EclectEcon

Yes, I take about ten different placebos each morning... a multiple vitamin, vitamin C, Vitamin D, ... etc.

Over-the-Counter Placebo
03 JUN 2008 – A new drug is arriving in the US that promises safe relief from everything from a wide range of childhood (and adult) conditions. It is called Obecalp – placebo backwards. Obecalp fills a previously empty market niche: you cannot normally buy placebo medication at the pharmacy, but many parents wish to help their children for imagined ailments without giving them real drugs as placebo. The pills look and taste like actual medicine but just contain dextrose. Since there is no active ingredient and they do not treat any particular condition it can be marketed as a dietary supplement.

Experts are somewhat divided over marketing placebo to minors. One issue is the deception involved, which has led the the AMA to come down negatively on placebo. But given that parents often believe (based on quite a lot of evidence) that placebo does work, that parents regularly lie to their children and that the alternative may be them instead giving ibuprofen or antibiotics rather than something guaranteed innocuous, the deception issue may be outweighed by concerns of overprescription. The real problem may be that parents are bad at acting as if it was a real medication. Yet studies have found that even when patients know they are getting placebo they get better. [emphasis added]

Another reason to avoid placebo pills is that they condition children to see pills as a relief, perhaps making them more vulnerable to future overmedication or quackery. Yet giving other kinds of placebos like herbal teas may have the same effect. What most crying kids really need is a "kiss it and make it better" concern from their parents. Yet today's kids may actually consider being given a pill a similar symbol of affection. Ms. Buettner, the creator of Obecalp, claims that "as a parent you'll know when Obecalp is necessary." Leaving the non-medical interventions in the hands of parents seems to be a better choice than asking the medical professions to deal with them.

On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can't own up to a mistake.

I will be visiting Houston for the next little while, acting as a nanny /housekeeper for our granddaughter while my son and his wife go back to work/school. We're delighted to be able to help out.

This is our 5th granddaughter and our first opportunity to be nanny-temps. There are so many relatives around here, where our other children and granddaughters live, and Canadian parental leave is so generous [the U.S. does not provide a year of parental leave as Canada does], that none of the grandparents actually moved in to help out with the others.

I'll be there for awhile; then Ms. Eclectic will take over from me. Later in the summer and fall other grandparents will take a shift.

How much blogging I do depends on how much she sleeps during the day while I'm supposed to be looking after her ...

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the Wintertons have decided to move out after being barred from claiming any more in Additional Cost Allowance (ACA) for living there. Instead, they will move into a rented flat in Westminster which will cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds a year in ACA.

Lady Winterton, the MP for Congleton, Cheshire, has written to John
Lyon, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, informing him that the
family trust, which owns their previous home on behalf of their
children, would now rent it out to a new tenant "at the current market
rate, as now".

Addendum: The criteria for who should qualify for the ACA do, indeed, seem to open the door for some questionable activities (see this); but given the criteria, the buy-rent decision and the wealth of the MPs should not cloud the issue. Opportunity costs are still important.

Regular EclectEcon reader, Kevin, sent me this link about the changing wage structure in Cuba.

Cuba is to abolish its system of equal pay for all and allow workers and managers to earn performance bonuses, a senior official has announced. [emphasis in the original as a sub-headline]

Vice-Minister for Labour Carlos Mateu said the current system - in
place since the communist revolution in 1959 - was no longer
"convenient".

He said wage differentiation should improve production and services. ...

The minister pointed out that the current wage system sapped
employees' incentives to excel since everyone earned the same
regardless of performance.

"It's harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it's also
harmful to give him what he doesn't deserve," the newspaper article
said.

The history of mankind is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective. The countries which have produced the happiest men, the highest standards of living and the greatest cultural advances have been the countries where the power of the collective — of the government, of the state — was limited and the individual was given freedom of independent action. As examples: The rise of Rome, with its conception of law based on a citizen's rights, over the collectivist barbarism of its time. The rise of England, with a system of government based on the Magna Carta, over collectivist, totalitarian Spain. The rise of the United States to a degree of achievement unequaled in history — by grace of the individual freedom and independence which our Constitution gave each citizen against the collective.

While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

This analogy has been made explictly by my colleague, Salim Mansur in his most recent weekly column for the Sun papers:

The good news from Iraq, as the Economist reports, is the guns have begun to fall silent. American and Iraqi casualties are down sharply,the sectarian-ethnic conflict is mostly over, al-Qaida insurgents are on the run as Sunni Iraqis have turned against them, and the government
of Iraqi PrimeMinister Nuri al-Maliki has increased confidence as Iraqi soldiers drove the Shia militia of Muqtada al-Sadr out of the port city of Basra and slums of Sadr City in the capital area of Baghdad.

An Iraq led by an elected government capable of securing its own interests invariably will alter the balance in favour of moderation in the hugely important Persian Gulf region. The effects of a strong and stable Iraq will be enormously positive globally. This will be the Bush legacy, as democratic Korea remains that of Truman, should the good news from Iraq become irreversible with the support of American troops.

The Iraq story, moreover, reveals that all the liberal left talk of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed of Third World countries is merely the empty noise of do-nothing hypocrites when confronted with blood thirsty thugs.

They will decry a Bush rather than advance the freedom of those beaten down by despots. 

Iraqis bear witness to this ugly truth and that is why good news from Iraq goes mostly unreported.

I do not share the optimism, infectious though it be. Democracy is a tough fit with Arab societies and with Islam. The principal reason is the inherent non separation of mosque and state in Islam. Turkey has managed it best, with Malaysia and Indonesia managing a modicum of accommodation. The risk of all these states sliding back into Shariaville, is high. The bulk of the remaining Islamic states are either hired goons - Egypt - collaborators of convenience - Saudi Arabia - or flat out hostiles, and none of these are even sniffing around a democratic structure.If they were, most like Egypt and 'Palestine', would likely vote for the other guys, as we have seen. A vote to end the vote.

A single statistic tells the tale. As against the 10 percent or fewer of American whites who hold negative views of blacks, the same mid-1990’s survey of intergroup attitudes cited above registered over three-quarters of blacks holding negative views of whites. ...

As I have already suggested, a dishearteningly large number of black Americans do indeed harbor extreme attitudes toward white America and toward other American ethnic groups. One of the most in-depth studies of this issue, conducted by Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza for their book Black Pride and Black Prejudice (2002), found blacks significantly more likely than whites to hold anti-Semitic views, a finding consistent with several other studies. Regarding whites in general, one-quarter of those surveyed said they believed white doctors had invented AIDS in the laboratory in order to commit genocide, and nearly half said that the CIA and FBI had flooded black neighborhoods with drugs and guns so that blacks would harm one another—findings that suggest Jeremiah Wright is no outlier among blacks.

These wild conspiracy theories are themselves rooted in racial animus. Indeed, the data demonstrate that the greater the animus, the more likely an individual is to impute bigotry against himself and his group to others. In sum, Sniderman and Piazza conclude, “what encourages blacks to believe that others are prejudiced against them is their being prejudiced against others.”

Ironman, at Political Calculations, presents a graph showing,

In simpler words, we confirm that individual Americans are not
consuming an ever-increasing amount of oil. We can therefore eliminate
increased U.S. consumption of petroleum-based products as a significant
contributor to the recent spike in the world price of oil.... As we see in the chart ..., the amount of
finished petroleum products consumed by U.S. residents started at 2.572
gallons per day in February 2007 and peaked at 2.661 gallons per day in
August 2007 before plunging to 2.443 gallons per day in March 2008.

In March of this year, Ed Leamer predicted that the US would narrowly avoid a recession [link via Newmark's Door, still my first read each day]. This forecast clearly reflects updated information, given his discussion over two years earlier, in which he expressed dismay about the US housing bubble and forecast a recession.

But here are two very different forecasts (among the many) about whether the U.S. will have a recession during the next year or so.

• Ironman at Political Calculations posted a graph showing (according to his model) that the threat of a recession has passed.
  


• At the same time, Steven Pearlstein writes,

So much for that second-half rebound.

Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast, happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to normal.

It ain't gonna happen.

Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter.

This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of.

Others, especially those at RGE Monitor, tend to share Pearlstein's view. I might, too, but they have been predicting this recession for quite some time. If they are right, how long will we have to wait for it???

Meanwhile, Ironman's model seems to have predicted reasonably well....

1. Global Warming is occurring,
2. Global warming is the direct of human behaviour, and
3. it is most efficient for us to do something about it, likely via carbon taxes.

Environmental extremists routinely assert a “scientific consensus” that global warming is occurring, and that human activity somehow causes it. This week, however, over 31,000 scientists spoke up and reduced that myth to a smoldering rubble.

The environmentalists’ alleged “scientific consensus” is much like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, behind which the supposedly infallible wizard dictated to his minions. Beyond that curtain, however, the wizard was nothing more than an ordinary little man perpetrating a fraud upon those who worshipped his doctrine. And once Toto removed that curtain, the fraud was exposed for all to see.

Similarly, environmentalists’ mythical “scientific consensus” has served as a shroud behind which they have sought to maintain an air of infallibility. By falsely claiming a closed consensus and excoriating anyone who speaks out against their flawed orthodoxy, environmental extremists seek to prevent any objective, scientific debate that might inhibit their political agenda.

That shroud, however, was further torn this week by a 31,000-strong petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). According to the OISM’s board of scientists, “a review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th Century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature.”

To the contrary, the OISM notes that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have actually increased plant growth rates, among other positive effects. On this basis, the OISM concludes that “predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge.”

• Even if the EU, Canada, and the US impose carbon taxes, these taxes would have a minimal impact on carbon emissions, given the rates of economic growth in the rest of the world, and
• it might be more efficient to build levees and dikes, if necessary, than to try to curtail carbon consumption.
  
  Just call me a major skeptic.
  
  Addendum: For more, see this at SCSU Scholars.
  
  And check out the Global Warming DoomsDay Called Off video from, surprisingly, the CBC.

  Addendum #2: For more, see this about the decline in sunspot activity and possible global cooling. [h/t Newmark's Door].

The execution of two Afghanis by Islamists in Pakistan stands out in sharp contrast to western treatment of prisoners of war. As Powerline says,

In Pakistan today, just across the border from Afghanistan, Taliban goons got their hands on two Afghans who they claimed had collaborated in a Predator strike on a Taliban house across the border in Pakistan. It isn't clear from this news account whether the Taliban kidnapped the victims from Afghanistan. 

In any event, loudspeakers in mosques called the faithful to witness
the brutality that was to follow. A crowd estimated at 5,000 or more
assembled. The Afghans were dragged out of a car. ...

The crowd cheered "Allahu akbar," or "God is great." You can see how
this would be a religious experience. The assassins then debated
whether the second man should be decapitated, since he may not have
been of age. One of the gunmen settled the issue by shooting him in the
head.

I'm not sure whether these gentlemen are among those with whom
Barack Obama wants to sit down and chat when he becomes President. I
hope not. Wittgenstein once wrote something to the effect that if a
lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand him. But I think
Obama would have a better chance with the lion than the Taliban.

Everyone's for a free Tibet but nobody's for freeing Tibet.
...
If Rumsfeld were to say, 'Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,' the bumper sticker crowd would be aghast. They'd have to bend down and peel off the 'FREE TIBET' stickers and replace them with 'WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER'.'

Every campaign finance case is opportunity for libertarians to
“stand above it all” and sigh with disappointment (disgust?). All sides
in the debate seem to agree on one thing: The whole point of the
exercise is to combat corruption in politics. Fair enough, and noble
enough.

But it is the libertarians, and only the libertarians, who ask the precedent question of why
we have so much corruption in politics. The answer is simple: Because
government does so much that invites corruption, that caters to
corruption and that perpetuates corruption. Things that have nothing to
do with the core functions of government — the functions that the
Framers did, and most people today do, associate with a free society.
Things that are explicitly designed to benefit, not everyone equally or
equitably, but some at the expense of others. From earmarks to tax
breaks, from nanny statism to nanny subsidies, from oil wells to oil
wars.

If the politicians didn’t do so much that they were never meant to do, then no one would try to buy them. That would be the best “campaign finance reform” of all.

You can raise orchids or kids.

The most ironic thing about the bill is its provisions for both massive subsidies to American farmers and, a few pages later, its provisions for food aid to third world countries. There’s a brilliant, productive solution to global poverty if I’ve ever heard one: make it impossible for farmers in the third world to compete on a global market, then inefficiently deliver more expensive American food to save the day. With this sort of policy, all America (and the EU, which has strikingly similar policies) does is continue a cycle of dependency while subsidizing unprofitable enterprises within her own borders.

The sponsors of the bill, among other things, express concern about the cost of rising food prices for the poor. If the goal is lower food expenses for poor workers, then let’s stop taxing workers in cities to pay for subsidies to farmers and start importing food from the places where it can best and most economically be grown.

...the SA rate fell, from a peak of 3.1 million individuals
in the early 1990s to 1.7 million in 2005.

Council bans 'brainstorming'

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" - and replaced it with "thought showers".

Officials Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent feared the phrase might offend epileptics or the mentally ill. ...

But Margaret Thomas, of the National Society for Epilepsy, said: "Brainstorming is a clear and descriptive phrase.

"Alternatives such as "thought shower" or "blue-sky thinking" are ambiguous to say the least.

"Any implication that the word "brainstorming" is offensive to epileptics takes political correctness too far."

And Richard Colwill, of mental health charity SANE, agreed: "This ban goes too far. Few would be genuinely offended by the word "brainstorming" in the context of council meetings."

A council spokesman said: "We take diversity awareness very seriously. The majority of staff have taken part in training and been asked to use the term "thought showers"."

More likely than not, the U.S. will experience a recession. The housing recession and credit crisis are ongoing and their consequences are likely to be felt for quite some time – both in the U.S. and world wide. The U.S. housing sector does not look to be approaching a bottom quite yet. On the supply side, housing starts are down 57% from their peak, but on the demand side sales of new homes are down a whopping 62%. This certainly does not bode well for inventory absorption and keeps putting downward pressure on home prices – the S&P Case-Shiller indices that came out yesterday speak for themselves. And together with home prices, the wealth of the U.S. consumer – the engine of a U.S. economy that relies on consumption (72% pf GDP) like no other economy in the world – is estimated to have fallen by almost $2 trillion in Q1 2008 and is bound to fall further. If tax refunds and rebates are trying to hold up the mood of the U.S. consumer – whose confidence is dropping – energy and food prices are pushing the other way. And employment figures are contributing further to the dismal of the U.S. consumer. The big shock in the latest employment report was a spike in the unemployment rate to 5.5% from 5.0%, one of the biggest monthly rises on record, and the next employment report could mark the seventh consecutive monthly decline for payrolls and the sixth for overall jobs.

Canada’s GDP actually contracted by 0.3% y/y in Q1 on plunging inventory and residential investment, disappointing those that hoped it would decouple from its Southern neighbor which absorbs 75% of its exports. U.S. weakness, elevated credit costs, and a strong Canadian dollar are offsetting strong commodity exports and buoyant domestic demand. Yet, some economists suggest that real GDP strips out the very income gains that have increased Canadians wealth from its sustained terms of trade rise. With the Canadian dollar’s disinflationary power fading, the Bank of Canada may have ended its aggressive easing and there is little room for more fiscal stimulus. Lackluster growth looks likely for the rest of the year. See “Canada Recoupling With a Vengeance?” and Rachel Ziemba’s “Why Is Canada Growing Slower Than the U.S.?”

"What can we do," the Syrian Finance minister asked, "to increase Chinese investment?" "Well," the Chinese minister replied, "before we invest in Syria you most open your markets, cut your subsidies, and reduce regulation..."

As the [US] presidential campaign drones on, Barack Obama and the Democrats are fleshing out the promise of "change" with some specific, big-government policy proposals. Many are familiar, perhaps because they already have been tried – in Argentina.

That country has gone from South American breadbasket to world-class basket case. ...

The [Argentine] constitution once held limited government and private property to be among the highest ideals of the land. But in the 1920s these protections, which had made the country a magnet for immigrants and the seventh-largest economy in the world, began to erode.

An early example of this assault on liberty was when Congress imposed a rent freeze to deal with a housing shortage after World War I. This only exacerbated the problem, and in 1922 a politicized Supreme Court widened state powers to allow the regulation of rents. That decision put property-rights protection on a slippery slope. A decade later the Court gave the legislature the power to regulate interest rates.

The interventions didn't end there, and as state control of the economy expanded and the nation grew poorer, the country could not recover its footing. Economic populism and labor militancy took hold; protectionism blossomed and Argentina became a welfare state. Meanwhile, the informal economy swelled under the high cost of legality.

Fiscal crises have been recurring. According to a paper recently released by researchers at the Buenos Aires business school Eseade, external debt as a percentage of GDP has now climbed to 56% compared to 54% in 2001. If you include the unpaid debt to bondholders, the number is 67%. More than a few analysts are worried that should the economy slow, the government may tap Central Bank reserves, sparking a run against the peso or, fearing that, choose default, for the second time in a decade, as its escape hatch.

Will that mean an end to ballooning entitlements, class warfare, hostility toward producers, capital and private property, protectionism and subsidized central-planning? Unlikely.

Americans reading that laundry list may note that it sounds a lot like the mindset of the left wing that will dominate the Democratic Party's convention and choose Barack Obama as its candidate in August. From nationalized health care and government-owned refineries to punishing taxes on the rich, Argentina has been there, done that. There are good reasons to find the resemblance disturbing.

A Los Angeles woman claims she was injured by her Victoria's Secret thong, prompting her to sue the underwear manufacturer.

The plaintiff in the case, Macrida Patterson, 52, attributed the May 2007 injury to a Victoria's Secret "low-rise v-string," according to a court document posted on The Smoking Gun.

Patterson's lawyer told The Smoking Gun that a "design problem" caused a decorative metallic piece on the underwear to fly up and hit Patterson in the eye while she was putting the underwear on.

1. Perhaps this was an efficient accident, i.e., it was an accident that it would cost more to prevent than the expected costs resulting from the accident. Of course to truly assess the efficiency of the accident, one must consider the dot product of (a) the vector of all possible probabilties of accidents and (b) the vector of costs of those accidents, should they materialize.
2. If it was not an efficient accident, Victoria's Secret was negligent. To promote economic efficiency, they should be held liable. And if they are held strictly liable (they must pay compensation, even if they were not negligent), they will tend to prevent only those accidents which are inefficient, but choose to pay compensation for those that are efficient.
3. If it was an efficient accident, who is the least-cost bearer of the risk: customers or the firm? We seem, increasingly, to assign this risk to large firms, not because they are any better insurers than consumers, but because they have more money. The result is that such cases are decided more on distributional than efficiency criteria.

It looked like a routine decision that Steven Levitt had to make. The co-editor of the "Journal of Political Economy" (JPE), who is most renowned for his bestseller "Freakonomics", had to accept or reject a comment written by the Dallas-economist Stan Liebowitz on an article which had been published in the JPE.

Perhaps Levitt should have simply used his far-reaching powers as editor and reject the comment without much ado. He did not do this, He did something instead, which could potentially taint his own good reputation and the reputation of the JPE, and which exemplifies the relatively lax procedural standards at top-flight economics journals.

On closer look, everything about the case was unusual. The comment was phrased very strongly. It was a thinly veiled assertion of data-manipulation. This is quite remarkable, given that the JPE, edited at the University of Chicago where Professor Levitt teaches, is one of the top five economics journals globally.

The subject of the criticised article was a hot topic. The authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (University of Kansas), claimed to prove that file-sharing websites on the internet have not been responsible for the sharp decline in music sales since the turn of the millennium. Music labels might disagree. They have been busy suing file-sharing sites and their users for copyright infringement.

Professor Liebowitz disagreed strongly He had told Stephen much in a letter even before the article was published in the JPE. Liebowitz had pointed to what he considered numerous mistakes and inconsistencies in the paper and complained that the authors would not share their data for replication purposes. Levitt had forwarded the letter to the authors of the study, but had published the study more or less as submitted.

Ignoring Liebowitz was not possible any more, however, after he submitted his counter-study officially as a comment to the JPE in September 2007. Levitt started by asking one of the authors, Koleman Strumpf, for his opinion. Strumpf handed in his reply in November. He defends the study and retaliates by pointing to alleged mistakes in Liebowitz' comment.

In addition, Levitt asked for a report from an impartial referee. The referee recommends publishing the comment in order to "save subsequent researchers from building on a flawed research foundation." While he advises Liebowitz to rephrase his comment such that it would not contain any overt assertions of data manipulation he sides with him on almost all the critical points and comes to a damming conclusion regarding the file-sharing article: "I would suggest that the authors? conclusions are not warranted given the analysis and evidence that they provide."

However, Levitt is not inclined to publish the comment. He anonymizes the reply by Strumpf and uses it as a second referee-report on which he bases his rejection of Liebowitz' comment. "There is no doubt you raise some reasonable points. Nonetheless, I think the negative referee (negative toward the comment, N.H.) is correct in most of what he says", Levitt writes to Liebowitz. The only point he takes up from the impartial referee is the advice to moderate the tone, should Liebowitz wish to submit the comment to some other, lesser journal.

[H]ere’s a question rarely asked, at least in Washington: Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?...

In fact, given the way U.S. policy favors owning over renting, you can make a good case that America already has too many homeowners....

All I’m suggesting is that we drop the obsession with ownership, and try to level the playing field that, at the moment, is hugely tilted against renting.

And while we’re at it, let’s try to open our minds to the possibility that those who choose to rent rather than buy can still share in the American dream — and still have a stake in the nation’s future.

Dani Yatom, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was invited to attend a NATO conference in Brussels last year. While reviewing the agenda, Yatom, a retired major general, was surprised to see that the meeting was titled “The Iranian Challenge” and not “The Iranian Threat.”

When a speaker with a French accent mentioned that a US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would be the most dangerous scenario of all, Yatom said, politely but firmly: “Sir, you are wrong. The worst scenario would be if Iran acquired an atom bomb.”

First, even before Iran may try to retaliate to this action by trying to block the flow of oil from the Gulf, oil prices would spike above $200 dollar a barrel.

Second, Iran could react militarily to such Israeli action (that would be taken with the tacit support and the military logistic support of the US) by unleashing its supporters in Iraq against the US military forces there. That would trigger a military reaction by the US that would start a sustained air-led bombing campaign against Iran’s military capabilities (air force, anti-aircraft defenses, radar and other military installations, etc.)

Third, Iran would unleash its supporters in Lebanon and Gaza (Hezbollah and Hamas) in a military confrontation with Israel. A broader war will follow in the Middle East.

Fourth, Iran would use both the threat of blocking the flow of oil out of the Gulf and an actual sharp reduction of its exports of oil (an embargo) to spike the price of oil. Oil prices would rapidly rise above $200 per barrel and the US and global economy would spin into a severe stagflationary recession (like those triggered by the sharp spikes in the prices of oil following the staflationary shocks of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990).

Fifth, while Sunni regimes may – in private – sigh relief following the destruction of the nuclear capabilities of the Shiite Iranian regime – the Sunni Arab street (the masses of poor Sunnis) from Algeria to Egypt and all the way to Pakistan, India and Indonesia may become even more anti-Western and anti-American leading to the risk over time of rise of anti-Western fundamentalist regimes in many Arab countries.

Sixth, the Bush administration whose hands have been tied by the new National Intelligence Estimate (that argued that Iran had suspended its program of development of nuclear weapons) would thus be able to strike Iran – via Israel - before the end of its term. Such October surprise by Israel would also certainly lead to the election of McCain and defeat of Obama as a national security crisis of such an extent would doom the chances of Democrats to win the White House. So both Israel – that prefers McCain to Obama and is hurried to act as it is wary of the constraints that an Obama presidency may put on its ability to act against Iran – and the Bush administration would guarantee the election of McCain.

The human-rights tribunals are a censor’s dream. Under Canada’s human-rights act, commissioners can convict if they believe any published material is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Since they are “remedial” institutions and not real courts, they need not follow strict legal procedures or grant traditional rights of the accused. No one goes to prison, but the panels can fine and silence people at will — and run up the lawyer bills for years. Truth is no defense, and commissioners are authorized to confiscate a computer without a warrant. Evidence can be woefully flimsy. ...

The kangaroo courts — a national one, plus one in each province — have been under fire for months, mostly because of the Mark Steyn case. In 2006, Maclean’s magazine ran an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone, warning of Islam’s threat to the West. Steyn predicted that Muslims would become a “successor population” in Europe because of their high birth rate. Three of the human-rights commissions pounced. The British Columbia panel completed a five-day hearing but has not yet released a ruling. The Ontario panel dropped the case, saying it lacked jurisdiction over printed material. The federal human-rights commission is still investigating.

Steyn and Maclean’s have churned up a good deal of controversy. Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, ran a June 16 editorial under the headline, “Curb Bigoted Acts Not Free Speech.” It said that calls for reform, including a few in parliament, “reflect growing unease that an unwarranted chill is being cast on free speech.” ...

Having shown little concern about the national anti-free-speech apparatus for years, the Canadian public is beginning to notice.

Reports from Canada say Hezbollah operatives have been detected conducting surveillance on Jewish targets in Toronto, including schools and synagogues. U.S. sources have confirmed increased Hezbollah activity as well. Intriguingly, the reports specifically said the men conducting the surveillance were Hezbollah members, not just men of Middle Eastern appearance. That either indicates a deep penetration of Hezbollah in Canada — the Canadians knew the political affiliation of the men — or psychological warfare against Hezbollah, an attempt to let the group know the Canadians are on to them. If this is a Hezbollah operation, the Canadians just told them they were busted.

Apart from the obvious problems of traffic and transportation, the growth created other confusing complications. Today, out of the city's eighty-five thousand streets, there are about eight hundred fifty called Juárez, seven hundred fifty named Hidalgo, and seven hundred known as Morelos. Two hundred are called 16 de Septiembre, while a hundred more are called 16 de Septiembre Avenue, Alley, Mews, or Extension. Nine separate neighborhoods are called La Palma, four are called Las Palmas, and there are numerous mutations: La Palmita, Las Palmitas, Palmas Inn, La Palmas Condominio, Palmas Avenida, La Palma I y Palma I-II Unidad Habitacional.

Sorry, folks, but the SUV is dead ...

We can let oil companies drill here, where they'll be expected to keep it clean and be proactive to prevent problems, or we can import more oil from Nigeria, which «has one of the worst environmental records in the world. In recent years, the country has seen the execution of a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, widespread social and environmental problems stemming from oil operations in the Niger River delta, and the world's highest deforestation rate.

We can have a few more oil rigs breaking the clean blue line of the Hollywood horizon or we can help finance the Russian exploration of the Arctic, leaving the Arctic Ocean to the devices of the country that «succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea - the Aral, now largely a toxic desert - and turning the world's deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits.» How do you think those Alaskan lichens will fare if the Russians repeat their recent history?

And, by the way, aren't our neighbors to the North a socialist paradise that can do no wrong? Yet, they also seem to be expanding oil production as fast as humanly possible - and selling it to us. If oil production is so bad for the environment, why are the sainted Canadians doing it and why isn't Barack Obama demanding they stop?

• When prices rise, the quantity demanded falls. Demand curves are downward-sloping. This is the "law of demand".


• People respond to incentives.

• They buy smaller cars.
• If they have two cars, they begin to use the smaller car more often.
• They bicycle more.
• They walk more.
• They make greater use of public transportation.
• They take fewer trips.
• They make shorter trips.
• They move closer to work or closer to public transportation connections.

Americans drove 30 billion fewer miles from November through April than during the same period in 2006-07, the biggest such drop since the Iranian revolution led to gasoline supply shortages in 1979-80.

The numbers released Wednesday may reflect more than a temporary attitude change in consumers toward high gas prices, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said. Previously, she said, "people might change their pattern for a short period of time, but it almost always bounced back very quickly. We're not seeing that now."

... "It's not a blip," said Marilyn Brown, professor of energy policy at Georgia Tech, citing data showing surging transit ridership, dropping sales of sport-utility vehicles and sharply increased demand for gas-efficient vehicles. "I think the difference between now and 1979, when prices were comparable when you adjust for inflation, is there's a sense of sustained pain. There's a sense that the era of cheap energy is a thing of the past."

Q. What's the difference between a Christian and a Communist?

A. A Christian believes what's mine is yours, a Communist what's yours is mine

Unions are about, at least in part, protectionism (protecting the jobs of people who would lose them in a completely open market). The UCU are merely protecting themselves against being shown up by Jewish scholars, since no intelligent, self-respecting Jew would now want to go to Britain on an exchange basis, whether or not the UCU sanctions a boycott.

Next on the UCU list will be Americans and then Germans if number of Nobel laureates by country is used as a metric for sanctions.

It seems the down economy is hurting every business, even the oldest profession. The Moonlight BunnyRanch in Carson City, a legal brothel featured on HBO's "Cathouse," is offering the first 100 customers who show up with their stimulus rebate checks twice the "services" for the same price.

They're calling it ... "more bang for your buck." ...

The ranch is also offering to reimburse customers who paid American Airlines $15 to check a bag, patrons "who otherwise might feel screwed at 30,000 feet."

As for the stimulus offer, a guy who brings in an entire $1,200 check gets a special deal: three women and a bottle of bubbly. Anyone notice that a guy with a $1,200 check is married to qualify for that amount?

But wait, there's more! The legal bordello plans to have all 100 customers, plus some of the Bunnies, sign a thank you card and send it to President ...Bush. Oy.

The African-American Illinois senator amplified one of his campaign themes in condemning absent fathers who have "abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men."

"You and I know how true this is in the African-American community," Obama said, recapping government statistics showing more than half of all black children live in single-parent households.

Such children are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison, he said.

"And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it," said Obama, who dwelt on his own challenges growing up with a single mother from the age of two after his Kenyan father abandoned them.

London, May 26 (ANI): Naming his sniffer dog "Allah" has resulted in in prison officer Chris Langridge, 28, being shifted out of Britain's top Belmarsh high-security jail.

Though Langridge insisted that his labrador was called Ali, and not Allah, a Muslim inmate filed an official complaint against the the dog handler, and he was promptly shifted.

One Belmarsh officer said: "This is political correctness gone mad."

Belmarsh houses some of Britain's most notorious extremist Muslims, including hook-handed Abu Hamza. It also has the highest proportion of Muslim prisoners of any jail in Britain.

"Muslims don't like dogs and it would have been an insult to their religion if the dog had been called Allah, which is sacred to them. It is disgraceful the way the management kow-towed to them despite Chris's denial," The Sun quoted a source, as saying.

...why he, or any judge for that matter, would say "he didn't believe the images were obscene" about a case he was hearing.

Lessig on the Kozinski Kerfuffle Larry Lessig has a blog post on what he calls, The Kozinski Mess, by which he means "the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage."

Here is how he explains the situation:

Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

Cyrus Sanai, a Beverly Hills lawyer who has had a long-running dispute with the 9th Circuit, took credit for bringing the graphic material to light.

Sanai said he discovered the sexual content in December while monitoring the judge's Web site as part of his legal rift with the court. After downloading the files, Sanai said he began contacting reporters at various publications in January to bring attention to what he called widespread ethical problems on the 9th Circuit.

He provided a copy of the files to The Associated Press on Wednesday, which appeared to mirror the Times' descriptions of videos and pictures on the Web site.

In case you're wondering, duct-tape pants are really not likely ever to become a fad - they are VERY hot to wear and quite uncomfortable.

Most of the media in Canada and the United States ignored the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal that took place last week in a windowless basement in Vancouver. Now, a group of provincial human-rights commissars will decide whether or not National Review’s incomparable Mark Steyn and the largest-circulating magazine in Canada, Maclean’s, will be fined or otherwise censured for printing an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone. The piece argued that demographic trends indicate that Western Civilization will sooner or later be forced to confront problems associated with radical Islam. We believe that the right to free speech must be defended almost without exception, but it’s worth noting that Steyn’s article was perfectly within the bounds of reasonable opinion journalism.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Wednesday that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's expressed support for Israel stems from his fear that the Mossad would assassinate him, just as it did President John F. Kennedy.

"We suspect he may fear being killed by Israeli agents and meet the same fate as Kennedy when he promised to look into Israel's nuclear program," Gaddafi said.