Burning fetuses

The New Neo Posted on by

Echoes of “Soylent Green” and “A Modest Proposal“:

The British Columbia Health Ministry has admitted that the remains of babies destroyed by abortion in B.C. facilities are ending up in a waste-to-power facility in the United States, providing electricity for residents of Oregon.

The province’s Health Ministry said in an email to the B.C. Catholic that “biomedical waste” shipped to the U.S. to be incinerated includes “human tissue, such as surgically removed cancerous tissue, amputated limbs, and fetal tissue.”

“The ministry understands that some is transferred to Oregon. There it is incinerated in a waste-to-energy plant,” the email stated.

The ministry said that contractors handling the province’s “biomedical waste” follow “health and safety protocols, as well as federal, provincial, and local regulations.”

Ghastly. But not illogical. If fetuses are considered not-human enough to be aborted, why should they be wasted? If they’re disposed of by burning anyway, why not a useful burning?

Well, I can think of plenty of reasons. The first is that I would guess there’s no informed consent here, either of the fetus or even of the mother or parents who have decided to abort. The second is that there are some practices that are offensive on the face, and this is one of them. Whether religion or common decency or respect for potential human life is the reason, I would say that most people would and should object to this practice, whether they support abortion or not.

I would go even further and say that we shouldn’t be burning cancerous tissue or amputated limbs for fuel, either. It is all human, partly-human, potentially human, whatever you want to call it, and as such should be treated with more gravity and respect than that. Of course, that probably means the tissue would be burned unceremoniously and without making use of the power thus generated, but so be it. I think I’d prefer internment, although I would imagine that method has its own problems.

[NOTE: If you’re wondering what is currently done in the US with aborted fetuses and other human tissue such as amputated limbs, read this if you have a strong stomach.]

Destructive Generation

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m reading the book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It’s a chilling document, especially because—unlike in 1989, when the book was first written—it’s become more and more clear that the left’s long Gramscian march through our institutions has been largely successful.

The book’s first chapter—the story of Fay Stender, with which I was previously unfamiliar—is a tale of such sadness it’s almost unbearable. Stender was an idealistic leftist lawyer who defended, and had affairs with, black prisoners such as Huey Newton and George Jackson, and was later shot by another black con after her supposed “betrayal” of Jackson.

Stender’s life trajectory wasn’t just sad, of course. It was offensive and outrageous and anger-provoking, and not just for what was done to her but for her own role in it. But it was also sad. It was sad that Stender was so naive in the first place as to dedicate her life to defending a group of socipathic con men who happened to talk a good line of racial victimization, sad that she deceived herself so greatly in her perverted idealism. It was sad that, when she finally realized who and what they really were, it was too late to save herself (or others) from their revenge although she tried her best. Sad (although ultimately good, if it’s truth you’re after) that she lost her illusions even before her former buddies managed to get her, and sad that, prior to their destroying her physically, she had realized her life’s work was a sham and a betrayal of the principles she had thought she was defending. Sad and ironic that, at the trial of the man who had shot her five times and left her in horrific unremitting pain and paralyzed from the waist down as well as handicapped in the use of her arms, his defense (unsuccessful, at least) was based on the sorts of arguments she had formerly used to defend other black activist criminals.

You might say that Stender got what she deserved, but I see her as a changer and I see her story as tragic despite (or perhaps because of?) her own role in her destruction and the destruction of others.

Oakland in the 1960s and 1970s was the epicenter of white radical leftism’s embrace of black criminals. The trial of Stender’s shooter—where most of the radical lawyers who had previously defended people like her would-be murderer were now rooting for the prosecution—was a sort of watershed. Having read Horowitz and Collier’s account, I now think of it as similar, at least on a local level, to the shock waves sent through the American left by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes. Those on the left had to make a decision about Communism itself, and a lot of people quit the party as a result. The ones who stayed were the hard core who were able to compromise with any evil for the Cause. I think a similar thing happened to some of Stender’s colleages; many left the fold, and the ones who stayed were the ones to whom 2+2 made 5.

Stender killed herself at the age of 48, about a year after she’d been shot. Friends say she did it because she was overwhelmed by pain and her handicaps, but I believe that equally unbearable to her may have been her realization about the uses to which she’d put her life, and the depth of her regret about the choices she made.

Stender was no shrinking violet in the heyday of her activist years. She romanticized the black prisoners she lawyered and loved, and felt more comfortable with them than with more conventional society. Her tale is a cautionary one for our times as well; the phenomenon has hardly died out with the 60s:

John Irwin, a former prisoner at Soledad who had served his time and after his release obtained a degree in sociology and became a leader of the Prisoners Union, was called into the Soledad Brothers case…Fay wanted him to listen to tape recordings made of the prisoner witnesses who would testify against [George] Jackson and suggest ways of discrediting them. During his time at the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee offices, Irwin was taken aback by the ease with which Fay and her associates accepted a sentimental and, to his way of thinking, benighted view of prisoners simply as victims of social circumstances, and of prison simply as an early warning system of the fascist state toward which all American social institutions were heading. “I don’t think Fay ever understood the commitment to criminality that many of the persons she dealt with had. Fay really had a strong belief that the prisoners were going to be in the vanguard of the social revolution.” Irwin was disturbed by the romantic acceptance of violent solutions and by what he was as a kind of sexual romanticism: “It was mostly woman who were doing the organizing. They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of oo-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.”

Stender lived long enough to understand that “commitment to criminality,” up close and very very personal. Whether or not she changed in the political sense of rejecting leftism itself I don’t know. Perhaps not, but perhaps if she’d lived a while longer she would have come to that conclusion, too (as did Horowitz himself). As it was, though, she made a symbolic gesture that is very telling: not long before she killed herself, she burned everything she’d written in connection with her work, including the manuscript of the book she had edited (and had cleansed of its more inflammatory and incriminating passages) for George Jackson, Soledad Brother.

That book is still for sale at Amazon, of course, praised by the usual suspects:

“The power of George Jackson’s personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persisten racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother.” ””Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States

The left never rests, does it?

[NOTE: Romanticizing sociopathic criminals seems to be a hazard for some women, although it’s not always as political as it was with Stender.

By the way, although I was a liberal for the entirety of my 20th-century existence, I never support the idea that racial discrimination either explained or justified criminality. Stender’s cause was not mine.]

Student loan forgiveness: liberal win-win

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes there’s so much out there it’s hard to keep up.

For instance, although I’d heard of the Pay As You Earn program, the details had previously passed under my radar screen. But my oh my, the set-up’s clever:

But the immediate taxpayer S.O.S. concerns Mr. Obama’s Pay As You Earn program. We’ve warned for years about the risks of this program as Mr. Obama has worked to expand the number of eligible borrowers and sweeten its terms.

Pay As You Earn allows students under certain circumstances to borrow an unlimited amount and then cap monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income. If they choose productive work in the private economy, the loans are forgiven after 20 years. But if they choose to work in government or for a nonprofit, Uncle Sugar forgives their loans after 10 years.

For aspiring community organizers who go to college and then grad school before moving into a job that the government defines as public service, the forgiven debt can be $150,000 or more, courtesy of the taxpayer. And unlike with some other federal programs, when the government forgives the debt of one of the exalted class of nonprofit or government workers, the do-gooder doesn’t have to report it as income to the IRS. Who wouldn’t want to pick up $150,000 tax-free?

What’s so clever about it for Obama and the Democrats? It’s probably pretty obvious, but I’ll state it anyway: it simultaneously fills the coffers of the left’s cadre of propagandists known as the universities and assures a ready supply of recruits for the left’s foot soldiers out in the working world, those employed by government and nonprofits.

And the taxpayer finances what basically amounts to a forced contribution to the Democratic Party. Sweet.

Bundy’s remarks on race, welfare, and slavery

The New Neo Posted on by

Cliven Bundy’s remarks about race, welfare, and slavery have drawn a lot of fire, and the right is attempting to back away from them.

First, take a look at what he said:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids ”” and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch ”” they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

There’s a kernel of truth there—that the welfare system has been a goodly part of the reason that people who receive welfare can sometimes end up being harmed by it in terms of killing initiative, undermining the family, and in general fostering dependence. The racist part of what Bundy said is not that outdated word “Negro” (although I’m sure some take offense at that), but the idea that this an especially black phenomenon. In fact, it’s something that happens with welfare as a whole, and although more blacks are on welfare proportionate to their incidence in the population, the culture of welfare is hardly limited to or special to blacks.

The last portion of Bundy’s statement is especially offensive not just to blacks but to the cause of the liberty he professes to support. Even though he couches it as a question (“I’ve often wondered”), the idea that slavery may have been better for black people (or anyone else) than welfare demonstrates an odd lack of appreciation on his part for one of the main—and probably the biggest—reason that slavery was a repulsive institution: the ownership of one human being by another is an especially profound violation of the liberty inherent in each human being, far deeper than anything engendered by welfare.

None of this has anything to do with the merits of Bundy’s legal case, the pros and cons of which were discussed here. Nor does Bundy speak generally for conservatives, libertarians, the Republican Party, or ranchers. However, you can be sure the left will try to impute his remarks to the right no matter how hard and fast the right tries to run away from them. They fit the false stereotypes the left has long tried to push about the Tea Party and the right as a whole.

All those objective moderates who love Piketty’s book…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are revealing themselves to be the leftists that they actually are.

I said as much in my Piketty post when I wrote:

In case you’re wondering, Piketty’s book has been hailed almost universally on the left””and by “left” I mean almost everyone except the right.

If that was a little too subtle, I want to emphasize a similar thought as expressed here by David Harsanyi:

…[H]ow does a book that evokes Marx and talks about tweaking the Soviet experiment find so much love from people who consider themselves rational, evidence-driven moderates?

Put it this way: It’s unlikely that Democrats would have praised a book like this 20 years ago ”“ or even 10. Nowadays, Jack Lew ”“ better known as the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America – takes time to chit chat with the author…

Like many progressives, Piketty doesn’t really believe most people deserve their wealth anyway, so confiscating it presents no real moral dilemma. He also argues that we can measure a person’s productivity and the value of a worker (namely, low-skilled laborers), while at the same time he argues that other groups of workers (namely, the kind of people he doesn’t admire) are bequeathed undeserved “arbitrary” salaries. What tangible benefit does a stockbroker or a Kulak or an explanatory journalist offer society, after all?…

The thing is, some of us still believe that capitalism fosters meritocratic values. Or I should say, we believe that free markets are the best game in town. Not that long ago, this was a nearly universal position. A lot of people used to believe that even the disruptions of capitalism ”” the “caprices of technology” as Piketty dismisses them”” that rattle “social order” also happen to generate mobility, dynamism and growth. Today this probably qualifies as Ayn Rand-style extremism.

Then again, I haven’t read Ayn Rand since college (or maybe it was high school) but if I still believed she was the most prophetic writer of her generation, I might feel compelled to defend her ideas. But Piketty’s utopian notions and authoritarian inclinations ”” ones that I’m pretty sure most Americans (and probably most Democrats) would still find off-putting ”” do not seem to rattle the left-wing press one bit. While Piketty’s economic data might be worth studying and debating, his political ideas are unworthy of discussion.

Despite the extremism of his positions, Piketty has already become a folk hero to inequality alarmists everywhere. So if his popularity tells us anything, it’s that many liberal “thought leaders” have taken a far more radical position on economic policy than we’re giving them credit for.

I’d like to add a caution to one thing Harsanyi says, though. He writes that he’s pretty sure that “most Americans (and probably most Democrats) would still find” Piketty’s “utopian notions and authoritarian inclinations” “off-putting.” Maybe so, but that’s certainly less true than it used to be, which is part of the reason that these liberal pundits don’t seem to have much problem coming out with their praise of Piketty.

I can’t find any polls asking people whether the rich should be taxed at a rate of 80%; my guess is that Harsanyi is right that most people would not support it. But the majority favors higher taxes on the rich, and it’s not hard to imagine that the definition of “higher” could increase significantly over time.

Will Piketty’s views ever become mainstream? Not sure, but they will if the press has anything to say about it.

Is eating fruits and vegetables good for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d like to say at the outset that I like fruits and vegetables. Even if they weren’t supposed to be good for you I would eat them. I might even eat them if I heard they were a little bit bad for you; that’s how much I like them.

And if I had to cut them almost totally out of my diet—which I did when, in my young adulthood, I went on the very-low-carb Stillman diet for a while—I would not only miss them terribly but I would dream about them.

Yes, I used to dream about fruit.

So it always astounds me when people talk about low-carb diets as being so great. “I can eat eggs and bacon every day! And then a big steak and some gooey cheese for dessert!” Although I like to eat all those things too, the thought of eating them or their equivalent every day, for nearly every meal, fills me with dread.

That said, I realize other people have vastly different desires. But I’ve long thought that the long-standing food wars about what’s good for you and what’s not rest at least partly on people’s idiosyncratic food preferences.

That brings us to today’s article in the NY Times by George Johnson, which is being hailed as knocking the common wisdom that fruits and vegetables are so very good for you.

The article limits itself to criticizing the viewpoint that fruits and vegetables confer some particular benefit in protecting against cancer. But it’s interesting that many commenters seem to generalize it to mean or to imply or to insinuate that there’s no health benefit of eating fruits and vegetables, period (see some of the commentary on this thread for examples of what I’m talking about).

I offer the caveat that attempts to link nutrition and food intake to diseases or health are fraught with peril, whatever the truth about foods and health might actually be. They tend to rely on self-reports about diet, which are certainly suspect, and tend to be about correlations, which can hint at causation but certainly do not prove it. So all diet suggestions for the general public should be taken with (forgive the pun) a grain of salt.

That said, Johnson is talking about something that science (as opposed to popular lore) had been backing off from: the idea that diet has a lot to do with whether one gets cancer or not. If you don’t believe me, see this, from the Harvard School of Public Health:

Numerous early studies revealed what appeared to be a strong link between eating fruits and vegetables and protection against cancer. Unlike case-control studies, cohort studies, which follow large groups of initially healthy individuals for years, generally provide more reliable information than case-control studies because they don’t rely on information from the past. And, in general, data from cohort studies have not consistently shown that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables prevents cancer.

For example, in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, over a 14-year period, men and women with the highest intake of fruits and vegetables (8+ servings a day) were just as likely to have developed cancer as those who ate the fewest daily servings (under 1.5).

A more likely possibility is that some types of fruits and vegetables may protect against certain cancers.

A more nuanced claim, to be sure.

And although Johnson is very careful to limit his article to whether fruits and vegetables protect against cancer, the Harvard publication is pretty clear that whatever the case for cancer protection (and it’s weak at best), the evidence that fruits and vegetables can help protect a person’s cardiovascular health is much stronger:

There is compelling evidence that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke. The largest and longest study to date, done as part of the Harvard-based Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, included almost 110,000 men and women whose health and dietary habits were followed for 14 years.

The higher the average daily intake of fruits and vegetables, the lower the chances of developing cardiovascular disease. Compared with those in the lowest category of fruit and vegetable intake (less than 1.5 servings a day), those who averaged 8 or more servings a day were 30 percent less likely to have had a heart attack or stroke.

Although all fruits and vegetables likely contribute to this benefit, green leafy vegetables such as lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and mustard greens; cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, and kale; and citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit (and their juices) make important contributions.

When researchers combined findings from the Harvard studies with several other long-term studies in the U.S. and Europe, and looked at coronary heart disease and stroke separately, they found a similar protective effect: Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, compared with individuals who ate less than 3 servings per day.

There is little question that, as with most health/diet studies of this design, there is the complication that there might be a lot of other things that are different about people who eat so many fruits and vegetables compared to people who don’t. Most studies attempt to control for confounding variables of this nature (such as exercise, for example), but let’s just acknowledge that it’s very hard to effectively do so.

All such studies are handicapped by this built-in flaw, and probably always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should toss them out, although you’re free to reject them if you want, and to eat whatever you want—life is for living, after all.

Income inequality: hey, let’s take away most of the money of the rich

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes indeed, that’ll fix it, according to French economist Thomas Piketty:

Piketty’s terror at rising inequality is an important data point for the reader. It has perhaps influenced his judgment and his tendentious reading of his own evidence. It could also explain why the book has been greeted with such erotic intensity….

It’s no surprise that the idea of levying enormously high taxes on rich people’s money has had rising support in this era of proudly unearned self-esteem and entitlement, as well as decline in the power of religious prohibitions such as the commandment against covetousness.

More at the WSJ:

While America’s corporate executives are his special béªte noire, Mr. Piketty is also deeply troubled by the tens of millions of working people – a group he disparagingly calls “petits rentiers – whose income puts them nowhere near the “one percent” but who still have savings, retirement accounts and other assets. That this very large demographic group will get larger, grow wealthier and pass on assets via inheritance is “a fairly disturbing form of inequality.” He laments that it is difficult to “correct” because it involves a broad segment of the population, not a small elite that is easily demonized.

Oh, but it can be done. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Piketty need only take lessons from Stalin re the kulaks, and from Pol Pot re—well, re just about everybody.

This is what Piketty proposes as a remedy for the terrible problem of income inequality [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.” It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meager US social state.”

In case you’re wondering, Piketty’s book has been hailed almost universally on the left—and by “left” I mean almost everyone except the right.

They have turned to “income inequality” as the big bad issue because the actual plight of the poor in objective terms can’t be the point any more, since the poor are doing a lot better than they used to be in terms of their standard of living in most first world countries. In fact:

…[T]he last few centuries have seen us banish starvation and famine from a large part of the Earth. In the most successful countries, the average citizen now enjoys a material standard of living that would have made the greatest king of two hundred years ago turn green with envy…

To see how much more an American worker can buy today, compare the number of hours he would have had to work to obtain various items in 1895 versus 2000 (Table 1). Whereas a one-hundred-piece china set would have taken 44 hours of labor income in 1895, a twenty-first-century American would need to work 3.6 hours or less for it. The numbers are 28 versus 6 hours, respectively, for a gold locket; and 260 versus 7.2 hours for a one-speed bicycle (taken from De Long 2000, based on prices in the 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog). Comparing the prices charged in the Montgomery Ward catalog with prices today””both expressed as a multiple of the average hourly wage””provides an index of how much our productivity in making the goods consumed back in 1895 has multiplied…

As all this was going on, expectations and demands have risen, and so income inequality has been the new buzzword. Stamp it out, because it somehow “offends democracy.” The fact that the remedy Piketty and many others propose offends liberty, and the strong possibility that it could end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg, are both ignored and/or minimized in the rush to social and economic “justice”—that is, equality of outcome rather than opportunity.

I’ll let the inimitable Margaret Thatcher have the last word here (the following clip is from 1990):

[NOTE: For more on income inequality, see this, this, as well as this on the question of how big a problem income inequality really is in the first place.].]

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Can’t wait to hear the rest:

In my opinion, a more sound approach to the problem of pigs

But does the bot mean the problem faced by pigs, or the problem caused by pigs?

Poll: AGW global warming, belief vs. skepticism

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting poll on the subject:

Over the past decade, Americans have clustered into three broad groups on global warming. The largest, currently describing 39% of U.S. adults, are what can be termed “Concerned Believers” — those who attribute global warming to human actions and are worried about it. This is followed by the “Mixed Middle,” at 36%. And one in four Americans — the “Cool Skeptics” — are not worried about global warming much or at all.

The “interesting” part is that, except for that “mixed middle” group (which has less education than the others), the groups don’t differ in their amount of education. Also, men are much more likely to be in that “cool skeptic” group (as are Republicans, which is no surprise at all—and men are more likely to be Republicans anyway).

Also interesting is the following chart, which tracks changes over time. You can see how the “cool skeptics” group has grown and the “mixed middle” shrunk. The “concerned believers” segment has had a few ups and downs, but has ended up pretty much where it began:
galluppoll