Plimer...

So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you're right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? 'I'm a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They're only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they're doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can't. It doesn't work.'

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by 'politicians, environmental activists and opportunists'. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth's warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian's Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn't trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

'I'm a natural scientist. I'm out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that's why I'm so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we're in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.'

....

Does he really believe his message will ever get through? Plimer smiles. 'If you'd asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The "consensus" was wrong.'

 

Constitutional questions

Betsy Newmark links to an essay in The New Republic that claims our position on Honduras is really a reflection of how we perceive constitutions in general:

So where you come down on Honduras really depends on which view of constitutions you favor. If you favor the dominant American view, you would tend to side with Zelaya. True, the Honduras constitution prohibits amendments related to presidential terms, but this rule flies in the face of the American notion that a constitution should be amendable in just about any direction--and Zelaya was simply exercising his right to try and correct that. If you favor the German view, you would tend to side with the supreme court and the military. After all, the changes Zelaya was seeking to the constitution were foundational and revolutionary. And a constitution should be able to protect against certain kinds of constitutional changes.

source

Betsy begs to differ:

Well, there's just one problem. We can't judge Honduras' constitution by either Germany's or our legal standards. That is not how constitutions work - to be changed according to a foreigner's idea of how amendments should be made. It isn't correct for our judges to look for answers in foreign laws and we shouldn't require that Honduras look to our traditions. We might accept that amendments can cover any aspect of our government, but Hondurans, concerned about the region's history of dictators seizing control, wrote their constitution differently than ours. And constitutions aren't mutable documents according to whatever ideological argument holds sway at the time. There are procedures for amending a constitution and, whether or not you like the way your country's procedures were designed, you have to play under those rules.

Further:

Miguel Estrada, a Honduran native who might have been the first Hispanic nominee for the Supreme Court if the Democrats hadn't blocked his advancement to the appellate court, looked at the actual text of the Honduran constitution. And he found that, according to the country's constitution, the ouster of President Zelaya was perfectly constitutional.

When Nixon was forced to resign under the threat of impeachment and probably conviction by the Senate, scholars celebrated that as proof that our Constitution worked and was stronger than any one man's criminality. Instead of trying to assert an American view of what we think should or should not have taken place in that country, we should also be celebrating a fragile democracy's efforts to withstand the ambitious efforts of one man's efforts to circumvent the rule of law.

In effect, Zelaya believed in a "living, breathing Constitution", meaning one which meant what he wanted it to mean, without the annoying text getting in the way.

Michael Jackson jokes

I heard a couple of people discussing the humor surrounding the death of Michael Jackson. One funny conspiracy theory holds that either Sarah Palin or her daughter Willow killed MJ.

I suppose she shot him from a helicopter?

The war on tobacco will kill soldiers

From Countercolumn again. Jason argues a ban on tobacco in the armed forces is a very bad idea. Among other reasons, one not that obvious:

Further, I wouldn't disregard the role of cigarrettes on the battlefield - especially the countergeurrilla battlefield. From a humint or interrogater's point of view, or simply from the perspective of a local leader trying to build a relationship with an Iraqi or Afghan, the simple act of offering a nicotine-starved Iraqi a quality American cigarette, and lighting one up one's self, is a time-honored way of establishing a rapport with a local or detainee - and is frequently the first and necessary step in breaking the ice and gaining the trust and cooperation of a local or detainee.

Honestly, we wouldn't get NEAR the HUMINT we do without it. Verily I say unto you... if tobacco were to vanish from U.S. soldiers' kits tomorrow, there would be an almost immediate and bloody, but nearly untraceable consequence on the ground. It would significantly degrade our relationship with locals and our ability to gain intelligence from detainees and HUMINT sources. Tread VERY SLOWLY here.

Tobaccophobes like to argue that if a ban saves even one life, it's worth it. Well, if its presence in the battlefield saves even one life, it's worth allowing soldiers to continue to have it.

Palin's retirement

Jason at Countercolumn points out that Palin's choice to step down is an excellent one, from a financial perspective.

It's no mystery to me why Palin resigned. She was right to resign. It was a no brainer. Had she not resigned, she would be doing irreparable financial harm to her family.
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Financial planning for children with special needs is a little different than planning for most families. And it takes quite a bit more cash flow to provide for them. Cash flow the Palin's don't have on a Governor's salary and Todd's pay.
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The Palins very likely need a substantial amount of permanent life insurance. Not term. Set aside for Trig. If they wanted to be equitable to all their children, they would need a lot more permanent insurance, as opposed to term.

It's a lot more expensive, in terms of cash flow and monthly required premium, to buy that insurance in her late 40s than it would have been if she were in her 20s or 30s. And there's not as much time to build it up, either. Had Palin tried to stick it out on the Governor's salary, it would have been almost impossible.

But quitting, and getting a book out there, and hitting the lecture/fundraiser circuit in the next few years, would allow her to do all that. She can take care of her family, provide a legacy for her other children, spend some time with the kids, create something that creates residual income (book royalties), and STILL have a shot at running for president or senator.

Most importantly, if she doesn't provide for Trig, her critics sure as hell won't. No one else can do it but her.

And his analysis doesn't even mention the half-million dollars already lost to fighting frivolous ethics complaints – money they also don't have.

Best of luck, Governor Palin and family.

Splash, out

Amen.

How to drive off your tax base

From Reason magazine:

If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It's no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4 percent and climbing.

I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.
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From the beginning, we've been headquartered in Los Angeles. But 15 years ago we had a dispute with the city over our business tax classification. The city argued that we should be in an "occupations and professions" classification that has an extremely high tax rate, while we fought for a "wholesale and retail" classification with a much lower rate.
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You can imagine how relieved we were on July 1, 1994, when the ruling was issued. We won, and firmly planted our roots in the City of Angels and proceeded to build our business.

Everything was fine until the city started running out of money in 2007. Suddenly, the city announced that it was going to ignore its own ruling and reclassify us in the higher tax category. Even more incredible is the fact that the new classification was to be imposed retroactively to 2004 with interest and penalties. No explanation was given for the new classification, or for the city's decision to ignore its 1994 ruling.
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Regardless of the outcome of our case, the arbitrary and capricious behavior of some bureaucrats is creating a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. If we win in court, the taxpayers of Los Angeles will have lost because all those tax dollars will have been wasted on needless litigation.

If we lose in court, the remaining taxpayers in Los Angeles will have lost because their burden will continue to swell as yet another business moves its jobs—and taxpayers—to another city.

Palin coverage hurts journalists

Politics Daily has this piece on how the journalism industry has shot itself in the foot, while aiming at Sarah Palin.

The mainstream media is undergoing its demise, drip by drip, day by day, and its practitioners, which include most of my friends in life, are under considerable pressure. In my opinion, however, these pressures do not excuse the treatment accorded Sarah Palin. On the contrary, to me the entire Sarah saga revealed that it wasn't only the traditional media's business model that is broken. Our journalism model is busted, too.

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I'm not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

From the founding of the Republic until the 1840s, newspapers were organs of a particular political party, or faction – or reflected the personal views of the proprietor. In that decade, as is happening now, technological innovation wrought cosmic change, first in the speed of news delivery, and then in the underlying philosophy of those who presented it. The telegraph begat the Associated Press, and, over time, a new paradigm emerged....

...there was money to be made in packaging the news, big money, and ultimately, the nation's publishers decided they could reach ever-larger audiences (and rake in ever-larger pots of dough) by toning down the partisanship. "Objectivity" became the watchword, and to enforce this concept, a host of social innovations, from journalism schools to journalism prizes, came into existence. Increased professionalism was part of a larger societal trend that swept vocations such as medicine and the law. In journalism, a movement that Professor West dubbed "objective media" came to pass. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than anything that had preceded it -- and it enjoyed a nice, 50-year run.

Concerns about "liberal bias" arose in this supposed Golden Age, but we had an answer for that: Sure, reporters are liberal, we told our sources, but the publisher is conservative. The ideal being peddled was that, yes, a Depression-era reporter making $8 a week will likely pen pieces extolling the New Deal, but meanwhile the owner/publisher is commissioning editorials lamenting Franklin Roosevelt's assault on capitalism. It sounds esoteric now, but when newspapers were king it worked. (It might still work: The lone news outlet in North America that still operates under this model is The Wall Street Journal. Its editorial pages have been conservative for decades; a recent study found its news pages to be the most liberal in the mainstream media. Guess what: The Journal is the largest circulation paper in this country.) But I digress.

Perhaps the seeds of the "objective" media's demise were sown in its very creation. Professionalism and a quest for objectivity made journalism a more attractive profession even as record profits made it a better paying one. The upshot was a generation of college educated reporters and editors, along with a set of cultural and political attitudes they brought with them from the nation's elite institutions of higher learning. In time, another technological innovation – broadcast – changed the historic role of newspapers and magazines. No longer deliverers of the news, print journalists became interpreters of events. That proved a slippery slope. As the elite denizens of newsrooms began to analyze the news instead of merely chronicling it, the confidence their audience had in the journalists' fairness and ideological balance began to wane.

This trend was only heightened by the ascendancy of television network news broadcasts, which had no convenient wall between opinion and fact-based journalism. And all this happened, mind you, before the advent of the Internet. By the 1990s, the audience for political news began fragmenting into subgroups of Americans who already thought alike. Meanwhile, an unrelated development put journalism on the firing line.

That event was the decline of conservative, mostly Southern, Democrats (and, eventually, liberal Republicans as well). A patchwork quilt of ideology and regionalism gave way to a U.S. political system more closely resembling that of Great Britain. Today, an American who is liberal tends to be a Democrat, a conservative is almost always a Republican. This may help clarify things for voters, but it created a little-understood crisis for journalists. If being "liberal" now meant sympathy for the Democratic Party, and being conservative implied sympathy for Republicans, all those liberal newsrooms across the country were gradually going to alienate themselves from about half their readers.

That this might pose a problem never dawned on the men and women who controlled the media – even as it drove their right-of-center readers and viewers away in droves. When I tell my friends working in places like The New York Times that they created Rush Limbaugh, they respond with shock and disbelief. But it's obvious to me that it's true, even as the anointed sages of the Old Media solemnly denied that an animal such as "liberal bias" existed at all. It's like that scene in the fire swamp in "The Princess Bride" when Buttercup expresses fear of "R.O.U.Ses." Replies our hero Wesley: "Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist" – just as one is about to chomp his arm off.
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From the beginning, and for the ensuing 10 months, the coverage of this governor consisted of a steamy stew of cultural elitism and partisanship. The overt sexism of some male commentators wasn't countered, as one might have expected, by their female counterparts. Women columnists turned on Sarah Palin rather quickly. A plain-speaking, moose-hunting, Bible-thumping, pro-life, self-described "hockey mom" with five children and movie star looks with only a passing interest in foreign policy -- that wasn't the woman journalism's reigning feminists had envisioned for the glass ceiling-breaking role of First Female President (or Vice President). Hillary Rodham Clinton was more like what they had in mind – and Sarah, well, she was the un-Hillary.
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The first thing reporters and commentators seemed to have noticed about Gov. Palin was her physical beauty. The second was that she had a bunch of kids, the last one born with Down's syndrome in spring 2008. For some reason, these two facts infuriated many Democratic activists and bloggers – and some liberal journalists. The most egregious example was posted on Daily Kos on Sept. 12, 2008 by Paul Lewis Hackett III, a trial lawyer and U.S. Marine Corps veteran of Iraq, who ran in 2005 for a vacant seat in the House from Ohio's second congressional district, losing narrowly in a district President Bush had carried easily just a year earlier.

Fretting that the Obama campaign was going to lose Ohio to McCain, Hackett proposed his own solution: A series of savage attacks on the GOP ticket focusing on Sarah Palin and her family. Here is what he wrote:

The message (would be) simple and the professionals can refine it but essentially it should contain these elements: Sarah Palin? Can't keep her solemn oath of devotion to her husband and had sex with his employee. Sarah Palin? Accidentally got pregnant at age 43 and the tax payers of Alaska have to pay for the care of her disabled child. Sarah Palin? Unable to teach her 16 year old daughter right from wrong and now another teenager is pregnant. Sarah Palin? Can you trust Sarah Palin and her values with America's future?

Apparently, Hackett took the rumors of an affair from the National Enquirer, which offered no proof, or even evidence. He then segued into an even uglier line of attack, arguing that it's irresponsible to bring a handicapped baby into the world. This is not "pro-choice," it's pro-eugenics. It's also creepy and illiberal, and reinforces conservatives' worst fears about Democrats and the issue of abortion. And, oh yes, Bristol Palin's age was wrong. She was nearly 18 when Hackett wrote this screed, not 16. This proved a harbinger, too, as misinformation slipped easily from the left blogosphere into mainstream coverage.

This New Journalism, if you can call it that, exhibited in 2008 was epitomized by an eradication of the lines between fact and opinion – and, even more troubling, between reporting and propaganda. Some journalists were content to repeat Democratic Party talking points or bloggers' rumors as though they were established fact, interspersing them with ideological commentary in a kind of toxic stew. [Emphasis added – KL]

"She is a far-right conservative who supported Pat Buchanan over Bush in 2000. She thinks global warming is a hoax and backs the teaching of creationism in public schools," wrote Jonathan Alter in Newsweek on Aug. 29, 2008. Actually, she did not support Buchanan, she questioned whether climate change is man-made (not whether it's occurring) and gave creationists the most minor of rhetorical nods – and never questioned the teaching of evolution in schools....

She was a book burner, you know....

Remember her callous decision as governor to cut Alaska's special education budget by 62 percent? After receiving emails to that effect, CNN's Soledad O'Brien cited the figure on-air. Oops. Palin actually tripled the state's spending on special needs kids.

Did you hear the one about her membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the union? That made The New York Times, and it was wrong, too.

But it was in the area of her family life where the press really lost its bearings.

"A day of stunning Palin disclosures," was how the Associated Press greeted the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant. "A political stunner!" echoed CNN's Campbell Brown. In one 30-minute stretch, CNN reporters and anchors referred to the teen's pregnancy as "a bombshell" four separate times.
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How much did this matter, in the end, to the outcome in 2008?

I really don't know. I do know this, however: The story line recited by my media brethren, naturally, absolves us of any wrongdoing....

...The Interviews.

The first of her in-depth network sit downs came with ABC's Charles Gibson. In those sessions, Palin came across as iffy, just barely treading water. But the press dunked her, particularly after witnessing this exchange:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
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This was widely cited in the media as proof that Palin was unready and over her head, and that McCain had done something "cynical" in choosing her. Except that Bush never said that, exactly, and certainly never suggested Iraq was one of many nations to be invaded. Gibson was simply wrong in suggesting the so-called "Bush Doctrine" was as immutable as the Monroe Doctrine. The "Bush Doctrine" was always a fuzzy concept, usually described that way by the president's critics as a way of expressing disagreement with his approach to foreign policy.

I remember seeing the phrase for the first time in a think piece by Steven Weisman in The New York Times in April 2002..."Vice President Dick Cheney and the hawks in the Pentagon are said to have encouraged Mr. Bush to support Mr. Sharon's military drive, arguing that it was simply an extension of the so-called Bush Doctrine, which holds those who harbor terrorists accountable for terrorism." [Emphasis in original – KL]
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That's one view. Another is that we chose sides in that election, and when our side pulled ahead, we stopped keeping score. The next time the Republicans showed strength (or, more precisely, when Palin's Democratic counterpart goofed up) we'd already become cheerleaders instead of judges. Before I explain what I mean by that, it's important to remember that those weirdly personal attacks on Palin began before the Gibson and Couric interviews. "I'm not convinced that's her baby," Bill Maher had said on HBO. That was Sept. 5. The following day Mort Kondracke called Palin "this wacko right-winger." Then movie star Matt Damon gave a television interview, saying he thinks the possibility of Palin becoming president is "a really scary thing." He went on in this vein, using words like "terrifying" and "totally absurd" and saying the possibility of a "hockey mom ... facing down President Putin is like a really bad Disney movie." Then, and only then, did the interviews take place. In other words, Palin's detractors had already made up their minds before she'd flopped in two interviews. Were her tormentors prescient? Or were they close-minded?

We were about to find out. As the truncated 2008 general election campaign raced by, Palin's critics in the Fourth Estate maintained that they were simply doing their job in ferreting out the qualifications, experience, temperament, and knowledge base that Sarah Palin would bring to national office. I'm not a Republican or a conservative; I'm a lifelong journalist who was born and raised in this profession and normally I'd defend the media in this argument. In this instance I cannot.

The reason is what happened when the battle over Sarah Palin came to a head on Oct. 2, 2008, in St. Louis, Mo. That night, the press showed its colors – and they were Democratic blue. That was the night that Palin cleaned Joe Biden's clock in their only debate, and nobody in the media could even see it, let alone report it. That was the night that the dual blinders of ideology and elitism prevented us being honest brokers.

Gov. Palin certainly had her sketchy moments that night....

Sen. Biden, however, was in a place by himself when it came to bogus claims, absurd contentions, and flights of rhetorical fancy. He threw out several assertions that were so preposterous that – had Palin made them – they would have prompted immediate calls for McCain to dump her from the ticket.
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Should Joe Biden have known this stuff? Since he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, you'd hope so. But even if he didn't, you'd think it would be news when he unleashed a veritable fount of misinformation to impugn Palin's knowledge of the federal system while attacking a sitting vice president. It barely rated a mention in the collective mainstream media.
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I must say, however, that when Palin announced her resignation last Friday, one of the few people who commented on it without saying something snarky was the only man who ever defeated her in an election. Asked for a comment by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Vice President Biden replied that although he didn't necessarily see Palin as a victim of political bloodletting, he accepted her judgment on this matter and assumed she was doing it out of concern for her family.

"I don't know what prompted her decision...so I'm not going to second-guess her," Biden said. "And I take her at her word that (there was) a personal ingredient in it. And you have to respect that."

Maybe we do need a new word

Over at Commentary's blog, we see:

As far as I know, there is no word in English for the opposite of jingoist. But if there were, its entry in the dictionary would belong next to Barack Obama’s photograph. It seems he can’t set foot on foreign soil without apologizing for this country’s past sins and promising that it will sin no more under his leadership. In doing so, of course, he both disses his own country and praises himself by implication.

Indeed, Gilbert and Sullivan, character never proposed a word for:

The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
Each century but this and every country but his own

Because all examples of such would wind up on his little list, and dispatched.

But since we don't have that option, may I propose, "ognijist", from "jingo", spelled backwards?

President Obama: National Security Risk?

According to this AP story, the Federal Bureau of Prisons twice ruled that Dreams From My Father and The Audicity of Hope could not be given to prisoner Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to read, on account of the risk to national security.

Last November, possibly after the election, the Prison Bureau changed its mind and allowed him the books.

Medicare's Administrative Costs

 The other Karl, at Patterico's Pontifications, has links to discussions about the real overhead costs for Medicare.

However, the same day Pres. Obama said that, the Heritage Foundation issued a report by Robert A. Book, Ph.D., showing that:

[O]n a per-person basis Medicare's administrative costs are actually higher than those of private insurance–this despite the fact that private insurance companies do incur several categories of costs that do not apply to Medicare.

Elsewhere, Merrill Matthews notes:

Public figures for Medicare's administrative costs count only what it takes to print reimbursement checks. Normal operating costs — rent, management, health insurance, taxes, capital to start a business and new equipment — which private insurers must include in their administrative costs, are counted elsewhere in the federal budget.

Official Medicare administrative costs simply exclude what most companies must include. No administrative cost savings exist in the public plan, and the true costs will never be counted because they'll be hidden in the federal budget.

I'd kinda thought so.  Bottom line:

In short, Medicare — our already-existing government-run health insurer — does not have lower adminsitrative costs. That myth is based on fuzzy math, the program's own laxity, and the fact that it gets to hide its costs elsewhere in the federal budget. Indeed, that last factor is the sort of unfair competition that is essential to the government-run plan envisioned by the Left. Pres. Obama claims he wants to keep private insurers honest, but he's not being honest himself.

Disturbed about Harry Potter

Bob Unruh, a news editor at World Net Daily, is on a tear about the Harry Potter books.

Got questions about life, death, politics or religion? How about one on the topic of "gay" marriage?

It's time for WWDD.

That's not a typo on the familiar WWJD -- "What Would Jesus Do?" -- a theme among Christians. It stands for "What Would Dumbledore Do?" a new move to answer such questions and spark "social change" through the "teachings" available in the Harry Potter witchcraft books and movies. The campaign has begun specifically promoting "gay" marriage.

End of a political career?

Steve Hayward at the Corner looks at the slow fade of another politician.

From my endless archives, a few samples of how the major media wrote off Ronald Reagan repeatedly:
Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . .
After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset": "The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech—'There is no substitute for victory'—could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career."

Does climate crisis pass the giggle test?

David Friedman doesn't think so.

The notion of a global climate crisis depends on three things being true:

1. The climate is in a warming trend.
2. Humans are in a position to change this trend.
3. The consequences of not changing this trend are severe.

I've phrased these the way I did to remove carbon dioxide emissions from the equation. If CO₂ emissions are a major factor in warming, we can certainly change our emissions. If warming is due to something else, we can still change our emissions. We can probably do other things, like put up a space umbrella and cut down on solar heating of the planet. Eventually, we'll be able to move the planet out to a higher orbit and cool it down that way. The question then becomes whether any proposed change is worth it.

This is the meaning of "severe consequences". The cost of putting up with the climate change is much greater than than the cost of averting it.

From David Friedman's blog:

The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with climate change, with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second has to do with consequences of climate change for humans.
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What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument. More precisely, I find unconvincing the claim that climate change on the scale suggested by the results of the IPCC models would have catastrophic consequences for humans. Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem—a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. And if, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.

But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them.
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Climate aside, we do not live in a static world—consider the changes that have occurred over the past century. The shifts we can expect to occur due to technological progress alone, even without allowing for political and demograpic shifts, are much larger than the shifts required to deal with climate change on the scale I am discussing.

My conclusion is that this version of climate catastrophe, at least, does not pass the giggle test. There may be other versions, based on more pessimistic predictions of climate change, that do. But the claim that we now have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.

Not Medicare, but...

The NCPA reports on a study of Social Security payments going to dead people.

In Southern California and elsewhere last year investigators analyzed 305 Social Security beneficiaries who were recorded as deceased in their Social Security Administration files; at least 140 of them were still alive.
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On the flip side of the problem, payments were made to dead beneficiaries in at least 88 out of the 305 cases studied by investigators. Some of these improper payments continued for years.

Care to bet Medicare faces similar problems?

Assuming it does...

Private companies get reminders from their insured. Ongoing payments of premiums are "proof of life", and cessation of such payments, although not necessarily "proof of death", are a signal to the insurance company that it should not honor claims from those individuals.

If Medicare's numbers are at all similar to those of Social Security, then we're seeing 88/305 = 29% of payments that should have been prevented, perhaps by spending more on administration. Should this 29% be counted as part of the "overhead"?

Of the 140/305 = 46% of clients listed as dead, some are still receiving their checks. So we don't even know if this poor record keeping is resulting in a net savings, even if we decide we don't care about a failure to extend benefits to qualified recipients.

Medicare costs and losses

An editorial at the WSJ titled Why it's easy to steal from Medicare says, among other things:

One of the purported benefits of nationalized health care is that it will be more efficient than private insurers since it would lack the profit motive and have lower administrative expenses, like Medicare. But one reason entitlement programs are so easy to defraud is precisely because they don't have those overhead costs -- they automatically pay whatever bills roll in with valid claims numbers.

By contrast, private insurers try to manage care, and that takes money. Not only does administrative spending go toward screening for waste and fraud -- logical, given the return-on-investment incentives -- they also go toward building networks of (honest) doctors and other providers. Medicare doesn't pay for this legwork, so it simply counts fraud losses as more spending.

One of the claims made on behalf of medicare is that it has a very low overhead. I've suspected this overhead is as low as claimed because a number of costs, which count as part of the overhead in the private system, are fobbed off on someone else and not counted as part of Medicare's expenses.

This would be one example. By not spending on preventing fraud before payment is made, overhead is magically converted into product. Masscare reports that Medicare spends 5% of every dollar on administrative costs, while the average private insurer spends 17%. Let's see what happens when we go in to the private insurer and move a penny from fraud prevention to payment of claims.

One question that immediately arises is, how many pennies of fraudulent claims did that penny of administrative expense prevent? Did it prevent two pennies of fraud? Ten? A thousand?

In a free market, insurers are going to allocate expenses based on how much good they yield. An insurer is not going to spend a penny to save less than a penny in fraudulent claims -- it's cheaper to pay less than a penny in fraudulent claims.

We can assume that insurers will pay for fraud prevention up to the point where the savings in fraudulent claims prevented just balances the increase in expenditures. On the margin, a penny spent saves a penny in fraud.

So we take the insurer that spends 17 pennies per dollar on administrative costs, and we move a penny from fraud prevention to paying claims. Since this is a marginal penny, the increase in fraud will not be much greater than the savings realized by the cut.

So administrative expenses decrease by one penny to 16 pennies on the dollar. However, the fraudulent payments that are no longer being prevented are now counted as product. A private insurer which achieves a penny in real savings now has an overhead of 16 cents over 99 cents, or 16.16% – about a 4.9% decrease. However, if cutting that penny results in an increase in payouts by that amount, there's no net savings. The overhead shrinks by 5.9%, but the total spent remains the same. And it will actually be slightly more – the curve is not a straight line. Eventually, a penny of cuts results in two, five, ten, or more pennies of additional payments.

A private insurer can't get away with too much of such "savings", because it has a different incentive than Medicare does. If expenses wind up ballooning, a private firm calls this a disaster, or at best, gross inefficiency. Private insurers get their money from the private sector, which means there are only limited funds available to pay claims. If fraud runs rampant, premiums will have to be increased to cover both real claims and fraudulent ones. And in a free market, subscribers will flee the less efficient company and opt for one with better control over its costs.

A government program cites such a growing budget as evidence of serious need, if not a "crisis". A program with exploding claims can agitate for more public funds to address the "crisis", and the government raises taxes. Or prints money.

Update: Fixed the math, and expanded the last two paragraphs.

Health care and national rankings

Over at Disloyal Opposition, J.D. Tuccille writes:

The World Health Organization gave America's health care a miserable 37th-place ranking out of 191 countries, right?

Well ... not so much. Actually, when economist Glen Whitman looked at WHO's rankings, he concluded:

The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions—some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares.

The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHO rankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance.

Basically, WHO front-loaded its ratings with criteria that guaranteed high rankings to tax-supported systems, and low rankings to systems where people pay for their own care. Said Whitman, "To use the existing WHO rankings to justify more government involvement in health care--such as via a single-payer health care system--is therefore to engage in circular reasoning because the rankings are designed in a manner that favors greater government involvement."

Palin out

Palin has decided not to be governor any more. She's not only not going to run for re-election, she's resigning ASAP.

Does this finish her political career?

It might. This turn of events is being described as all but abandoning her post, or at least as close as you can get without disappearing for a few days to hike one of the nation's trails.

I can recall one former governor who left office, then spent years writing and speaking. He even had a radio commentary, in which he discussed matters of political import. He wound up being elected President.

However, he didn't leave office the way Palin has chosen to, turning in a resignation before the term is completely over. This may be a handicap, or if it can be played right, maybe not.

Here's a piece from American Thinker explaining why we may not have seen the last, or even the least, of Sarah Palin:

There is a point in tournament poker where one player doesn't have the chips to play out the next raise, but they have great cards, so they call "all in." At that point, nobody can raise them and the hand gets played out -- either to a game changing win or a total loss for the person who made the call.

It appears Sarah Palin decided she and her family could no longer deal with the thousand cuts, so she is "all in."

Palin may well decide to stay home and make macaroni and cheese for the kids, but history may not let her. She has already established herself as a major player -- candidate or not. More importantly, the wildly critical left has put her in a financial position where she has no choice but to speak out, perhaps do a book, and make the money she needs to pay legal bills for 15 unwarranted "ethics" investigations, all of which she handily won. The legal bills remain.

One doubts that when she speaks out, it will be about how to field dress a moose. Rather, she will take positions in speaking and writing about her core beliefs. That is a problem for the radical left of their own creation.

Yes, maybe a string of ethics investigations has been enough to drive her out of office, but now that weapon's useless. The only hope her opponents have now is that she will turn out to have nothing to say.

The fight is between an out of control government led by media and government elites and common sense Americans, of both parties, who have had enough. Sarah Palin is in the enviable, although personally painful position, of being the "anti elite" voice of common sense and shared American values.

The vicious left put her there and now they may live to regret it.

When informed of the invention of "poison gas" by Admiral Cochrane, the Duke of Wellington cautioned that "that is a game two can play." He wisely chose not to go there because it would certainly be used by both sides.

It had occurred to me that one of Palin's reasons for leaving office is that she "doesn't want to be a traditional lame duck". Well, gee. Where does that leave her Lieutenant Governor?" Answer: the incumbent.

Wizbang points to a post at Big Hollywood making a very similar point:

Remember when Darth Vader faced off with Obi-Wan Kenobi? "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine?" She's now immune from bogus legal claims and her book will not only raise her profile but set up her family financially for life. Now Sarah is unbound, freed from the need to be up in Juneau and able to network, fundraise and even (maybe) campaign without limitation. And the modern media environment will let her do these things without even a nod to the mainstream media (Do you think Katie Couric will ever get to ask Sarah another question? Ha!)

Lefties, if you were responsible for her doing this, you just unleashed your strongest opponent and made her immune from your strongest attacks all at once. Ouch. It must hurt to know a woman you pride yourself on seeing as a drooling Neanderthal nitwit so thoroughly out-maneuvered you. You do see it, right?

Kim Priestap doesn't know if this was part of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed plan. She doesn't think so. Frankly, I don't either. I think Palin got sick of being a target for leftist venom and took herself and her family out of the line of fire. However, a big change like this creates ripples in the fabric of politics, and these ripples can be ridden, if you're quick to seize the opportunity.

Climate fight

There's a fight going on between a couple of blogs, Real Climate and Climate Science. In the current salvo, we have Real Climate's Misinformation:

More importantly, however, the author of the weblog makes the statement that the following climate metrics “are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago” ;

1. “rising sea levels”

NOT TRUE; e.g. see the University of Colorado at Boulder Sea Level Change analysis.

Sea level has actually flattened since 2006.

2. “the increase of heat stored in the ocean”

NOT TRUE; see

Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions.

Their has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003.

3. “shrinking Arctic sea ice”

NOT TRUE; see the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly from the University of Illinois Cyrosphere Today website. Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.

These climate metrics might again start following the predictions of the models. However, until and unless they do, the authors of the Copenhagen Congress Synthesis Report and the author of the Real Climate weblog are erroneously communicating the reality of the how the climate system is actually behaving.

Real Climate, in turn, responds that the cessations are too short in duration to be taken as a real change in the trend – a "one swallow does not make a summer" argument.

IBD Health Care Series

Link to the series on health care at Investor's Business Daily.

CanadaCare, Infant Mortality, and the US

From the June 30 Investor's Business Daily editorial:

Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus. As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive. Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S. In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth. A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length. In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.

Investigators' dirty tricks

The "don't talk to the police" post at Randy Cassingham's blog continues to generate comments. Most recently, someone has posted a link to THE LITTLE KNOWN “DIRTY TRICKS” OF DCFS/CPS/DSS THAT ARE HIDDEN FROM VIEW.

DIRTY TRICK #1

DCFS/CPS/DSS will PRETEND to help you, when in actuality they are gathering evidence against you.

DIRTY TRICK #2

DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get you to talk. In plain English, SHUT UP! EVERYTHING you say will be twisted and used against you in a court of law. Be pleasant but firm. Don’t fall into their trap.

DIRTY TRICK #3

There are those workers in DCFS/CPS/DSS that will abuse and traumatize you and your children themselves. Those caretakers who have had children “yanked” out of their home by an unscrupulous DCFS/CPS/DSS agent or have been shoved out of the way as they enter to talk to the children privately know the indignity of the process.

DIRTY TRICK #4

The DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get one parent to say incriminating things about the other and if this doesn’t happen then they will twist and turn your words to fit their case.

DIRTY TRICK # 5

The DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get your children to make damaging disclosures about you using manipulation, coercion and fear.

DIRTY TRICK #6

DCFS/CPS/DSS will always try to make sure that you do not get any help on the legal issues surrounding your case.

Artificial primordial soup?

A group in the Netherlands is working on a computer simulation called the EvoGrid. It is intended to simulate the chemical reactions in a "primordial soup" and determine whether life could result therein from unguided chemical reactions.

Source

With a laundry list of basic physical properties entered into the starting parameters, the simulation would allow artificial nature to take its course. Interactions and connections between particles should occur, and ever higher levels of complexity may arise from the most basic elements.

Much like SETI@home's screen saver, which enables computers at home to search for signals of extraterrestrial life within volumes of astrophysical data, the Evogrid is conceived to have volunteer computers become part of an interconnected grid for maximum processing capacity.  Damer hopes to eventually get a million computers hooked into the grid. 

These computers would receive data from the EvoGrid simulation engine. The simulation would essentially consist of a vast virtual ocean of interacting numbers that would model the time before complex life forms emerged. To know whether self-organization is occurring, the program would look for persistent patterns within the data. 

The EvoGrid Project Web Site

 

Free medical care

 At Real Clear Politics, John Stossel has  a piece about the Canadian health care system.

"People line up for care, some of them die. That's what happens," says Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of "The Cure". He liked Canada's government health care until he started treating patients.

....

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it's much worse in Canada. If you're sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

"We can't send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. "Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are."

....

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery "elective."

"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.

It's true that America's partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

"[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment," Dr. Gratzer says.

"Literally we're surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You've got to pay a price for that type of advancement."

Canada and England don't pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care -- forever.

Government monopolies don't innovate. Profit seekers do.

....

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology -- CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn't have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn't been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

Well, to be fair, I'm sure that's not entirely true.  You might get help there if you chirp or hiss.