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Spengler writes on the lives of Palestinians. As is his wont, he will provide a view of the situation you haven’t seen before.
… The standard tables of gross domestic product (GDP) per capital show the West Bank and Gaza at US$1,700, just below Egypt’s $1,900 and significantly below Syria’s $2,250 and Jordan’s $3,000. GDP does not include foreign aid, however, which adds roughly 30% to spendable funds in the Palestinian territories. Most important, the denominator of the GDP per capita equation – the number of people – is far lower than official data indicate. According to an authoritative study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies [1], the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. The numbers are inflated to increase foreign aid.
Adjusting for the Begin-Sadat Center population count and adding in foreign aid, GDP per capita in the West Bank and Gaza comes to $3,380, much higher than in Egypt and significantly higher than in Syria or Jordan. Why should any Palestinian refugee resettle in a neighboring Arab country?
GDP per capita, moreover, does not reflect the spending power of ordinary people. Forty-four percent of Egyptians, for example, live on less than $2 a day, the United Nations estimates. The enormous state bureaucracy eats up a huge portion of national income. New immigrants to Egypt who do not have access to government jobs are likely to live far more poorly than per capita GDP would suggest.
Other data confirm that Palestinians enjoy a higher living standard than their Arab neighbors. A fail-safe gauge is life expectancy. The West Bank and Gaza show better numbers than most of the Muslim world: …
The chattering classes have continued to discuss Yale’s flight from reason. Christopher Hitchens weighs in.
The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of “protest” and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.
Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing other historic illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet, including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in Dante’s Inferno that shows Mohammed being disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there’s a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.) …
American Thinker notes the growing realization Obama does not know what he’s talking about.
… When questions of Obama’s lack of experience were raised during the Presidential campaign, those questions were brushed off as racist. We have been treated to an incessant refrain from the antique media celebrating Barack’s sterling intellect. But Barely the President’s miscues along the health-care campaign trail have been so glaring that even the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is turning on him:
“Mr. President,” the “Daily Show” host said Monday night, “I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi – 10 steps ahead of everything – or if this whole thing is kickin’ your ass. “
And it’s not just Jon Stewart. Watch the video at The Politico to see Obama ripped by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann as well. Even the authors of the Washington Post’s compliant editorial corps who faithfully supplied the props to support Obama’s fantasy Presidential campaign are bailing out. Eugene Robinson asks: “Where’s Mr. Transformer?” while Richard Cohen regrets “The klutziness of Obama’s effort.” .
Caroline Baum in Bloomberg with the same thoughts.
… Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president’s touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles.
For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:
“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”
Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?
Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook. …
Thomas Sowell continues with his series on who will make medical decisions.
When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said: “Because that’s where the money is.”
For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled medical system. Because that’s where the money is.
My experience is probably not very different from that of many other people in their seventies. My medical expenses in the past year have been more than in the first 40 years of my life — and I did not spend one night in a hospital all last year or go to an emergency room even once.
Just the ordinary medical expenses of keeping an old geezer going along in good health are high. Throw in a medical emergency or two and the costs go through the roof. So long as my insurance company and I are paying for it, it is nobody else’s business what my medical expenses are. But once the government is involved, everything is their business.
It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The logic of their collectivist thinking — and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care — is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that “society” cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be “social justice” for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people “happen to have money.”
The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care, important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation depends on how much they have contributed to those resources. …
Ann Coulter has started a series – Liberal Lies About National Health Care.
(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.
You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.
As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That’s why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.
Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines — unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.
U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)
Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That’s what single-payer health care is: “Single payer” means “single provider.”
It’s the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it’s screwed up because there’s not enough government oversight (it’s the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of “reform.” …
Gunzip.weebly provides a very clever use of Obama graphics to display the red ink flowing from his administration.
Outgoing head of Greenpeace says they “emotionalize” to reach their goals. Abe Greenwald has the story in Contentions.
Oops:
The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.
Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.
“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. . . . That may have been a mistake,” he said.
But Leipold admitted to something far more destructive than a mistaken press release. “We, as a pressure group, have to emotionalize issues,” he said, “and we’re not ashamed of emotionalizing issues.”
That is a bald confession of contempt for science. Greenpeace is “proud” to fudge data, to do violence to the scientific method and the tradition of empirical analysis. …
How’s this for a story to start the humor section? Seems that in 2004 Dems in Massachusetts were distressed at the prospect of GOP Gov. Romney naming a replacement for Senator Kerry after he became president. So, they passed a law requiring a vote for senator within five months thus preventing a GOP appointment. Now it would mean the state would have only one senator for the five months following Ted Kennedy’s reunion with Mary Jo Kopechne. So now the Dems want to change the law back. Kathryn Jean Lopez has the story for The Corner.
More on this from John Fund who seems to know everything.
More humor from the Dems as they say the law of unintended consequences is of no consequence. Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek has the story.