Saving Your Memory

A recent study has confirmed what many suspected: People who engage in activities that exercise the brain, such as reading, writing, and playing card games, may delay the rapid memory decline that occurs if they later develop dementia:

The study involved 488 people age 75 to 85 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of five years; during that time 101 of the people developed dementia.

At the beginning of the study, people reported how often they participated in six leisure activities that engage the brain: reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music. For each activity, daily participation was rated at seven points, several days a week was rated at four points, and weekly participation was rated at one point.

The average was seven points total for those who later developed dementia, meaning they took part in one of the six activities each day, on average. Ten people reported no activities, and 11 reported only one activity per week.

The researchers then looked at the point when memory loss started accelerating rapidly for the participants. They found that for every additional activity a person participated in, the onset of rapid memory loss was delayed by 0.18 years.

"The point of accelerated decline was delayed by 1.29 years for the person who participated in 11 activities per week compared to the person who participated in only four activities per week," said study author Charles B. Hall, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY.

Further studies are needed to determine if increasing participation in these activities could prevent or delay dementia."

Few things are more terrifying to people as they age than the awareness that they're losing their memory. Keep reading, discussing and thinking. It's good medicine.

RLC

Good and Evil among the Lefties

Over at Evolution News and Views Michael Egnor is piqued by the fact that much of the secular left has been very hostile toward the appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institute of Health, but totally mute on the appointment of John Holdren as the President's chief science advisor.

Collins has being severely criticized because, even though he's a highly accomplished scientist, he's also a devout Christian. Holdren is a totalitarian who holds extreme views, some would say genocidal views, about limiting human population. Here are a few that he has committed to print:

• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" - in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women-particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth--could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into public drinking water or in staple foods.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

So why is Collins, a man who would find such views abhorrent, unacceptable to the secular left while Dr. Holdren, a man who would seemingly find himself quite at home in the company of Josef Mengele, is apparently just fine with them?

I don't think it overstates the case to surmise that, for at least some on the left, Christianity is the great evil while totalitarianism and genocide are actually necessary for the betterment of mankind. Read Egnor's analysis at the link.

RLC

Counter-Proposal (Pt. I)

Keith Hennessey is a former advisor to President Bush who writes on insurance matters at KeithHennesy.com In a pair of recent posts he offers first a critique of President Obama's health care reform proposals and second a compelling alternative, the essence of which is incorporated into the Ryan-Coburn proposal crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Tom Coburn. Hennessey writes:

President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs. Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children. The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I. Congress has gone in the opposite direction. Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else: you. The facts are not in dispute. The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:

• No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
• More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
• $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
• More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.

The better approach, Hennessey argues, is to make health insurance companies compete for individual clients as do automobile insurance companies:

While others offer you the hollow promise of government-provided and underfunded health care security, I'm telling you that you're going to have to take more responsibility for decisions about your own health. A well-functioning system will offer financial incentives to keep yourself healthy, and to avoid risky behaviors that are the source of so much of the costs in today's system. You will have to spend more time talking with your doctor and making hard choices yourself, although that's far preferable to spending that time fighting with your insurer or with a government bureaucracy.

You will have to shop intelligently for health insurance and decide what tradeoffs make sense for your family situation. You will have lower insurance premiums but more financial responsibility for relatively minor medical costs, and you can have a tax-free reserve fund that you can spend wisely on everyday non-critical medical expenses.

It means more personal responsibility and control, and less dependence on the government. It means your health security comes from you buying insurance to protect your family against catastrophe, rather than hoping the government won't ration your care when it's needed. Others want to tell you that you have the right to have someone else pay for your health insurance. I think you have the responsibility to provide for your family's health security, and that it's government's job to set rules so that you have affordable options, and to subsidize the poorest who cannot afford basic catastrophic protection.

The right kind of health care reform means your wages will grow faster as insurance premium growth slows. It means portable health insurance that you can take with you from one job to another, so you don't get locked into your current job because you're afraid to lose your health insurance. It means that millions more Americans will be insured because premiums are less expensive and the uninsured can better afford to buy it, not because we are shifting those costs onto other hard-working Americans and small businesses through higher taxes. It means no increase in the short-term budget deficit. It means dramatic reductions in unsustainable long-term budget deficits, rather than the explosive deficit increases contained in the current legislation.

Hennesey's follow-up post in which he lays out what congress should and should not do about health care reform can be read here. This is very helpful stuff and everyone concerned about the current debate over health care should take the time to read it.

Thanks to Hot Air for the links.

RLC

Wasting Time

Are you the sort of person who feels guilty if you spend an hour doing nothing productive or edifying or are you the sort of person who wishes there were more hours in the day just so you'd have more time to squander? Whichever you are you'll enjoy Jonathan David Price's meditation on wasting time at First Principles. Here's Price's lede:

Do not say this to a philosopher but we have more time now than ever before. One would think that since modern men-and modern women too-have more time, they would think less of it. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The same applies to health and money. We are healthier and wealthier than ever, and these facts have neither calmed our fears nor added peace to our souls. Actually, we seem more anxious than ever about how we spend our time.

This newly-won time, occurring on weekends, evenings, and during paid vacations, is called "free time," and it is a byproduct of industrialization. Delayed marriage and fewer children may have also helped. The majority waste their free time without a second thought, egged on by television, video games, and personal billboards (a.k.a. social networking sites), which they may or may not feel vaguely guilty about. But there is another group-perhaps fifteen percent of Americans-that busies itself with doing and getting and self-betterment.

This cadre of overachievers has the opposite problem: it is terrible at wasting time. And even worse at wasting it well. Their days are planned, their evenings booked, futures fixed. From this group comes our leaders, teachers, businessmen, and preachers. Thus, if the likes of YouTube and the proverbial bear pit fill their lists of time wasters, it is commendable. The problem is that they consider leisure to be a waste of time as well. What Joseph Pieper called the basis of culture, leisure-activity outside the field of servile work, the retreat from the world to study it, reflect on it, worship its source, and return refreshed to serve it-is considered to be wasting time. In recent memory, even the everyday connotation of the word has changed to "doing nothing."

Further on he makes the point that when we waste money it doesn't seem so bad because we can always make more, but the time we waste can never be recovered. The question is what exactly is a "waste" of time?

I wonder if spending a couple of hours a day writing a blog qualifies as "wasting time." Maybe it depends on the blog. I'll have to think about that. Anyway, you'll like Price's essay.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

Noses Are Growing

When President Obama insists his health care reform plans would not eliminate private insurance he's being very disingenuous. He certainly wants to eliminate private insurance and have the government take over control of all health care in this country. This is video of Mr. Obama and others explaining that their ultimate goal is to do precisely that. He states clearly that his goal is to get to a single-payer system with the government as single payer:

Two things are disturbing about this: The prospect of government controlling such a huge part of our lives and Mr. Obama's complete lack of candor in his recent pronouncements about his true intentions. He has repeatedly tried to assure voters that he has no intention of getting rid of private insurance, but this is certainly at odds with what he said before his election. How does he expect people to believe him on anything he says if so many of his most important statements are calibrated to meet the demands of political exigency?

RLC

Chavez's Version of the Fairness Doctrine

The left continues its assault on basic freedoms in Venezuela:

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez's drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

The association of radio broadcasters said 13 stations had stopped transmitting, following an announcement Friday night by government broadcasting watchdog Conatel that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations.

Critics said the crackdown infringed on freedom of speech and that owners were not given the right to a proper defense.

"They're closing the space for dissidents in Venezuela," William Echeverria, head of the National Council of Journalists, told RCTV, a private cable TV station, which did not have its broadcasting license renewed in 2007.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government's effort to democratize the airwaves.

"This government has turned into a mutilator of rights," Juan Carlos Caldera, of the opposition political party Primero Justicia, said on Globovision TV.

Antonio Ledezma, the opposition mayor of Caracas, called on Venezuelans to protest the move in the streets.

Another 120 radio stations were being investigated for administrative irregularities and the radio frequency of stations being shut down would be transferred to new community broadcasters, Cabello had said.

No doubt the community broadcasters will be favorable to the Chavez regime. Meanwhile, here in the states proponents of the Fairness Doctrine are taking notes. They must envy the ease with which Venezuela has been able to silence its political opposition.

RLC

Best That They Can Do

In logic there's an informal fallacy called tu quoque, meaning, roughly, "you're one too." It occurs when someone seeks to deflect the force of an allegation or claim made by an opponent by asserting that the opponent or the opponent's allies are just as bad. The irrelevance of the reply is a tacit admission that the accused person, or his supporters, really has no defense against the charges. I thought of this while watching the video of Michelle Malkin's recent appearance on The View.

Ms Malkin has written a book on the extensive corruption in the Obama administration (Culture of Corruption) which won her an invitation to appear on the show. It was amusing that during her six or seven minute segment none of the liberals among the ladies at the table chose to defend the President or his administration against her indictments. Instead they were reduced to protesting that, well, the Bush administration was corrupt too, you know:

If this is the best defense the President's friends can mount against the very serious accusations Malkin amasses in her book then Mr. Obama is in quite a pickle.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

RLC

Racial Profiling

If you think that racial profiling by cops is one of the great evils of our time read this. Written by a retired cop it explains how New York's finest do it every day. What's more, it makes the argument that cops shouldn't profile seem pretty simple-minded.

RLC

The Third Replicator

Writer and psychologist Susan Blackmore has an interesting article at New Scientist on the emergence of what she thinks is a third type of "replicator." The first type is the gene, the parcels of DNA that code for the structure and function of biological organisms. The second type is Richard Dawkins' "meme," which is an idea, or cluster of ideas, that get selected by cultures for various reasons and spread throughout the human population (We might ignore for the moment the fact that the concept of the meme has come to be widely dismissed by scientists).

Blackmore thinks there is a third type of replicator that is spreading across the globe threatening to run out of control - computer technology. She makes an interesting case and her article is worth a read, but the most interesting part of it to me is this:

Memes are a new kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages - copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology? There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains.

If all three replicators are analogous to each other, and all three are expressions of information, and if information is known to be a product of minds, as it is with memes and technology, then is it not reasonable to infer that the gene may likewise be a product of mind? If evolution at the level of the meme and technological information is mind-driven, why would it be unreasonable or even unscientific to assume that evolution at the level of the gene is mind-driven? Just asking.

RLC

What We're Likely to Get

The WaPo's Charles Krauthammer puts on his prophet's cap and tells us what the upshot of Obamacare is likely to be. Here's his lede:

Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he's fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy -- and half the mainstream media did -- you'll believe the second. Don't believe either.

Conventional wisdom always makes straight-line projections. They are always wrong. Yes, Obama's aura has diminished, in part because of overweening overexposure. But by year's end he will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they'll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended.

Krauthammer thinks that "reforming" the health care system is indeed no longer a viable possibility, for reasons he adumbrates in his column, but he thinks that what the Democrats will be able to give him is reform of health insurance:

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no preexisting condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the United States; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.

In other words, insurance reform will come about by requiring that everyone have insurance. The liberal solution to the problem will be to take away more freedom. Wouldn't the better solution to insurance costs be to reform tort and get rid of onerous state and federal mandates that just multiply the cost of premiums for all policy-holders? Unfortunately, these measures would have the effect of impoverishing lawyers who are big donors to Democrat pols and reducing the control of government in the insurance industry. They're therefore as likely to survive congressional scrutiny as a fish is likely to survive being tossed onto the sands of the Sahara desert.

RLC

Looking for Racism in All the Wrong Places

Much of the national media was all atwitter over the fact that two white men and two black men were having a beer together at the White House the other night. The talking heads spent much of the evening and the next morning trying to discern the portents in this event for the future of race relations in this country. They reported assiduously on all the important details like which brand of beer the principals sipped, what role was played by each, whether the vice-president was allowed to say anything, etc.

Meanwhile, if they were really interested in reporting on a significant story about race and racism they should have followed the lead of the Washington Times. The Times has a report on one Jerry Jackson, a Democratic committee member in Philadelphia and New Black Panther who had been charged with intimidating voters in last November's election. It turns out that Mr. Jackson is not just an overzealous Obama supporter but a man infected with a deep-seated hatred for whites. The Times examines Mr. Jackson's Facebook page where they found Mr. Jackson expressing his racism with incredibly vile racial invective.

We wonder whether the media would be looking the other way if Mr. Jackson were a white Republican saying such hateful things about blacks. He's not, of course, so he gets ignored by the traditional media which can rarely find racism anywhere but among middle class whites. Blacks are allowed to be virulent racists, but if a cop investigates a possible break-in which turns out to involve black men then he and the woman who reported it are vilified as the worst sort of human beings.

Here are a few of the ponderings taken from Mr. Jackson's Facebook page:

• "BLACK POWER,BLACK LOVE,BLACK UNITY,BLACK MINDS,KILLIN CRAKKKAS"
• "F*** Whitey's Christmas"
• An image of an execution scene from the cult hit film "Pulp Fiction"
• A photo of a man holding a sign saying, "DEPORT WHITE PEOPLE"
• A derogatory anti-cop poster titled "BEWARE OF PIG"
• An image of Saddam Hussein before his execution
• A photo of a cop sitting next to a black child in a toy car. Beneath the image the phrase "Racial Profiling: It Starts Early"
• A photoshopped movie poster of the "Bourne Supremacy" is re-worded to say "The Bourne White Supremacy" A swastika is added to Matt Damon's cheek, and the scope of his firearm is photoshopped to look as if he is about to shoot a black man. The "n" word is used to describe who "Matt Damon hates" in this movie poster. The phrase, "They should have just stayed in Africa" is photoshopped at the top of the image.

Not only has Mr. Jackson apparently been given a pass by the media but the Obama Justice department chose not to prosecute him for his misconduct at the polls and, just as bad, the man was reappointed to work the polls in the upcoming primary in Philadelphia. I wonder what Professor Gates thinks about that.

If people want to have a conversation about race in this country let it start with the case of Mr. Jackson.

RLC

Spoof

Some people just have too much time on their hands:

Thanks to Politico.com.

RLC

Smiley-Face Fascism

We've often remarked that fascism is an ideological bacillus endemic not, as is commonly supposed, to the right but to the left. Indeed, fascism and conservatism are almost complete opposites of each other. Washington Timescolumnist Jeffrey Kuhner explains why, taking as his starting point Jonah Goldberg's fine book, Liberal Fascism. Kuhner writes:

Both Hitler and Mussolini were national socialists. They were militant pagans hostile to Christianity, religious orthodoxy and tradition. They believed in the cult of personality, mass propaganda and the pseudo-spiritual transformational nature of politics: charismatic leadership as a means of fulfilling people's deepest aspirations. They glorified the state, as well as the subordination of the individual and the family to the collective. They created a corporatist economy that combined big business, big labor and big government. They emphasized the nationalization of key industries, redistribution of wealth, massive public works projects and trade protectionism. They established a so-called "social safety net" through national health care, unemployment insurance and government pensions. They erected a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Fascist social policy was so popular that President Franklin Roosevelt incorporated much of it in the New Deal.

Embarrassed by the horrors of World War II and Auschwitz, the West's liberal elite disowned Hitler and then falsely portrayed him as a reactionary right-winger.

Kuhner then goes on to show how President Obama's policies reflect many of the characteristics of fascism noted above. He hastens to point out that, to be sure, Obama is neither Hitler nor even Mussolini:

He is not a crypto-dictator. Nor does he believe in an authoritarian police state or territorial expansionism. But Hitler and Mussolini were men of a different age, time and national culture; their fascism was distinctly German and Italian.

Mr. Obama's fascism is uniquely American. His revolution is not of blood and iron, but of pork and bailouts. His fascism is a potent mix of incremental socialism, messianic liberalism and puritanical environmentalism. It is not the crude militarism of the jackboot but the sugar-coated, forced spoon-feeding of the nanny state.

Whether it's militaristic or no, smiley-face fascism is still coercive and freedom-denying. It's still totalitarian, and it's still fascism. Let's hope that our elected leaders recognize the road they're taking us down before it's too late. Let's hope, too, that they're not taking us down this road deliberately.

RLC

Cry Racism Some More

Let me see if I understand this. If you see two black men trying to break into a house you're a racist if you report to the police that two black men are trying to break into a house, even though knowing the race of the perps could be of value to the police in eliminating others as possible suspects.

At least that's apparently what we are to deduce from the experience of Lucia Whalen who, be it noted, did not mention the race of the men she was led to believe were trying to break into a home in her neighborhood:

The woman who dialed 911 to report a possible break-in at the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said Wednesday she was pained to be wrongly labeled a racist based on words she never said and hoped the recently released recording of the call would put the controversy to rest.

With a trembling voice, Lucia Whalen, 40, said she was out walking to lunch in Gates' Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University when an elderly woman without a cell phone stopped her because she was concerned there was a possible burglary in progress.

Whalen was vilified as a racist on blogs after a police report said she described the possible burglars as "two black males with backpacks."

Tapes of the call released earlier this week revealed that Whalen did not mention race. When pressed by a dispatcher on whether the men were white, black or Hispanic, she said one of them might have been Hispanic.

"Now that the tapes are out, I hope people can see that I tried to be careful and honest with my words," Whalen said. "It never occurred to me that the way I reported what I saw be analyzed by an entire nation."

Even if Ms Whalen had reported that the men were black, which they were, why would that be racist? And why should the cretins who are subjecting her to threats and ridicule be angry with her? She's just a good person doing her civic duty and now she's being smeared by the lefty blogosphere, which excels at this sort of thing, for reporting the apparent crime.

I remember the much-cited story of Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man on a city street back in the 1950s, and although dozens of people heard her calls for help, few actually did anything. They didn't want to get involved. I can imagine that from now on no one who witnesses a crime being committed by a black is going to want to get involved by reporting it for fear of being slandered for his/her efforts. Easier to just let society crumble than to suffer the abuse of those small minds who see racism lurking in every cultural crevice and those fetid souls who relish destroying and defaming whoever they can.

RLC

Re: <i>Taken</i>

Alas, no anti-torture absolutists chose to reply to my invitation to watch the movie Taken and explain why the Liam Neeson character was wrong, immoral, or unjustified to use torture in interrogating the men who had information on his daughter's whereabouts. A couple of readers did endorse Neeson's methods, however, and asserted that the circumstances of their use justified their employment. You can read their comments on the Feedback page.

RLC

Paramilitaries, Theirs and Ours

The New York Times has an article that reveals the horrors Iranian detainees swept up in the aftermath of the massive protests over voter fraud several weeks ago underwent. Eyewitness accounts of atrocities perpetrated by military and paramilitary groups like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij that are outside the structure of civilian law enforcement are now leaking out:

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.

The accounts of prison abuse in Iran's postelection crackdown - relayed by relatives and on opposition Web sites - have set off growing outrage among Iranians, including some prominent conservatives. More bruised corpses have been returned to families in recent days, and some hospital officials have told human rights workers that they have seen evidence that well over 100 protesters have died since the vote.

On Tuesday, the government released 140 prisoners in one of several conciliatory gestures aimed at deflecting further criticism. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a letter urging the head of the judiciary to show "Islamic mercy" to the detainees.

I'm glad Mr. Ahmadinejad is concerned about the welfare of the detainees, but I thought the fact that their murders numbered only in the hundreds was already a sign of "Islamic mercy."

Anyway, more details of the abuses - which make Abu Ghraib look like a Sandals resort - can be found at the link.

One of the especially disturbing revelations about the events in Iran is the role played by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. Why is this particularly disturbing? Because one of the things President Obama wants to do once he has passed the legislation that is currently before us - health care reform and cap and trade - is to establish a civilian security force that will rival the military in its training and funding. In other words, he envisions a paramilitary force at the government's disposal pretty much like the Iranian mullahs have at theirs:

I wonder if he plans on calling it the Basij. I guess we'll see.

RLC

Can't be Bothered

It seems like the only people in favor of the Democrats' plan for health care reform are people who haven't read the bill.

During a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who has apparently decided himself not to read it, questioned the point of being expected to do so. He said:

"I love these [House] members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

Well, the point, of course, is that you're getting paid by the taxpayers to read it Mr. Conyers, and if you don't have time to do it then it is criminally reckless of you to vote for it. Indeed, anyone who does vote for such a revolutionary piece of legislation without having read it should be subject to impeachment for malfeasance.

Many of those who have read the 1000 page monstrosity tell us that it's a looming disaster. It will, according to many analysts, end private insurance, putting tens of thousands of people out of work. It will take medical decisions away from you and your doctor and place them in the hands of some anonymous bureaucrat in Washington. It will cause procedures like colonoscopies to be rationed so that rather than getting screened every three years screenings could be extended to, say, every six years, thereby increasing your risk of colon cancer. It will increase waiting times for procedures like MRIs and CAT scans from days to months. It will deny certain procedures like joint or heart valve replacements to people who are judged too old, too feeble, or too heavy. The bright, clean clinics and hospitals that make our stays reasonably pleasant today will likely be deemed superfluous and too costly to maintain. And all of these blessings will cost us trillions of dollars over the next two decades.

Before you and your colleagues kill the best medical care system on the planet, Mr. Conyers, please at least have the decency to learn what you're voting for.

RLC

Gangster Government

Rep. Michelle Bachman calls our attention in this video to the economic brutality and corruption involved in the closing of GM car dealerships across the land:

If you're politically connected, you can survive. If not, tough luck. If the Democrats behave this way with the people who own and work for car dealerships, how will they behave when government health care is the only game in town? How much bribery do you think there'll be as people seek to curry favor with congressmen in order to get moved up on the waiting list for a procedure? How much bribery will there be if cap and trade is passed and government bureaucrats control how much carbon a business can use and emit? When government runs things the opportunities for corruption will be massive.

If we want a model of what life will be like if the Democrats get their legislation passed, we might look toward the old Soviet Union. How's that for hope and change?

RLC

Disparate Impact

Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt and Affirmative Action Baby, has a column in the WaPo that I commend to anyone interested in the conversation about race in this country. As he does in his books Steele argues that affirmative action is not so much about helping blacks, it's more about relieving largely white institutions from the burden of guilt for past racial injustice. It's a way of gaining for themselves a kind of racial absolution. Steele writes, for instance, that:

It is important to remember that the original goal of affirmative action was to achieve two redemptions simultaneously. As society gave a preference to its former victims in employment and education, it hoped to redeem both those victims and itself. When America -- the world's oldest and most unequivocal democracy -- finally acknowledged in the 1960s its heartless betrayal of democracy where blacks were concerned, the loss of moral authority was profound. In their monochrome whiteness, the institutions of this society -- universities, government agencies, corporations -- became emblems of the very evil America had just acknowledged.

Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its inception, no one even bothered to measure its effectiveness in minority progress. Advocates of racial preferences tried to prove that these policies actually helped minorities only after 1996, when California's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences in all state institutions, scaring supporters across the country.

But the research following from this scare has .... has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites -- the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.

In order to account for the elusive competitive parity latent racism and discrimination are assumed to be lurking insidiously in the nooks and crannies of society, always working to keep blacks from getting ahead. The proof that these malefactors are still in play is the occurrence of "disparate impact," an indicator not of black failure but of an indelible white racism.

We are headed now, it seems, into a legal thicket created by the incompatibility of two notions of equality: "disparate impact" and "equal protection under the law." The former is a legalism evolved from judicial interpretations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the latter is a constitutional guarantee. Disparate impact lets you presume that an entire class of people has been discriminated against if it has been disproportionately affected by some policy. If no blacks do well enough on a firefighters promotion exam to win advancement while many whites do (Ricci v. DeStefano), then this constitutes discrimination against blacks.

Disparate impact and racial preferences represent the law and policymaking of a guilty America, an America lacking the moral authority to live by the rigors of the Constitution's "equal protection" -- a guarantee that sees victims as individuals and requires hard evidence to prove discrimination. They are "white guilt" legalisms created after the '60s as fast tracks to moral authority. They apologize for presumed white wrongdoing and offer recompense to minorities before any actual discrimination has been documented. Yet these legalisms are much with us now. And it will no doubt take the courts a generation or more to disentangle all this apology from the law.

We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us -- even if they were effective -- with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

I'd like to post Steele's complete column, but I refer you instead to the link. There's much more there that's worth considering.

RLC

Stunted Development

According to Strategy Page, as North Korea moves toward chaos with the imminent succession crisis looming when Kim Jong Il dies, South Korea and China are increasingly concerned about the primitiveness of the refugees that are making it out of that prison state:

South Koreans are growing increasingly anxious at the difficulties North Korean refugees are having in adapting to life in a prosperous democracy. There are over 17,000 refugees in South Korea now, and the children do not do well at school. Few get into a university. The adults do poorly in establishing prosperous careers. These refugees are among the most enterprising North Koreans, because of the planning they had to do, and risks they had to take, to get out of the country. But these people are obsessed with basic survival, not personal improvement and advancement, as in South Korea, and the rest of the world.

Sixty years of police state rule up north, plus the 1990s famine, has seriously crippled the initiative and ambition of the northerners. It appears that the North Koreans are much more psychologically damaged, than were the East Germans (and east Europeans in general) after their communist dictatorships collapsed in 1989. This just makes South Korea, and China, even more anxious about a collapse of the North Korean government, while would leave China and South Korea to deal with refugees, and picking up the pieces in general.

Meanwhile, those Norks who can are preparing to flee once the end comes:

Some senior officials are making escape plans, gathering portable wealth and cultivating connections in China that would be useful for a getaway. There is a growing consensus that Kim Jong Il will be gone within three years, and that after that, chaos.

The North Koreans have managed to stunt the development of three generations of their people by forcing them to live in a Marxist paradise. There's a lesson here for the rest of the world: The fewer freedoms a people have the more dehumanized they become.

RLC