George Deutsch makes a bang

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents.

I'm disappointed in young George (a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters, a 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M and a former intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign) and in the AP as well.

Update
When I was writing that yesterday, he was resigning. And officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he has not graduated.

Out with a whimper.

Hell Freezes Over

Via Julian Sanchez

Congress withdrew support for a U.S. cotton subsidy program Wednesday, ending export and import subsidies and normalizing world cotton prices.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation that would repeal a support program for cotton formally known as "Step 2" as part of its Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act. Before the end of 2005, the Senate passed identical legislation. The bill will now go to President Bush who is expected to sign it into law.

Ending a subsidy? What next? It must be the end of the world.

Start Investing Young

James K. Glassman:

The average annual return for U.S. large-company stocks (as represented by the Standard & Poor's 500 Index) for the past 80 years has been about 10 percent after transaction expenses but not taxes. Say your goal is to build a nest egg of $1 million by the time you are 55. If you start at age 24 and invest $5,000 a year at an average return of 10 percent annually – through, for example, an index mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) – then you'll reach your goal. But if wait until you are 34 to start, you'll accumulate only $357,000 by age 55. If you start at age 44, you'll have just $107,000.

Subsidies cost jobs

American candy producers are offshoring production. They

blame their shifting production strategies on one culprit: U.S. sugar subsidies that keep prices of domestic sugar much higher than prices on the world market. In addition, tight import quotas make it hard to import cheaper foreign-produced sugar.

World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare

Tony Corn writes,

If 1979 marks the return of Islam in history, it also marks (more significantly than 1949 ever did) the return of China in history. Throughout the 1980s, China experienced phenomenal growth rates and was catching up fast with the West, when the advent of the information revolution widened the gap anew. Since the Chinese leadership cannot go into overdrive without destroying the social fabric (and ultimately its own power base), it can only hope to narrow the gap by slowing down the West. For Western historians, all this has a deja-vu all over again feel. Just as imperial latecomers like Germany and Japan did not hesitate to play the Islamic card for all it was worth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today China has — to put it mildly — no reason to be a priori hostile to the idea of using jihadism as a weapon of mass disruption against the West.

The congruence between the Islamic [Fourth-Generation Warfare] 4GW jihad and China’s own Unrestricted Warfare doctrine is therefore no surprise. This Sino-Islamic connection has been largely ignored by European elites too busy indulging in anti-American posturing instead. In the EU media, China is invariably portrayed as being all (economic) opportunities and no (political) threats; from the Spanish and French media in particular, one would never guess that China in fact has a rather proactive — and sophisticated — policy in Spain’s and France’s former colonies. As for the Islamic question, EU elites continue to believe that it can best be solved by keeping as much distance as possible between the U.S. approach (Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative) and the EU approach (Euro-Med Partnership).

Well, I hope he's wrong. And it's irritating the way he abbreviated "Fourth-Generation Warfare" as "4GW".

Does Wendy Kaufman Think Markets Are Evil?

According to Wendy Kaufman, elderly Americans--"seniors"--aren't getting cell phones, because the phones & plans cost too much; she cites an authority from the odious AARP, but not one who tells us that the elderly are richer than the average American. Even though she mentions Consumer Cellular, which offers plans for $10 a month, she goes on to say that "publicly-traded cellphone companies want to maximize profits", so they offer more expensive plans. But she just told us about one that only cost $10 a month! So we're supposed to control the market for the sake of the cheap skate elderly?

By the way, speaking of cheap skates, I don't have a cell phone.

Dissatisfaction and Mistrust, or Stupidity and Ignorance?

The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.

They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.

This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening.

Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment.

Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous.

Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements.

"I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, " said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine.

Dr. Barnes added, "People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."..

In interviews and surveys, [people who use nontraditional therapies] often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause.

Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the "rightness of fit" above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system.

Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show.

"I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. "The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head."

From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful.

To best way to validate this, [say those] who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy "and listen to your own body."..

Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease...

For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in "personal growth or spirituality" predicted alternative medicine use.

Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate.

It sounds like stupidity and ignorance to me.

Fires Damage Six Alabama Churches

Who will Pat Robertson and Ray Nagin blame for this?

Over-regulation and flawed policy initiatives

Henry I. Miller blames over-regulation and flawed policy initiatives for the failure of the US produce an appropriate vaccine against avian influenza:

The Vaccines for Children Program...was a do-gooder innovation of the Clinton administration (Hillary's toe in the water for national health care, apparently) that disrupted market forces and dealt a blow to vaccine producers. Established in 1994, it created a single-buyer system for children's vaccines, making the government by far the largest purchaser of childhood vaccines -- at a mandated discount of 50 percent. Try extorting that kind of discount from manufacturers of trucks for the U.S. Postal Service or of Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) for the Department of Defense, and see how long the companies bid on government contracts...

The highly risk-averse FDA has been especially tough on vaccines. The agency has rejected evidence of safety and efficacy from European and Canadian vaccine approvals; prematurely withdrawn life-saving products from the market because of mere perceptions of risk; and set the bar for the testing of new vaccines almost impossibly high.

Why Hong Kong developed

It's thanks to Sir John Cowperthwaite (1915-2006)

When he became Financial Secretary, the average Hong Kong resident earned about a quarter of someone living in Britain. By the early 90s, average incomes were higher than Britain's. Cowperthwaite made Hong Kong the most economically free economy in the world and pursued free trade, refusing to make its citizens buy expensive locally-produced goods if they could import cheaper products from elsewhere. Income tax was never more than a flat rate of fifteen percent. The colony's lack of natural resources, apart from a harbour, and the fact that it was a food importer, made its success all the more interesting. Cowperthwaite's policies soon soon attracted the attention of economists like Milton Friedman, whose television series Free to Choose featured Hong Kong's economic progress in some detail.

Asked what is the key thing poor countries should do, Cowperthwaite once remarked: "They should abolish the Office of National Statistics". In Hong Kong, he refused to collect all but the most superficial statistics, believing that statistics were dangerous: they would led the state to to fiddle about remedying perceived ills, simultaneously hindering the ability of the market economy to work. This caused consternation in Whitehall: a delegation of civil servants were sent to Hong Kong to find out why employment statistics were not being collected; Cowperthwaite literally sent them home on the next plane back.

Free trade and low income taxes. What's the problem with taxes? In "The Real Lesson of Hong Kong" (National Review, December 31, 1997) Milton Friedman compared Hong Kong to several other countries:

Direct government spending is less than 15 percent of national income in Hong Kong, more than 40 percent in the United States. Indirect government spending via regulations and mandates is negligible in Hong Kong but accounts for around 10 percent of national income in the United States. In both respects, the United States differs from Hong Kong less than either Britain or Israel, both of which have even higher government spending as a fraction of national income and even more intrusive and extensive regulations and mandates, which is presumably why per capita income in the United States is more than a third higher than that in the United Kingdom and nearly 80 percent higher than that in Israel.

We are more productive than Hong Kong. But we have chosen, or been led by the vagaries of politics, to devote roughly half of our resources to activities to which Hong Kong devotes 15 or 20 percent. Our higher productivity means that we can produce with 50 percent of our resources the same per capita income as Hong Kong can produce with 80 to 85 percent of its resources.

The real lesson of Hong Kong for the United States is that we’re using our resources inefficiently. Our government is spending our money to subsidize tobacco and to penalize smoking; to subsidize childbearing and to discourage childbearing; to build new housing and to tear down housing; to subsidize agriculture and to penalize agriculture; and on and on—not to mention converting square miles of forests into billions of paper forms and spending many man-years of labor filling them out and then filing them.

(via Tim Worstall).

It's stressful work, but plenty of people want it

The fact that Wal-Mart got 25,000 applications for 325 openings for a new Chicago area store

shows...that 25,000 people would prefer to work in those jobs than the jobs they have -- or don't have -- at the moment.

That's the fundamental fact of economics that the critics seem not to get. Sure, for those with college educations or substantial technical skills in high demand in the marketplace, work as a stocker or cashier in the retail industry would be undesirable. It's hard, stressful work. But there would appear to be 25,000 people out there who consider those jobs a step up from where they are now...

Further, as economist Thomas Sowell explains, people who take low paying jobs gain valuable skills that they can translate into higher paying jobs. "Notions of menial jobs and dead-end jobs may be just shallow misconceptions among the intelligentsia but they are a deadly counterproductive message to the poor. Refusing to get on the bottom rung of the ladder usually means losing your chance to move up the ladder."

Rising health care costs as the preference of a wealthy nation?

While health care costs are undeniably rising fast, this is not necessarily a sign of something wrong with the system. It could simply be a reflection of the legitimate preferences of an increasingly wealthy nation. After all, once basic necessities are met, it is reasonable to assume that an increasing share of each extra dollar earned will go to things that improve quality of life, like health care, beauty aids, or recreation.

In fact, that is what has been happening. Over the past 20 years, spending on recreation, health clubs, even lawyers, has climbed at about the same rate as health care. (See Table 1.) Yet nobody talks about a national health club crisis, or the need to reform the nation’s recreation industry.

Table 1
Chasing Quality

Spending increase, 1984 to 2004

Computers	1,600%
Recreation	386%
Medical care	362%
Higher education	344%
Hair stylists and health clubs	301%
Legal services	279%
Housing	226%
Furniture	178%
Food	154%
Clothing	131%
Gross Domestic Product	198%

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Table 2

Shielding Consumers
Out-of-pocket spending on health care as share of national health expenditures.

1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2004
46.7%	33%	21.5%	19%	14%	12.6%

Source: Center for Medicare and Medicare Services

Tim Worstall and Robert Reich agree

Tim Worstall cites Robert Reich (Clinton's labor secretary) on the inefficiency of using the minimum wage to alleviate poverty instead of the earned income tax credit, adding the credit is

...a form of Milton Friedman’s idea of a negative income tax. Really, who would have thought it? An economist often demonized by the left campaigns for 40 years for a policy that actually helps the poor?

Liberals Should Know Better

Arnold Kling writes:

Although the motivation of the liberals was to raise the well-being of Wal-Mart workers, it is far from clear that this will be the consequence. Low-skilled workers cannot receive more in compensation than the value of their labor. If Wal-Mart is forced to increase the share of compensation that comes in the form of health benefits, then it will have to decrease take-home pay. If it cannot decrease take-home pay, then it will have to reduce its reliance on low-skilled labor or cut back on operations altogether.

...The law requires Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health care, whether or not this is enough to keep its workers from needing to rely on Medicaid. If Wal-Mart came up with a way to provide outstanding health care to its workers for 6 percent of its payroll, it would be in violation of the law unless it found a way to waste the other 2 percent on unnecessary health care. Conversely, if Wal-Mart offers a really lousy health plan, it would be in compliance with the law as long as it spent 8 percent.

Then he addresses liberals directly:

Liberals see the market as an arena in which evil corporations inflict their greed on innocent victims. I wish you would see that motives matter less than consequences. I wish you could see that greed is at work when laws are passed that regulate markets, because regulations always produce winners and losers. I wish you could see that those winners and losers are often not who you think they are. I wish you could see that competitive behavior and free choice are forces that operate in the market as a check against greed. Finally, I wish you could see that greed is most difficult to restrain when it is exercised through the medium of government.

Help the better-off!

The World Bank has released Reaching the Poor: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why, an investigation into the efficiency of measures to improve the health of the world’s poor.

Its authors studied the results of programs meant to help "poor people battle illness and disease". But what the report found was that even "programs designed to reach poor people often end up instead helping the better-off."

Krugman's intellectual dishonesty

In "The Joyless Economy", Paul Krugman argued that "Over the last few years GDP growth has been reasonably good", but "that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans." And yet as Jon Henke points out, benefits now account

for 32.2 percent of compensation costs. This is sometimes known as the total compensation package.

Focusing on real wages -- which accounts for changes in inflation, but doesn’t account for compensation that helps to cover those increased costs -- obscures the fact that total compensation has increased faster than inflation. In fact, total compensation has been growing faster than it did during much of the latter half of the 1990s, while inflation, though more volatile, has remained about the same.

and

Real Disposable Personal Income -- the inflation-adjusted portion of compensation that we the proletariat get to pocket (i.e., spend or save) -- has risen by 3.1 percent, 2.4 percent and 3.4 percent over the past three years.

Chinese lawyer hits out at regime

Gao Zhisheng 高智晟, a firebrand lawyer who has defended hundreds of victims of torture and persecution, said the Communist party was responsible for more deaths than the Nazis, but Western governments turned a blind eye because they were desperate to trade with the world's fastest growing economy.

'When the Nazis slaughtered Jews, the outside world condemned them,' he said. 'But the Communist party has taken the lives of 80 million people, 13 times more than the death toll among the Jews, yet the world says nothing.'

80 million?!

By Adler's logic, no criticism of Bush is permissible, either.

Alexandre Adler, author of "Rendez-vous With Islam," criticized the newspapers. "We're at war," he said, citing the Iraq insurgency and the electoral victories of the radical Palestinian group Hamas and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "And sometimes war demands censorship. In this context, anything that might strengthen the hate of the West is irresponsible."

By Adler's logic, no criticism of Bush is permissible, either.

This morning, Linda Wertheimer interviewed Ramez Maluf, professor of journalism at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, asks him if Islam is compatible with secular Western societies that are accustomed to joking about everything including religion. He replies that there is a problem, that the Muslim world is very religious, probably as religious as the United States (but not Europe). He declares that a caricature of Jesus in a midwestern publication--showing him as the devil--would probably draw a lot of ire on the part of the local citizens.

Maybe so, although there's plenty of anti-religious stuff around the US, and not many riots about it. In any case, this suggests that Americans have fundies, so it's OK for the Muslims to have theirs.

Then he cites a web poll, showing just how ignorant he is. Web polls mean nothing!

God Loves Abortion

John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

Microsoft stinks

Like that's news to anyone. Instructed to use "Add Network Place" to enable me to upload things to WebCT, I get the message "The folder you entered does not appear to be valid. Please choose another." Of course, there is no other. So I do a search on the web, and learn that I should find webfldrs.msi on my computer, but it's not there. Another search on the internet led me to Software Update for Web Folders, but that was no help, either. Fortunately another search led me to netdrive , which works a charm.