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• Pickings :: May 17, 2007 (word)

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We’re a little long today. Thankfully it is the end of the week.

Whole bunch of global warming stuff.

The first warming piece is from The Nation. This is a first for Pickings. It’s a typical item from the conspiratorial genre of the left and is a perfect illustration of yesterday’s discourse on those angry folks. The theme, by Alex Cockburn, is the global warming debate was cooked up by the nuclear power industry. I’m not kidding. Here’s the pull quote;

The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-’90s he’d positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change,” which stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

Pickerhead’s always been willing to credit Al Gore with sincere motives in this debate. But for the crazy left, if you disagree with them, they will find evil.

From a blog from the U. S. Senate, of all places, we learn of many scientists who have become global warming skeptics. Thirteen of them from 9 countries have vignettes in this post. Here’s a sample;

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears “poppycock.” According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”

Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, calls for rational rather than hysteric approachs to global warming inquiry in his new book.

Samizdata with good quote.

May Month post is on cannibalistic communists.

Another organ of the left, the Village Voice, on groups organizing to pressure China over Darfur.

Power Line with some background on testimony of Deputy Attorney General Comey. Washington is truly a cesspool.

Speaking of Washington and cesspools, the Captain has Berger news.

New Editor with a short from a Weekly Standard piece on the 2006 vote.

Don Boudreaux’s bi-monthly Tribune-Review column starts with something that is hard to believe.

The economist Paul Romer notes the astonishing fact that if you thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, chances are practically 100 percent that the resulting arrangement of cards has never before existed.

Never.

Michael Gerson, formerly a Bush speechwriter, is now writing a column for WaPo. He starts out with the bizarre circumstance of missionaries from Africa working the northern Virginia suburbs for converts.

An epoch-dividing event recently took place in the religion that brought us B.C. and A.D. Too bad hardly anyone noticed.

For years, a dispute has boiled between the American Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion it belongs to, with many in the global south convinced that Episcopalians are following their liberalism into heresy. This month, Archbishop Peter Akinola, shepherd of 18 million fervent Nigerian Anglicans, reached the end of his patience and installed a missionary bishop to America. The installation ceremony included boisterous hymns and Africans dressed in bright robes dancing before the altar — an Anglican worship style more common in Kampala, Uganda, than in Woodbridge.

The American presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, condemned this poaching of souls on her turf as a violation of the “ancient customs of the church.” To which the archbishop replied, in essence: Since when have you American liberals given a fig about the ancient customs of the church?

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Bernard Lewis gives another Middle East history lesson.

Jonathan Gurwitz lists the lessons of Fort Dix.

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes on changes to his neighborhood in London.

It’s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie’s death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph above), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god.

Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

Great Posts from Power Line;
John posts on senate defeat of Iraq funds cut-off and on the standoff in the house. Then he posts on the debate which will serve as our segue to the Captain and his debate thoughts.

Good debate take from the Captain.

While London’s changing for the worse the left in the US is going “round the bend.” First example is from Jonah Goldberg.

And Thomas Sowell writes on their anger.

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

The source of the anger of liberals, “progressives” or radicals is by no means readily apparent. The targets of their anger have included people who are non-confrontational or even genial, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Sowell then follows with a column trying to understand why the left’s so sure it’s right.

… Elites are all too prone to over-estimate the importance of the fact that they average more knowledge per person than the rest of the population — and under-estimate the fact that their total knowledge is so much less than that of the rest of the population.

They overestimate what can be known in advance in elite circles and under-estimate what is discovered in the process of mutual accommodations among millions of ordinary people.

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.

The ignorance of people with Ph.D.s is still ignorance, the prejudices of educated elites are still prejudices, and for those with one percent of a society’s knowledge to be dictating to those with the other 99 percent is still an absurdity.

You know the old saw that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality? Plain Dealer has a story.

John Stossel on the tax-cut myth.

According to Cafe Hayek, the village idiots in Montgomery County MD are on the loose again.

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In Contentions, Gabriel Schoenfeld, examining the past, peers into the future.

In 1981, Israel hit Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Eight F-16 fighter-bombers and eight F-15 fighters swooped in to carry out a precision strike that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by more than a decade.As the whole world knows, Israel now faces a similar challenge from Iran, which has an ambitious nuclear program of its own, and whose president has threatened to wipe Israel from the map. …

… Thus, one does not have to be a Vanity Fair writer, or to love the Islamic bomb, to see that Israel’s decision, whatever it is, will be one of the biggest rolls of the dice in the sixty-year history of the Jewish state.

Norman Podhoretz will be making the case for the U.S. to step up to the plate and deal boldly with Iran’s nuclear program in the June issue of COMMENTARY; an advance posting will be available next week at www.commentarymagazine.com.

Here’s a link for the Podhoretz article. It is 5000 words so it’s doubtful it will be in Pickings.

Ed Koch says the dems own defeat in Iraq.

During the Cold War the pols in Washington were mostly united in support of this goal. But now the Democrats are not. There is no safety for the weak and foolish. When you seek to end a war without substantially achieving your essential goals by simply ceasing to fight, it is often a form of surrender. And that’s the way the Democrat-imposed outcome in Iraq will be understood around the world, especially by our enemies.

David Brooks (Subscription Reg.) sees off Tony Blair.

… In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished. …

For two months, Mark Steyn has been in Chicago following the Conrad Black trial. It has been ignored here. Today in National Review, Mark tells us why we should be interested.

Jamestown just celebrated 400 years. David Boaz says private property saved the colony.

May Month honors today go to a post in Volokh by Ilya Somin on the current memorial controversy in Estonia.

Prof. Somin links to a Reason article by Cathy Young. She closes with:

… The best summary of the crisis comes from Elena Bonner, the widow of the great Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and a noted human rights activist in her own right as well as a World War II veteran. On May 9, the day Russia commemorates its victory over Germany—an occasion that Putin used to take a public swipe at those who “desecrate monuments to war heroes”—Bonner issued a holiday greeting that dealt largely with the drama over the Bronze Soldier.

“I am not insulted by the relocation of the remains and the monument,” Bonner wrote. “It is far more honorable to have one’s final resting place on a cemetery than at a bustling, noisy bus stop. What did and still does insult me is the inscription on the monument. What it should say, in Estonia or in any other country, is not ‘To the soldier-liberator,’ but ‘To the fallen soldiers.’

Soviet soldiers, Bonner writes, liberated no one—not even themselves, though many hoped that after the war things would be different. That hope, she concludes, didn’t come true in 1945—or, for Russians, in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Power Line posts on the ludicrous Chuck Hagel.

The Captain too.

The New Editor exposes most recent hatchet job by MSM

The latest from the “I’m From the Government, and I’m Stupid Sweepstakes.” Of course it would turn out the coerced switch to biofuels has some huge downsides. Ones that may make us worse off than before. Instapundit with the details.

Instapundit linked to a post from Nature.com. That is here too.

Hit & Run post on another dumb law.

When to take social security: 62, 66, or 70? NY Times profiles an econ prof who says wait as long as you possibly can.

… Indeed, requesting your Social Security benefits might seem like the first order of business as soon as the going-away party is over. But you might be a lot better off waiting a bit longer, until age 66 or even 70 before tapping into the government retirement fund. Relying at first on other savings like individual retirement accounts or the 401(k) from work could raise your living standard in retirement as much as 10 percent, according to calculations made by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University. …

While campaigning on the Iberian Peninsula, the Duke of Wellington, annoyed, writes to the bureaucrats in the foreign office

… to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance,

2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

Your most obedient servant

Wellington

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Theodore Dalrymple, who has a second home in France, writes on Sarkozy and what his election might mean.

The French Revolution having taken place only two centuries previously, Chou En-lai famously remarked that it was too early to tell what its effects might be. A fortiori, it is too early only a few days after Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory in the French election to say what that victory means. One thing is certain: It means something.

The rioters in the Place de la Bastille agreed. What they feared was that Sarko, as he is known to both his friends and his enemies, is in reality what he has all along presented himself as being, a man determined to change France. One of the ironies of the election was that the conservatives wanted change, while the liberals wanted everything to remain the same. And there is nothing like the prospect of change in France to spark a riot.

It is instructive to compare Sarko’s dignified and decent statement after his election — that it was important for everyone to respect Ségolène Royal because millions of French people had voted for her — with the rioters’ contorted faces of hatred. Like Mrs. Thatcher (and George Bush), Sarko evokes hatred completely disproportionate to anything he has done or might conceivably do. It is his ideas that are hated and feared more than the man himself. …

… Sarko has been called American in his attitudes, but has taken it as a compliment rather than as a criticism. His problem is that, without reform, France is headed for very serious violence, amounting almost to civil war; with reform, it is headed for serious, though temporary, conflict. But the reward of reform is that France would soon be one of the very richest countries in the world, as well as what it is now, the country with the highest per capita consumption of tranquillizers.

John Fund has ideas for the World Bank.

Modern Malthusians see nothing but trouble ahead. Jeff Jacoby sees good news.

… take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. “In the United States as late as 1900,” Goklany writes, “infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to 30 in the past 50 years.

Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003. …

Great Corner post from Victor Davis Hanson.

Good news worldwide on school vouchers from The Economist.

… Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule—the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

Claudia Rosett thinks Zimbabwe as head of CDC is perfect. Instead of calling it the Commission on Sustainable Development, she says how ’bout, “U.N. Commission on Sustainable Dictatorships.”

Couple of Wolfowitz items. Chris Hitchens and WSJ.

Carpe Diem posts on Wal-Mart health clinics.

Our May Month article describes prison camps in NoKo.

The most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor. Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. And prisoners are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes — anything remotely edible. It should be noted that below-subsistence-level food rations preceded, by decades, the severe nationwide food shortages experienced by North Korea in the 1990s.

Great Cafe Hayek post on unintended consequences.

Reason’s Hit & Run posts on the foolishness of Lou Dobbs.

Jim Taranto writes on what can happen to a college student who suggests carrying weapons.

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Mark’s Sun-Times column comments on the backgrounds of the Fort Dix Six.

…what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: “The hour of Europe has come!” he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union’s rotating “presidency” at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. “We don’t have a dog in this fight,” said then-secretary of state, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication. …

… Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It’s time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you’ll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They’re not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver’s license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity. …

Richard Perle is in WaPo with reaction to Tenet’s book.

The Captain links to a Swedish study that says our health care system outperforms in providing new treatments.

Because he is a gentleman, Larry Arnn, Hillsdale College president, waited a long time before losing patience with the Bush administration’s Education Department.

…Today we watch with trepidation an attempt to establish federal control over all colleges and universities, including our campus. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings wants to extend the testing and standards requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act to colleges. The specific details of what these testing and standards would entail are unclear, but are likely to be determined by education department regulators over the next several months.

President Bush and Ms. Spellings have brought a new approach to education reform at the federal level. They have good motives and a fair appraisal of the situation, at least in K-12 education. But national standards and testing in higher education will only strengthen a bureaucracy that already plagues an otherwise highly competitive system.

Mr. Bush and Ms. Spellings will be not be around long enough to write the rules of this new program. They will leave behind them a much larger department, now armed with the tools to influence education to a much greater extent. Ms. Spellings often uses the language of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in her speeches. …

WaPo has a profile on Shaha Riza. She would be the woman portrayed by some of Wolfowitz’s enemies as a bimbo.

She is the invisible woman at the center of the storm swirling around embattled World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz. Serious, discreet and strong-willed, Shaha Ali Riza has been variously described as Wolfowitz’s “girlfriend,” his “female companion” and, according to Salon.com, his “neoconcubine.”

But little beyond labels is publicly known about the 52-year-old British citizen who has been dating Wolfowitz, one of Washington’s most high-profile and powerful men, for the past seven years. People close to Riza have encouraged her to go public and tell her side of the story, but she remains silent.

When a friend is asked how Riza is feeling at the moment, the friend, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation, says, “What would you expect? How would you like to be portrayed as somebody’s bimbo when you’re a highly educated person who has actually worked hard to make life better for women and civil society in the Middle East and has actually achieved a lot.” …

Bunch of good posts from Power Line and New Editor. The segue between is when they both post on what should be in the humor section; Zimbabwe selected by the UN to head the U.N. body charged with promoting economic progress and environmental protection.

WSJ reacts to Obama’s Detroit speech.

Shorts from National Review.

NR Online on AARP.

IBD with some good news on trade and congress.

After two years of gloom, Congress has seized the lead on free trade. Its green light for Peru and Panama pacts strengthens our allies and breaks a trail for bipartisanship. This is real progress.

The accord Congress reached Thursday with the Bush administration marks the first true act of bipartisanship since the Democrats won Congress in 2006. The bickering’s gone, and this time the vote was more than “symbolic.”

Members like Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., showed leadership in bringing back free trade from its moribund state. His office tells us he was tired of Congress’ do-nothingism and wanted to work.

Nice post from Division of Labour on Milton Freidman.

Tech Central on the doomsayers.

Paul Krugman who told us that we’d ‘all better start brushing up on our depression economics,” and astonishingly, two months ago, was talking about a short-term drop in the Dow as a sign of “economic collapse.”

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• May 10, 2007 (word)
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Today turns out to be Institute for Justice Day.

IJ has been mentioned from time to time in Pickings. We have just learned a charity rating service continues to give IJ its highest award.

Next is an example of the types of clients assisted by the Institute.

DANNY GLOVER’S recent difficulty hailing a cab in New York City highlighted one transportation problem faced by minorities. But there is another problem that is perpetuated by the government of the city of New York — lack of alternatives to the public transportation system.Like other cities, New York throws barriers in the path of entrepreneurs who attempt to launch van or jitney services. When Hector Ricketts, a Jamaican immigrant and father of three children, lost his job at a hospital, he decided to start a van service. He had seen the difficulties his fellow Queens residents had in obtaining cheap, convenient transportation. People were often faced with a walk to the bus plus a transfer to the subway to get to work. Those who live in high-crime neighborhoods and must return home after dark are frightened of even a two or three block walk — particularly women. Vans pick people up at the subway station and take them directly to their doors. And they do it for $1.00, considerably less than the public system charges.

One would suppose that in this era of welfare reform, obstacles to obtaining jobs would be cast aside with brisk efficiency. Not so. …

One of the Institute’s main efforts is litigation against abuse of eminent domain. There has been a recent victory in Riviera Beach, FL.

If you’re interested, check out their web site. www.ij.org They are lucky folks; they get to spend their days suing governments.

David Brooks – Anglophile.

Der Spiegel has a long look at the IPCC, the UN climate panel. This looks to be a reasonably balanced portrayal of the debate.

Yesterday marked the end of WWII in Europe. Historian Richard Overy writes on the war.

May Month has a posting on Eric Hoffer, the philosopher longshoreman from California.

… The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliché that money is the root of evil! The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind. …

There’s still a war. Max Boot has a good post in Contentions.

Tony Blankley thinks September May Be the Cruelest Month.

Claudia Rosett comments on World Bank.

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• May 9, 2007 (pdf)
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We start off with John Stossel’s weekly column.

Bill Clinton once declared, “The era of big government is over.” Both Republicans and Democrats applauded.
What a joke.
Government grew under Clinton, and grew even faster under his successor. Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.

Michael Barone is having a week. Today he questions our priorities.

Sometimes politicians get things upside down. They ignore problems that are plainly staring them in the face, while they focus on dangers that are at best speculative.Consider two long-range issues that are not pressing matters this year but pose, or are said to pose, threats a generation or two away. One of them you don’t hear much about: Social Security. The other you hear about all the time: global warming. Yet this gets things upside down. We have an unusually precise knowledge of the problems that Social Security will cause in the future. But we don’t know with anything like precision what a continuation of the current mild increase in temperatures will mean.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mr. Barone about the piece we started with yesterday.

WSJ editorial on the people behind the attacks on Wolfowitz.

George Will pays some attention to the World Bank.

The kerfuffle over whether Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank’s president, behaved badly regarding the contract for his companion to facilitate her departure from the bank involves no large issue. The bank’s existence does. The bank’s rationale, never strong, has evaporated.

The Village Voice thinks NY Times is hypocritical.

May Month selection today is Kolyma: The Land of the White Death.

“As the isolation of the region made it difficult to transport prisoners by rail, the ocean began the preferred route of transport. A fleet of ships based in Vladivostok carried out the operations. In the late fall of 1941, one such slave ship – the Dzhurma – carrying 12,000 Polish prisoners became trapped in the frozen waters near Wrangle Island. The Soviets could not carry out a rescue and refused help from outsiders for fear of exposing their slave apparatus to the world. The entire contingent died due to cold and starvation.”

Instapundit posts on Anne Applebaum’s good bye to Chirac.

Walter Williams writes on the minimum wage.

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Michael Barone, the master of voting statistics, gives us lost of food for thought with his column in WSJ today.

In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly. … … Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation’s fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That’s the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.

A series of good blog posts follows.
Power Line post on Edwards’ poverty program and Jim Lileks.

Captain picks up on Lileks and then gives us a good post on the French election.

Ed Morrissey, who is the captain of Captains Quarters, linked to his post on E. J. Dionne at the blog Heading Right.

May Month’s selection highlights the poverty created by the Soviets.

Under communism, in contrast, industrialization accompanied falling agricultural productivity. Almost all Russians were still family farmers in 1928. Stalin seized their land, launching a deadly famine that killed about 7 million. Agricultural collectivization slashed total food production, but the government drastically increased quotas to feed industrial workers and pay for exports. As Robert Conquest explains, collectivizing agriculture was the opposite of progress:
[A]gricultural production had been drastically reduced, and the peasants driven off by the millions to death and exile, with those who stayed reduced, in their own view, to serfs. But the State now controlled grain production, however reduced in quantity. And collective farming had prevailed.
Stalin’s idea of “economic growth,” in other words, was shifting production from agriculture to other sectors – and mangling the former in the process. Genius it was not. If official statistics had properly counted agricultural output, Stalin’s policies would have correctly been seen as a catastrophe.

While on the subject of the Soviet Union, we have a book review from Saturday’s WSJ. The book is by Pickerhead’s favorite author Vasily Grossman.

No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commissars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation. Even now, after the fall of communism, things for them remain impressively dreary. I not long ago asked a formidable expert on Russia whom we were supposed to root for among those contending for power in the country. With only thieves, thugs and former KGB men seeking leadership, he replied, there is no one to root for. Business, in other words, as usual.
Literature has been the only, if of course vastly insufficient, Russian compensation. The barbarity of the nation’s conditions has, somehow, produced a great literature studded with magnificent literary subjects. From Pushkin through Solzhenitsyn — with Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Babel, Akhmatova, Pasternak and many others in between — great Russian novelists and poets have never been in short supply.
One Russian writer who until only recently slipped through my own net is Vasily Grossman (1904-64), author of a novel called “Life and Fate,” which was written under the direct influence of “War and Peace.” The first I had heard of this book was six or so months ago from my friend Frederic Raphael, the English novelist and screenwriter, a man never given to overstatement. “It’s a masterpiece,” he said, and, upon investigation, this assessment turns out to be precisely correct. …

Thomas Sowell says some scandals are more equal than others.

Mark Steyn reviews a book for WSJ. The book – “Can We Trust the BBC.”

… When a chap writes a book called “Can We Trust the BBC?” I think it’s a safe assumption that the answer is unlikely to be “yes.” So I trust you won’t regard it as a plot spoiler if I reveal that, at the end of his brisk tome, Robin Aitken (a Beeb journalist for 25 years) reveals that, no, you cannot trust the BBC, at least not if you’re of a broadly conservative disposition. On the European Union, on the Iraq war, on Northern Ireland, on Islam, on America, the BBC trends not merely well to the left of the Conservative Party but well to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour. …

Carpe Diem posts on seasonal gas price increases.

Some environmental folks have gone round the bend. Jim Taranto with details.

Not everyone on the left is nuts. The Nation found a global warming denier, Alexander Cockburn.

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences

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• May 7, 2007 (pdf)
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Gabriel Schoenfeld and Norman Podhoretz wrote excellent posts today in Contentions, Commentary’s blog.
Schoenfeld;

… supporting a war that is going badly, in which American forces are getting continually hammered, is emotionally, morally, and intellectually arduous. To those of us who do not want to see American soldiers die and die needlessly, it may be time, then, to tip our hats to those in public life—soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals—who are not only being steadfast but are finding a way forward.

Podhoretz;

… In spite of what the polls supposedly tell us, I strongly suspect that the Democrats may already have blown the 2008 election. Unlike the late Senator Aiken of Vermont, who proposed that we declare victory and get out of Vietnam, the Democrats want us to declare defeat and get out of Iraq. This, they imagine, is what the American people were demanding in the congressional election of 2006.
But it seems far more likely that the message of that election was not “Get out,” but rather “Win, or get out.” In any case, the position the Democrats are now taking can only have the effect of revivifying and reinforcing the sense of them as weak on national security. And this was the very factor that led to the ignominious defeat of their presidential candidate, George McGovern, in 1972, when they also misread the public temper by paying too much attention to the left wing of their party. …

Lots of reaction to France’s vote.

John Fund’s first.

… It is difficult for Americans to appreciate just how removed from the French people the nation’s bureaucratic elite is. Its arrogance is mind-boggling. One of Mr. Chirac’s ministers privately compared the public’s repudiation of the EU Constitution in 2005 to a temper tantrum. Listen to former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the prime architect of the now-rejected 448-article European Constitution, when he was asked to respond to complaints that voters would have trouble understanding the dense document: “The text is easily read and quite well phrased, which I can say all the more easily since I wrote it myself.” …… With the victory last year of Angela Merkel, the pro-U.S. leader of Germany, and the impending changeover in power in Britain from pro-American Tony Blair to equally pro-American Labor leader Gordon Brown, there is also at least a chance that Europe will begin to address its problems straight on and avoid needless scapegoating of the U.S. With Mr. Sarkozy’s victory, France’s government looks like it will finally have some energetic adult supervision.

Next Mark Steyn.

… In my recent book, whose title escapes me, I cite one of those small anecdotes that seems almost too perfect a distillation of Continental politics. It was a news item from 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.
She was 94 when she croaked, so she’d presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: “Frenchman Lived With Dead Mother To Keep Pension.”
Think of France as that flat in Marseilles, and its economy as the dead mother, and the country’s many state benefits as monsieur’s deceased mom’s benefits. To the outside observer, the French give the impression they can live with the stench of death as long as the government benefits keep coming. If that’s the case, the new president will have the shortest of honeymoons.

Adam Smith.org is pleased.

Jewish World Review reprinted an article from a paper in Belgium. It’s not well written but has interesting background info on Sarkozy

Volokh with insight on Hayek’s spontaneous order.

A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

One of the proprietors of Division of Labour has to listen to a commencement speaker claiming lengthened life spans are a product of the government. Of course he has a comment.

May Month’s selection is on the Soviet state’s murder of the Aral Sea. Ever notice that the worst environmental disasters have been created by government? All of Russia, of course, and here at home look at the sites involved in the production of nuclear weapons.

… The moral of this story is that for lack of property rights & trade, a huge ecosystem (and the health of millions of people) was sacrificed. Let us all keep this in mind when latter day pundits claim that property rights and trade are enemies of the environment.

Carpe Diem mentions a WSJ piece on how governments might ruin our talented and productive drug manufacturers.

Cafe Hayek on job creation.

… William’s example of the ban on self-serve gasoline reminds me of a story. An economist is visiting China and is given a economic tour of the country. At one point, he’s shown a dam under construction and the economist asks why all the workers are using shovels instead of more powerful equipment. It creates jobs, the Chinese guide says proudly. The economist responds: why don’t you have them use spoons? …

Another wind farm is proposed. This time off the Delaware coast.

The Economist writes on gestures, rather than speech, as possible origins of language. We already knew drivers can communicate without speaking!

The proprietor of this site, Ed Roesch, lives in tidewater Virginia where he owns and operates a small business that fabricates precision metal parts for electronic enclosures. Started by Mr. Roesch in 1981, the company has grown from two to almost 100 people. All without memos, meetings, or mission statements. However, like many small business people, Ed understands God put him on the earth to “fund an ever-increasing break-even level.”

He loves freedom and marvels at the accomplishments of people in voluntary cooperation when they are unfettered by government’s dead hand. Pickings started as a clipping service for his six children. Interesting items were copied and mailed in an effort to expose them to ideas about free people and free markets. Although he often said, “If you have an open mind, someone will come along and fill it with garbage,” what he hoped to give them was a chance to fight back.

He also wished they would grow to understand, ‘there ought to be a law’ is perhaps the most dangerous phrase in our language. Mischief and tragedy grow out of those thoughts. The wiser course is to find and repeal the bad laws that created the problem in the first place.

A good example is our third party pays medical system. During WWII employers, seeking to evade wage and price controls, offered medical insurance as a fringe benefit. They went to congress to make sure the expense was deductible but would not be added to their employee’s taxable income. So we have ended in a situation where we all think someone else is paying.

Imagine, if you will, the savings that would accrue from people treating their medical insurer with the same care they give to the company that carries their car insurance. Now new laws are nearly certain to compound the current healthcare morass.

In fact, the phrase is so dangerous, maybe there should be a law prohibiting its use.

Then came the Internet.

Now he had the tools to terrorize his children with greater volume and velocity. The emails were called Pickings from the Webvine and since he was the head picker, Mr. Roesch called himself Pickerhead. Family and friends asked to be added to the distribution list. More family, friends, colleagues, reporters, teachers, pundits, radio hosts, politicos, (liberals and conservatives alike) benefited from Pickerhead’s curious mind and insatiable appetite for surprising and ingenious commentary. The list grew to two hundred and the time came to launch this site.

The goal is to find interesting background to the news that busy people might overlook and the main stream media ignore. Although sources frequently include many right and center-right blogs and publications, the weeks preceding launch in May 2007 saw items from The Nation, Village Voice, and Salon. We try to have fun without being snide, sarcastic or cynical.

Pickings is posted five days a week and the archives go back over one year.