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What is it like to live in hell? There are few people who know better than Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow. She gave a speech in Norway recently. It is here courtesy of The New Republic.
… At the age of 14, I was left without my parents. My father was executed, my mother spent 18 years in prison and exile. My grandmother raised me and my younger brother. The poet Vladimir Kornilov, who suffered the same fate, wrote: “And it felt that in those years we had no mothers. We had grandmothers.” There were hundreds of thousands of such children. Ilya Ehrenburg called us “the strange orphans of 1937.”
Then came the war. My generation was cut off nearly at the roots by the war, but I was lucky. I came back from the war. I came back to an empty house. My grandmother had died of starvation in the siege of Leningrad. Then came a communal apartment, six half-hungry years of medical school, falling in love, two children and the poverty of a Soviet doctor. But I was not alone in this. Everyone lived this way. Then there was my dissident period followed by exile. But Andrei [Sakharov] and I were together! And that was true happiness. …
… And another question that has been a thorn for me for a long time. It’s a question for my human rights colleagues. Why doesn’t the fate of the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit trouble you in the same way as does the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners?
You fought for and won the opportunity for the International Committee of the Red Cross, journalists and lawyers to visit Guantanamo. You know prison conditions, the prisoners’ everyday routine, their food. You have met with prisoners subjected to torture. The result of your efforts has been a ban on torture and a law to close this prison. President Obama signed it in the first days of his coming to the White House. And although he, just like president Bush before him, does not know what to do with the Guantanamo prisoners, there is hope that the new administration will think up something.
But during the two years Schalit has been held by terrorists, the world human rights community has done nothing for his release. Why? He is a wounded soldier, and fully falls under the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The conventions say clearly that hostage-taking is prohibited, that representatives of the Red Cross must be allowed to see prisoners of war, especially wounded prisoners, and there is much else written in the Geneva Conventions about Schalit’s rights. The fact that representatives of the Quartet conduct negotiations with the people who are holding Schalit in an unknown location, in unknown conditions, vividly demonstrates their scorn of international rights documents and their total legal nihilism. …
In his blog, Spengler looks at Iran’s prospects.
The Iranian exile journalist Amir Taheri, the dean of regime critics writing in the English language press, says that civil war is unlikely in Iran. In the most convincing analysis I have seen to date, Taheri points out that Ahmadinejad has his back to the wall, while regime critics have the option of a comfortable exile. Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guards will fight to the death and–more importantly–kill as much as they need to in order to keep power. Back in 1979, by contrast, it was the Shah and his supporters who preferred exile to bloodshed. He writes:
… In 1979 the ruling elite had little stomach for a fight. Many of its members had homes and investments abroad and thus were not forced to fight with their backs to the wall. Thousands of them just packed up and left. Now, however, the overwhelming majority of the ruling elite has no fallback position. …
Dana Milbank looked askance at the latest presidential presser.
… The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn’t as free as advertised. But yesterday wasn’t so much a news conference as it was a taping of a new daytime drama, “The Obama Show.” Missed yesterday’s show? Don’t worry: On Wednesday, ABC News will be broadcasting “Good Morning America” from the South Lawn (guest stars: the president and first lady), “World News Tonight” from the Blue Room, and a prime-time feature with Obama from the East Room.
“The Obama Show” was the hottest ticket in town yesterday. Forty-five minutes before the start, there were no fewer than 107 people crammed into the narrow aisles, in addition to those in the room’s 42 seats. Japanese and Italian could be heard coming from the tangle of elbows, cameras and compressed bodies: “You’ve got to move! . . . Oh, God, don’t step on my foot!” Some had come just for a glimpse of celebrity. And they wanted to know all about him. “As a former smoker, I understand the frustration and the fear that comes with quitting,” McClatchy News’s Margaret Talev empathized with the president before asking him how much he smokes.
Obama indulged the question from the studio audience. “I would say that I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where I mess up,” he confessed. “Like folks who go to AA, you know, once you’ve gone down this path, then, you know, it’s something you continually struggle with.”
This is Barack Obama, and these are the Days of Our Lives. …
David Harsanyi thinks quacks tout preventive medicine.
Despite the extraordinary energy exerted in trying to delay the inevitable, the inconvenient fact is we all die.
So it is no surprise that “preventive” health care, that game-changing fix to policy trotted out relentlessly by both Democrats and Republicans, is so appealing.
And, like many cure-alls, it’s a myth.
Surely, for some, preventive health care is worthwhile. And no one is stopping you from eating an apple. But unless policy changes have the power to stop the Grim Reaper — rather than only postponing his arrival — it will make health care more expensive.
Let’s begin with the morbidly obvious. The longer people hang around the longer they utilize the health care system. End-of-life care is often the most expensive. Old folks just love doctors. (I know I plan to unleash septuagenarian fury on MDs regularly.) As studies on Medicare have proven, easy availability to services at the tail end of life translates into lots of needless services.
Second, a government policy that prods people into incessantly visiting medical offices for checkups, screenings and tests will only raise costs even further. …
Speaking of quacks, Thomas Sowell writes on the ideas lining up for stimulus funds.
Even if the “stimulus” package doesn’t seem to be doing much to stimulate the economy, it is certainly stimulating many potential recipients of government money to start lining up at the trough. All you need is something that sounds like a “good thing” and the ability to sell the idea.
A perennial “good thing” is education. So it is not surprising that leaders of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities have come out with an assertion that “the U.S. should set a goal of college degrees for at least 55 percent of its young adults by 2025.”
Nothing is easier in politics than setting some arbitrary goal– preferably based on numbers– and go after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions. That is how we got into the housing boom and bust, by mindlessly pursuing ever-higher statistics of home ownership. The same political game can be played by making ever higher miles per gallon the goal for automobiles, ever more “open space,” ever more– you name it.
Sometimes these open-ended political crusades can be given some semblance of rationality by referring to other countries that have bigger numbers in whatever is the goal du jour. …
John Stossel comments on the conceit of folks who think they can fix everything.
President Obama has announced his “sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system.”
We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to “overhaul” the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system.
My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn’t know this. He thinks he must regulate the system because it is so complicated and important. In fact, those are the reasons why he cannot regulate it, and should not try.
As F.A. Hayek said in accepting the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, “[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.” So when regulators set out to redesign an economy, they display not wisdom but a “pretence of knowledge”. …
Interesting Contentions post on Bernanke’s culpability.
Fed Chairman Bernanke is up for reappointment next year, and the questions are beginning in earnest about how he’s handled monetary policy. Some of the best-informed people out there insist that the cause of the housing bubble and the subsequent crash was an episode of low interest rates during 2003 and 2004, as the U.S. economy was recovering from the post-9/11 recession. Alan Greenspan was the Fed Chairman at that time, but Bernanke was prominent among the Fed’s governors, and fully supported the loose policy.
It’s always fun to look into the past for someone to blame, but the more important question is what this means for monetary policy going forward. To a careful observer, there can be no question that the crisis had many causes, and was greatly exacerbated by complex interactions that no one could have predicted.
For their part (and I agree with them), Bernanke and Greenspan have both pointed many times to the “savings glut,” a vast accumulation of dollar reserves by the governments of emerging nations. Its effects have been apparent since the mid-Nineties, as the excess capital reduced interest rates and excess production reduced inflationary expectations. Did the savings glut make possible the burst of financial technology that greased the skids of the financial system? No, it didn’t. But without the glut, there would have been far less incentive to find clever (and ultimately unsustainable) ways to increase investment yields.
We haven’t had such a strong deflationary episode since the early Thirties. Bernanke was absolutely right in seeing that coming. …
Would you believe there is some dude retired from the town of Vernon, CA who gets a pension of $499,675? WSJ has the story.
A campaign to publicize the identities of thousands of people receiving hefty government pensions — from onetime professors to former fire chiefs — is catching on around the country.
The effort was launched earlier this year by a California interest group determined to promote its view that steep pension payments are bankrupting states and localities. Newspapers in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere have published lists of their six-figure public retirees.
Those named are former public employees and their dependents who receive an annual pension of more than $100,000. Atop one list is a former city administrator from the small Southern California town of Vernon, whose annual pension is $499,674.84. …