The Russians: still drinking…

The New Neo Posted on by

…after all these years.

The Russians do so like their vodka:

Today, according to the World Health Organization, one in five men in the Russia Federation die due to alcohol-related causes, compared with 6.2 percent of all men globally. In 2000, in her article “First Steps: AA and Alcoholism in Russia,” Patricia Critchlow estimated that some 20 million Russians are alcoholics in a nation of just 144 million.

The problem has been going on for centuries, and attempts to combat it have been sporadic and largely futile. Those death rates are astoundingly high, but they were even higher just a few years ago.

And Russians aren’t picky when they drink, either:

…[A]s of 2003 Russia was Europe’s heaviest per capita spirits consumer; its reported hard liquor consumption was over four times as high as Portugal’s, three times that of Germany or Spain, and over two and a half times higher than that of France.

Yet even these numbers may substantially understate hard spirit use in Russia, since the WHO figures follow only the retail sale of hard liquor. But samogon””home-brew, or “moonshine”””is, according to some Russian researchers, a huge component of the country’s overall intake. Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia’s leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia’s adult population””women as well as men””puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.

…One forensic investigation of blood alcohol content by a medical examiner’s office in a city in the Urals, for example, indicated that over 40 percent of the younger male decedents evaluated had probably been alcohol-impaired or severely intoxicated at the time of death””including one quarter of the deaths from heart disease and over half of those from accidents or injuries. But medical and epidemiological studies have also demonstrated that, in addition to its many deaths from consumption of ordinary alcohol, Russia also suffers a grisly toll from alcohol poisoning, as the country’s drinkers, in their desperate quest for intoxication, down not only sometimes severely impure samogon, but also perfumes, alcohol-based medicines, cleaning solutions, and other deadly liquids. Death rates from such alcohol poisoning appear to be at least one hundred times higher in Russia than the United States””this despite the fact that the retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.

The question, of course, is why so much drinking? There may be a significant genetic component, but that only increases the risk and does not explain the phenomenon. But in a society in which drinking is as common and accepted as it is in Russia, those with the gene are probably more likely to be drawn to the behavior. And of course there’s the famous Russian gloom.

I must confess that my ancestors probably did a bit to encourage all of this—although not the hard liquor part. Family legend has it that they were brewers living in Alsace-Lorraine who were invited into Russia some time around the 1870s by Alexander II, with the aim of helping to establish a viable beer industry in Russia.

I have no information on how successful they were. But after Alexander’s assassination things tightened up considerably in that country, and whether they took to drink or not they managed to leave for the US in the early years of the 20th century.

For which I’m extraordinarily grateful.

Was deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill a liberal cause?

The New Neo Posted on by

Sparked by the Aaron Alexis case, Ann Coulter wrote a blistering piece excoriating liberals for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill:

But liberals won’t allow the dangerous mentally ill to be committed to institutions against their will. (The threat of commitment is very persuasive in getting disturbed individuals to take their medicine.) Something in liberals’ genetic makeup compels them to attack civilization, for example, by defending the right of dangerous psychotics to refuse treatment and then representing them in court after they commit murder.

Liberals won’t even agree to take the most basic steps to prevent psychotics from purchasing guns — yes, GUNS! — because to allow the release of mental health information would be “stigmatizing.”

I have no quarrel with that, as far it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough; Coulter is leaving out an important part of the picture.

Sure, Coulter is correct that liberals have defended deinstitutionalizaton and pushed it, and continue to do so, as well as protecting the privacy of the mentally ill and therefore their gun rights. But originally it was libertarians who spearheaded the deinstitutionalization drive, and then their ideas were taken up by the left. So it was a fusion of the two groups that is responsible. Similar fusions of liberals and libertarians have occurred with the movement to legalize marijuana, just to take one example—even though in certain other ways they may be at loggerheads.

The grand-daddy of the movement to “liberate” the mentally ill was Dr. Thomas Szasz, who was a fervent libertarian. He did not believe there was such a thing as “mental illness” (see this article for a fuller explanation of Szasz’s views and his political orientation).

As far as Aaron Alexis goes, it’s unclear whether banning the mentally ill from buying guns would have helped. Alexis had not yet formally entered the mental health system; as far as I know, he was not in therapy. So he most likely had no mental health diagnosis.

Institutionalizing him probably would have depended on the involuntary commitment laws, because that may have been what it would have taken. Were his relatives alarmed enough to have pressed that? Would anyone else have considered his situation dire enough to have sounded the alarm, and would they have succeeded, even under easier commitment laws?

But if somehow Alexis had been involuntarily committed, even for a short time—enough time to have gotten him started on medication for schizophrenia—and if he had continued to cooperate with taking the medication once he was released, there’s at least a decent chance that the murders at the Navy Yard could have been prevented.

[Hat tip: Maetenloch at Ace’s; plus this.]

Media bias: Wendy Davis vs. Ted Cruz

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we know all about that sort of thing. But it’s not that usual for Politico to notice, and publish an article about it:

When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an “embarrassment” in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board…

Yes, the difference between filibustering and grandstanding plays a part. Equally important is the fact that Cruz’s theatrics are frustrating members of his own party. But, part of the disparity in coverage is due to the fact that the mainstream media, generally speaking, don’t admire Cruz the way they admired Davis ”” or rather, they admire him only insofar as he makes for tragicomic theater, whereas they admired her on the merits.

Is the Nairobi mall standoff over?

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope so.

Kenyan President Kenyatta says so:

Kenya’s president said on Tuesday that his forces had “defeated” Islamists from Somalia’s al Shabaab, had shot five of them dead and detained 11 others suspected of killing 67 people after storming a Nairobi shopping mall.

It remained unclear after Uhuru Kenyatta addressed the nation on television whether the four-day security operation at the upmarket Westgate centre was completely over, or whether any militants were still at large or hostages unaccounted for.

“We have ashamed and defeated our attackers,” Kenyatta said, adding that bodies were still trapped under rubble following the collapse of part of the building late in the operation. A fire began on Monday which officials said was started by the gunmen.

Many mysteries abound. We may learn the answers to at least some of them in the fullness of time. Who were/are the terrorists? Were Americans among them? Who are the victims (here are two—actually, three, if you count the unborn viable child)? How did the incident finally end? Were some or all of the hostages freed (note that Kenyatta doesn’t seem to mention this)? What will happen to the terrorists now in custody? Did any escape and, if so, do we know their identities?

Obamacare: bait…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and switch.

And the public never even took the bait in the first place.

More here.

The gist of the message is that from the outset the calculations to sell Obamacare to the American public were slipshod and/or naive and/or mistaken and/or simplistic and/or lies.

And this is news to exactly whom?

Of course, large federal government programs are like that; that’s why many people are distrustful of them in the first place. Small pilot programs are the way to experiment with things. Local and state programs are the way to experiment with things. And then keep, or expand, the ones that seem to work. Redesigning the health care insurance system of the entire US at one fell swoop is inherently risky, and the promises that this would constitute an improvement should always have been taken with a grain of salt.

Actually, when Obama assured the American people that their health insurance premiums would be lowered by “up to $2,500 for a typical family per year” he was saying absolutely nothing on the face of it, although he was counting on his listeners to hear something and like what they heard. But a statement such as his merely means that a “typical” family (whatever that is; a family of four? living in what state?) would face a ceiling of $2,500 for the amount its premiums might be lowered per year. He’d be technically correct if a single “typical” family had its premiums lowered $2,500, and all the other families of that type had theirs lowered by a dollar. Or even had them raised.

In other words, it was a meaningless statement.

What will actually happen is anyone’s guess, including the author of the Forbes piece critical of Obama. One reason is that there is no “typical” family, because (a) the present state-to-state variation among what families of the same size are paying is vast; and (b) since poorer families will be subsidized by less-poor ones, families of the same size will end up paying very different premiums depending on income. So even an average premium would tell us very little.

What’s more, Obamacare is supposed to be financed in part by the famous individual mandate. But the penalty for not enrolling is far less than the yearly premium would be for most people and families, and since a person or family can enroll in Obamacare without increased penalty as soon as he/she experiences a decline in health, many people will probably wait to enroll. How will that affect the premiums of the others? Let’s just say it’s unlikely to make them go down.

Simon Jenkins: extremely useful and extremely idiotic

The New Neo Posted on by

British journalist Simon Jenkins writes up a perfect storm of useful idiocy:

There is nothing anyone can do to prevent suicide bombers hitting civilian populations. The slaughter of Christians in Peshawar this weekend showed that wherever crowds gather they are vulnerable to any group with a brainwashed youth and a bomb. It might be sensible to discourage like-minded crowds from gathering in one place, be they co-religionists or party faithful or merely the wealthy.

The modern urban obsession with celebrity buildings and high-profile events offers too many publicity-rich targets. A World Trade Centre, a Mumbai hotel, a Boston marathon, a Nairobi shopping mall are all enticing to extremists. Defending them is near impossible. Better at least not to create them. A shopping mall not only wipes out shopping streets, it makes a perfect terrorist fortress, near impossible to assault…

By deploying violence against a succession of Muslim states, the world’s leading powers have made their business its business and invited retaliation. They have not crushed al-Qaida any more than they have suppressed extreme Islamism. They have refreshed rather than diminished that extremism, and made the world less safe as a result.

Where do they get these people? Well, in Jenkins’ case (that’s Sir Simon to you; Jenkins received a knighthood for his journalistic savvy in 2004): Oxford, The Economist, The Times, the Evening Standard, and the National Trust.

Impeccable credentials. Flaming idiot.

Something tells me that Sir Simon’s real objection to malls might be an esthetic one; only philistines go to malls, don’t you know? Although what the man’s got against the Boston Marathon I can’t quite imagine.

And churches? Sir Simon wrote a book entitled England’s Thousand Best Churches. It’s possible that he thinks churches should merely be toured and studied as architectural wonders (that seems to be the focus of his book) rather than actually, you know, worshiped in.

Because those Christians who were killed in Peshawar recently—the incident Jenkins specifically mentions—who had the gall to be “gathering in one place,” as he puts it, were actually assembled in a church with their “co-religionists.” Perhaps Jenkins is implying that churches in England are acceptable, but in Pakistan people should know better than to present an environment so target-rich in Christian blood.

[NOTE: By the way, although it’s quite irrelevant to this post, Jenkins was married to actress Gayle Hunnicutt (previous husband David Hemmings) for thirty years. They divorced in 2008.]

[NOTE II: Something about Jenkins had a familiar ring, and I began to wonder whether I’d written about him before. And sure enough, I have, here. Turns out this sort of swill is his meat and potatoes.

And please read this piece on the Peshawar bombing, which has somehow been overshadowed in the news by the Nairobi mall attack, but which has taken an even greater toll of human life.]

Remembering the Lod Airport massacre

The New Neo Posted on by

The Nairobi mall attack has conjured up memories of the first terrorist attack I ever remember: the Lod airport massacre.

You may never have heard of it—or of Lod airport, for that matter, which is in Tel Aviv and was later renamed Ben Gurion Airport after Israel’s founder and first prime minister. But the Lod massacre remains one of the most terrifying in the long list of terrorist attacks that have followed, and at the time it was perpetrated (1972) it was especially horrific. Masterminded by the PLO (specifically, its hard left wing the PLFP), it was also a prelude to the much-more-famous Munich Olympics massacre that gripped the world just a few short months later.

The PLO was involved in both, but the Lod massacre featured unusual perpetrators for that organization, and that was part of its shock value: leftist Japanese gunmen. This is the way it went down:

…[T]hree inconspicuous Japanese men dressed in business suits disembarked Air France Flight 132 from Rome and strolled into the baggage claim area. After retrieving what appeared to be violin cases, the men pulled out machine guns, opened fire and threw grenades indiscriminately at the crowds of people…

The gunmen killed 26 people: 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, one Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis, and 80 people were injured…Gunman Yasuyuki Yasuda was also shot dead during the attack – it is unclear whether by his own weapon or that of his partners or security forces. The lone surviving gunman, Kozo Okomato, was injured, arrested by security forces and given a life sentence. He was later freed in the 1985 prisoner swap known as the Gibril Deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

This attack had a number of characteristics that seemed new at the time, but with which we’ve become more familiar in the ensuing years. The Japanese killers represented a fusion between leftists and Islamists that became very important later on during the Iranian revolution, and which continues to this day for the many leftists who support and make excuses for Islamist terrorism. The Lod massacre was an eye-opener that led Israeli security forces to realize a new approach was needed, one that profiled not just on nationality but also on demeanor, and that expanded its sweep to include the airport in general rather than just the airplanes.

The fact that Okamoto is still alive and well and living in Lebanon is perhaps the most shocking of all. Despite its emphasis on security, that Israel allowed a perpetrator of that magnitude to be released in a prisoner swap (details here) seems suicidal.

Some insight into the mindset of someone like Okamoto is provided by a 1976 prison interview with him that was conducted by Patricia G. Steinhoff, who was an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Take it with a hefty grain of salt, because who knows whether Okamoto was being truthful or not. But here’s what he said at the time about his motives:

One of the ambiguities of Okamoto’s revolutionary conception is that the enemy is not clearly defined. Sometimes the ordinary person living in bourgeois society is regarded as part of the enemy bourgeoisie. Yet at other times, he counts the same people as potential supporters of the revolution because they are victims of such things as pollution”¦Because he foresees total overthrow of the existing arrangements of society, he does not feel bound in any way by the moral values of the present world”¦On the other hand, he is not really certain of what society will be like after the revolution has occurred. When I asked him what kind of a world he envisioned after the revolution, he smiled and said, “That is the most difficult question for revolutionaries. We really do not know what it will be like.”

Revolution and violence for its own sake as well as to fulfill the goal of feeling personally powerful. Such a person is a useful tool for those such as the PLO, who know quite well what kind of a world they envision.

More historical ignorance…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on the part of the American public.

We keep reading polls such as this one about how few Americans know the basic facts of American history.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to read another. But oh, how very depressing it remains (and how well it explains certain recent events):

Only 27% of Americans knew which country we fought in the Cold War ”“ the Soviet Union — and even fewer, 25%, knew the name of the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which is John Roberts.

And this makes no sense:

Scholars agree that one reason for the poor results is that America has a complex political system, which can take years to fully understand.

Poppycock. And what’s that got to do with learning what country we fought in the Cold War? How complex can that be?

Of course, if you keep people in ignorance of history, they are much easier to manipulate.

Nairobi standoff continues

The New Neo Posted on by

Islamist terrorists continue to hold hostages at the upscale Nairobi mall that was the scene of carnage Saturday.

No one knows how many people are being held by the terrorists, but one estimate of the missing is 63. Information is sketchy, but a few more of the attackers may have been killed.

These things are becoming more clear: the attack was spearheaded by a Somalian terrorist group but the perpetrators are at least somewhat international. Israel seems to be involved in advising the government on how to deal with the standoff. The president of Kenya is holding firm about his country’s refusal to back down in Somalia (by the way, the current president is Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founder Jomo Kenyatta, whose presidency was also marked by conflict with Somalia).

Kenya is a predominantly Christian nation. Compared to other African countries it’s been doing relatively well: relatively stable and relatively uncorrupt.

By the way, in the Reuters article I linked to in the first paragraph of this post, the authors and editors stepped up to the plate and called the terrorists “Islamists” in the lede. Although the word “terrorists” is never used in the article except in a direct quote (instead we have “gunmen,” “militants,” “attackers.” and “assailants”), at least that’s a step in the right direction towards truth in nomenclature.

The Palinization of Ted Cruz continues apace

The New Neo Posted on by

Right on schedule.

It was inevitable that there would be a serious and concentrated attempt to Palinize Cruz no matter what he did. But Cruz’s current stance on Obamacare, which is exposing the deep rifts within the Republican Party, makes the Palinization process easier because many Republicans are participating in that process of destruction—as they also did with Palin.

Cruz is a very intelligent and well-educated man with impeccable credentials and prize-winning debating skills. Therefore the approach can’t be “he’s a stupidhead,” as it was with Palin. It’s “he’s crazy, extreme, and dangerous”—as it also was with Palin.

Why can’t people just disagree? That’s a rhetorical question.