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Maybe emigration to Canada should be considered

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

I confess I don’t understand Obama, or the political views of several of my children who voted for him. I was always convinced that he was a radical leftist and nothing he has done has shaken that view. When Jimmy Carter was elected, I can remember thinking, “Well, he has been a businessman. He can’t be that bad.” He was. I never had a doubt that Obama would be bad although, not even my worst fears were equal to his actions. He has insulted friends like Britain and India. He appears to be bent on appeasing every enemy, like Russia and Iran, while attacking small countries like Honduras with no apparent reason.

His economic policies are inexplicable. The financial meltdown came after years of complaints, from the Wall Street Journal for example, about the policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Other financial newspapers explained the hazards of the loan incentives. There was blame to go around because the Bush Administration should have reined in the Fed and the SEC should have intervened and no one did. Still, there is evidence that warnings were ignored. The response in the fall last year was controversial and the Republican House refused to support the bailout bill the Bush Administration presented, to their credit. They held firm on the worse bill the Democrats presented after Obama’s inauguration. The auto companies should have been allowed to file bankruptcy and Bush’s failure to allow this will haunt us for years, even if he did have some fair reasons. Ron Paul, crazy as he is on some subjects, keeps looking better every year.

I really do wonder what all this will look like in two or three years.

Canada has a good leader who seems to be doing the right things, while we try to cope with a media darling who might just be unraveling American history forever. Maybe we are Argentina, after all.

Be that as it may, when I contrast a know-nothing do-harmer like Obama with the prime minister of my own country, a principled and reliable politician who has defended the democratic tradition to the best of his ability and steered the country through the recent economic meltdown with reasonable firmness, who is naturally averse to bedding the media and wary of ingratiating himself with the public, and who possesses verifiable talents, I have no doubt that were Canada’s Stephen Harper president of the United States, it would find itself in a far more resilient position than it does now.

There is a powerful irony at work here. President Obama is well on his way to ruining the American economy and reducing the nation’s defensive posture before an increasingly threatening world. The evidence for so unflattering an assessment is bluntly undeniable, at least for those who have managed to resist hypnosis. Yet he is staunchly defended by the MSM, receives accolades from a vast and robust constituency of devoted supporters, including the Oslo bunch, and is crowned by a nimbus of invincibility. Prime Minister Harper, on the other hand, finds himself constantly struggling to maintain a minority government, faces the prospect of no-confidence motions against his administration and ad hoc coalitions of the disgruntled, and is regarded by the teeming number of leftist nannies in this country as “scary” and of nurturing a “secret agenda” — an agenda, be it said, which is transparently conservative and responsible. If there is a scary and secret agenda to be feared, it is not here.

Read the rest. It is sobering.

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Posted in financial, politics | 7 Comments »

America in 1964.

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

I have begun to read the two volume series The Age of Reagan by Steven Hayward. The first volume is subtitled, “The Fall of the Old Liberal Order.” This is obviously a play on the title of the first book of Schlesinger’s three volume series on FDR, which I have also read. That book is called “The Crisis of the Old Order,” and is chiefly interesting as a view of things from the left as many of its insights have been superseded by Amity Schlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man. I recommend reading all three books.

Anyway, the first chapter is about 1964 as the “Apogee of Liberalism.” John Kennedy has been assassinated and LBJ is now president. What is the country like ? Since I remember this period well, I will intersperse my own observations with the author’s. First, the federal budget in 1964 was $100 billion. That’s right. The US budget was the same as California’s budget deficit in 2009 ! The GDP was $576 billion and the growth of the economy that year was 7%. Inflation was 1.2 % and the chief concern of the public was International Relations at 51%. This was still the time of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis had been only two years before. Seventy per-cent of Americans were confident that the government would “do the right thing” and this was Walter Cronkite’s America.

Personally, I watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report, sponsored by Texaco. I was a third year medical student, married still without children although my first would arrive in March, 1965. We were living in a two bedroom house in Eagle Rock, on Oak Grove Drive, for which we paid $100 per month rent. It was in a small compound of homes on a hill side and from the living room window, I could see the San Fernando Valley in the distance. We were driving an old VW bus I had bought from another student. My wife taught school in east LA and dropped me off each morning on her way to school. We managed on $200 a month from our parents plus a small amount I could earn doing routine histories and physicals in a local hospital plus a few insurance physicals.

Per capita income was $2,592 and the average manufacturing job paid $ 2.53 per hour. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average was 800. The IBM 360 mainframe computer came out and used microchip circuits. I had programmed an IBM 650 in 1959 when I worked for Douglas Aircraft Company in El Segundo. It had vacuum tubes and the memory was a spinning drum covered with magnetic tape material. It had 2000 addressable memory units, each with ten digits. First class postage was 5 cents and Zip Codes were introduced. The Ford Mustang was introduced and helped Ford recover from the Edsel fiasco. In 1968, flush with my surgery resident’s salary, I bought a Mustang convertible for $3050. The car payment was $95 per month for three years. I had put $50 down.

Jack Kemp led the Buffalo Bills to the AFL championship. The Supreme Court had banned prayer in public schools in 1962 but 88% of the public disagreed and 63% said they prayed regularly. Out-of-wedlock births were at 5% although, among blacks, they were up to 25%. Less than 10% of households were headed by single mothers. The divorce rate was 25%. The Hays Office was still censoring movies but LSD was legal and would be so for another two years. In 1966, the medical school Dean called me in to talk. I was student body president and he wanted to talk about a developing drug problem among medical students. He told me that 24 students in the sophomore class (of 68) were using drugs, mostly LSD. Several had been found crawling around on all fours in the student dorm barking like dogs. One student told him that he would take LSD and sit at the beach to hear the waves talk to him. The Dean told him that these hallucinations could be vivid. The student replied that, oh no, the waves were really talking to him. A half dozen of that class would either never graduate or not take an internship, lost to medicine. I didn’t know what to do about it either.

That was, as the Age of Reagan, points out, the end of a golden era of post war prosperity and cultural ease that affected all but black members of the population. The Vietnam War would end a lot of that but the social policies of Lyndon Johnson would also exacerbate social pathology that still plagues us as a nation. Probably the worst effect of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was inflation, aggravated by Jimmy Carter, it would change the way we all live. I bought my first house in 1969, just before the birth of my younger son and third child. I paid $35,000 with $3500 down and a second trust deed for another $3500. My house payments were $204 per month. Fifteen year later, that small house (1500 square feet) would be listed at $595,000. My house in MIssion Viejo, bought for $67,000 in 1972, would see a similar inflation. My medical school tuition in 1962 was $600 per semester or $1200 per year. Now USC medical school tuition is $40,000.

Crime, drugs and the failure of public education were further developments that I will discuss as I go through the book.

UPDATE: Fred explains what happened in a lot fewer words than I could. More from John Derbyshire. I’m not quite as pessimistic as those guys but I am close.

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Posted in financial, general | 11 Comments »

Is this our future ?

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Theodore Dalrymple, the non de plume of physician Anthony Daniels, has another piece today on the decline of Britain. I have previously commented on the British teenagers’ loss of history and the loss in the entire society, which has a much longer history to remember. He places much of the blame on the educational system.

Although we spend four times as much on education per head as in 1950, the illiteracy rate has not gone down. I used to try to plumb the depths (or shallows) of youthful British ignorance by asking my patients a few simple questions. Fifty percent responded to the question “What is arithmetic?” by answering “What is arithmetic?” It is not that they were good at doing something that they could not name: When I asked one young man, not mentally deficient, to multiply three by four, he replied “We didn’t get that far.”

That’s not very far. We are not much better.

The political system isn’t doing very well, either.

It is doubtful whether any major country has had a more incompetent leader than Gordon Brown for many years. The product of a pleasure-hating Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he behaves as if taxation were a moral good in itself, regardless of the uses to which it is put; he is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile, though he has not been an apt pupil, for he now makes disconcertingly odd grimaces at inappropriate moments. He is the only leader known to me who combines dourness with frivolity.

Early in his disastrous career in government he sold the country’s gold reserves at a derisory price, against all advice, driving the price lower by the manner in which he arranged the sale. A convenience-store owner couldn’t, and almost certainly wouldn’t, have done worse.

This sounds familiar. Barack Obama is weak in economics although he has a high opinion of himself in almost every sphere.

For example, he was famously asked by Charles Gibson in one of the debates his policy on capital gains taxes.

GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.

So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

And again:


GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

OBAMA: Well, that might happen, or it might not.

Yes, stuff happens and there is little reason to expect that Obama knows why.

Then we come to foreign policy. Today the Telegraph, in Britain, published this column on its web site.

Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

I have to agree. His performance at the UN was depressing. I have previously expressed my concerns about this administration and its policy toward Israel.

I would suggest that Obama consider the consequences of convincing Israel that they are alone, or worse, that we sympathize with their enemies. For the consequences, you might read this report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International,

some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.

It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term,” Cordesman notes. The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.

The report also points out that Israel, backed into a corner, would most likely strike at its other potential enemies, including hostile Arab states. The fallout would probably mean the end of the Age of Petroleum, since the oil fields in the Middle East would be unusable for decades.

I don’t think Obama is equipped to make these judgements. He is starting down a very dangerous road with no evidence that he understands the risks. Neither did Chamberlain.

In 1939, the appeasers had the excuse that World War I was widely believed to have arisen from hasty mobilization and misunderstanding that more time and patient negotiation might have avoided. We now have the experience of that failure of appeasement, especially when dealing with an opponent who lacks historical balance or who has been mislead to believe that he runs no risk of opposition. The president of Iran has shown lack of historical balance and he represents a regime that has as a spiritual tenet that martyrdom is to be desired. Militant Islam has an unreasoning hatred of Jews dating, I believe, back to a rejection of Mohammed as he was founding Islam as a derivation of Judaism. This has now reached a psychotic stage in which a nation state of 66 million is governed by a small clique who believe that a millennium will come about by civil disaster, such as nuclear war. We have never seen as dangerous a delusion in the minds of leaders so close to the possibility of such weapons.

We see western governments that are so inept that they cannot educate the populace and they cannot understand the basic facts of economics or foreign policy.

UPDATE: This discussion of the coming financial meltdown shows just how difficult this problem is. Do not expect to see any logical discussion of this from the left.

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Posted in education, History, politics, terrorism | Comments Closed

Taxes and the Depression

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Arthur Laffer, author of supply side economics in the Kemp-Roth tax cuts proposed in the late 70s and finally passed in 1981, has a column today on the origins of the Great Depression. Books have been written on the subject and recent books have revised much history. Today Laffer points out that tax policy had a powerful effect on the collapse. We all know the theories of Keynes, about how falling demand led to the contraction. We have read (many of us have, anyway) Amity Schlaes book and realized that regulation and the effort to keep wages high contributed. Schoolchildren of my generation knew about the Smoot-Hawley tariff and how it led to trade wars and decreased world trade. Laffer now contributes another factor. Taxes.

While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy’s relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy’s relapse in 1937.

I had not previously thought of Smoot-Hawley as a tax but, of course, it was. Until the 16th Amendment, tariffs were the government’s principle source of revenue.

In 1930-31, during the Hoover administration and in the midst of an economic collapse, there was a very slight increase in tax rates on personal income at both the lowest and highest brackets. The corporate tax rate was also slightly increased to 12% from 11%. But beginning in 1932 the lowest personal income tax rate was raised to 4% from less than one-half of 1% while the highest rate was raised to 63% from 25%. (That’s not a misprint!) The corporate rate was raised to 13.75% from 12%. All sorts of Federal excise taxes too numerous to list were raised as well. The highest inheritance tax rate was also raised in 1932 to 45% from 20% and the gift tax was reinstituted with the highest rate set at 33.5%.

Raising taxes in a recession is not only an illogical idea, Keynes says government should run a deficit in recessions, but is a proven cause of the Depression. Roosevelt, as in so many other areas, followed Hoover’s lead.

In 1934, during the Roosevelt administration, the highest estate tax rate was raised to 60% from 45% and raised again to 70% in 1935. The highest gift tax rate was raised to 45% in 1934 from 33.5% in 1933 and raised again to 52.5% in 1935. The highest corporate tax rate was raised to 15% in 1936 with a surtax on undistributed profits up to 27%. In 1936 the highest personal income tax rate was raised yet again to 79% from 63%—a stifling 216% increase in four years. Finally, in 1937 a 1% employer and a 1% employee tax was placed on all wages up to $3,000.

It has been written that Roosevelt took great delight in those high tax rates on his fellow members of the inherited wealth class. He was widely hated in return but the hate seems to have gone both ways.

The states also made their contribution to the collapse.

In 1929, state and local taxes were 7.2% of GDP and then rose to 8.5%, 9.7% and 12.3% for the years 1930, ’31 and ’32 respectively.

If there were one warning I’d give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.

I believe that the only way this warning will be heard is if the Republicans take Congress next year. Hopefully, they have learned their lesson from the early years of this decade.

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Posted in financial, History | 1 Comment »

What is a basic education ?

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

I have been spending a lot of time with the health reform legislation lately and have begun to wonder what people understand and what the consequences are of failure to understand some basic concepts. I’m not the only one.

What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As the U.S. rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what American citizens, voters, and taxpayers need by way of knowledge and skills to form reasonable conclusions about the hottest domestic policy issue of the day.

Today’s elites seem certain that John Q. Public is irremediably ignorant about, and perhaps oblivious to, the health-care debate, and thus susceptible to being misled, brainwashed, or cowed. Some Democrats are convinced that the insurance industry is creating “movements” bent on misleading and confusing people and planting suspicion in their hearts, while at least one GOP congressman and more than a few conservative pundits and talk-show hosts say President Obama is lying. All these folks seem to assume that the masses cannot possibly understand the debate. But must we accept that as a given? What would it take to comprehend the health-care battle?

OK, how do we get that education ? I grew up in the 1940s and 50s, went to Catholic school and still have sharp memories of my early schooling. For example, I was reading (For the 20th time, at least) The King Must Die, by Mary Renault, one of my favorite authors. It brought to my mind that, in elementary school, I learned the fact that King Minos had a great fleet and that Crete had “wooden walls” on the sea. These small items of history were common in elementary education at the time I was a child. I wonder how many children today would know what I was talking about.

I read to my children as they grew up. When they were small, I read “The Lord of the Rings” and “Watership Down,” both fantasy literature. Interestingly enough, children’s literature is now being de-monsterized meaning the scary stories are being removed so that children are not frightened by the stories. I can’t find the link right now where this was discussed but it makes clear that there is a reason why children’s literature has so many frightening stories. Those fears are part of children’s lives and working them out in fiction may be helpful in assisting children to cope with the real events of life. Most fairy tales are actually based on frightening events. Jack and Jill fell down the hill. Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their parents in the woods. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella both had wicked stepmothers in an era when the possibility of the death of mothers was very real.

All of my children read although reading seems to increase in attraction as they grow older. Reading for pleasure is an activity of childhood that has been devastated by television. Children who do not read a lot, have difficulty with reading and with reading comprehension. It is a skill that grows with practice. They will learn no history from television. Only reading will bring them into a historical world where things fit into place in the greater scheme of things. It was easier for me because we had no television. In fact, because my father was in the juke box business, he hated television and refused to have one in the house. When I was in eighth grade, I didn’t know who Jackie Gleason was. That was a social handicap. Eventually, a family friend gave us a TV set for Christmas and the barrier was broken. Fortunately, by that time habits of a lifetime were set and I have never been much interested in TV. At one time, with my first wife, I had a set of earphones with a long cord. I would sit and read with the earphones on as she watched TV. I mostly listened to classical music in those days. It goes well with reading.

What do we do about the poor quality of schools today ? I don’t know. Spending lots of money on schools isn’t the answer.
In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City’s schools were in simply terrible shape. The city, like most others of its size (pop. 460,000), had experienced white flight from the 1950s on, and the school district even more so, even whites resident in the city pulling their kids out of the public schools. By 1977 enrollment was 36,000, three quarters of them racial minorities (which at that point meant mostly African Americans). The voters had not approved a tax increase for the district since 1969. In 1977 litigation commenced, members of the school board, district parents, and some token children suing the state and some federal agencies on the grounds they had permitted racial segregation. Federal judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee, got the case.

The solution seemed obvious.

After eight years of litigation, Clark gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted, and then some. He in fact ordered them to “dream” — to draw up a money-no-object plan for the Kansas City school system.

Dreaming is no problem for educationists. The plaintiffs — education activists and their lawyers — duly dreamt, with an initial price tag of $250 million for their dreams. This was twice the district’s normal annual budget.

It proved to be only a start, however. Over the next twelve years the district spent over 2 billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated.

The results ?

After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

Kansas City did all the things that educators had always said needed to be done to increase student achievement — it reduced class size, decreased teacher workload, increased teacher pay, and dramatically expanded spending per pupil — but none of it worked.

The great C-130-loads of money being air-dropped on the system also brought about waste and corruption on a heroic scale. Theft was rampant. So was overmanning: The project became a huge jobs and patronage program, with the inevitable mismanagement and scandals.

So that’s not the answer. I don’t know what it is, beyond the obvious, but I do know that an educated citizenry is necessary for a democracy to flourish and I think we are in big trouble because we have a lot of citizens who don’t read and know no history. And they vote.

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Posted in education | 3 Comments »

Sarah Palin, libertarian

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

UPDATE: I’m not the only one thinking about this.

I’ve been thinking about the surprise announcement of Sarah Palin yesterday. It has stimulated a huge amount of speculation on both left and right. Both left and right wing blogs have long comment sections on posts about her announcement. Why did she do it ? There are a number of speculations. Certainly, she has been subject to an unbelievable amount of abuse, much of it obscene and/or delusional. Andrew Sullivan, for example, has ended whatever credibility he had remaining on the right by his fascination with the birth of Trig Palin. The David Letterman slur was obscene but that is not the worst of the harassment. She has been deluged with frivolous ethics complaints, none of which has been upheld but she and her husband have $500,000 in legal bills to pay. Even mainstream Democrats have been frothing at the mouth.

Some of the speculation is that the harassment has convinced her to quit politics. I would not blame her if that were true. There is another possibility, however. The other phenomenon of this spring has been the Tea Parties. They have also been an object of derision by the left. The left has called them “teabagging parties,” a reference to homosexual jokes about oral sex. At first, participants used the terms interchangeably being unaware of homosexual jokes. The political left is far more familiar with homosexual terminology, especially when it is scatological.

Though supported by Republican think tanks, it is a grass-roots movement comprised of independents, conservatives, and libertarians, many say. Few attending these events have protested before, says Donalsonville, Ga., organizer Becky Worsham, adding, “A common joke at our first one was, ‘Gosh, I’ve never protested anything in my life, and this feels pretty good.’ ”

The protesters’ concern, she says, is that Washington “will really bring our country down to where we’ll no longer be a superpower.”

The April 15 protests

As many as half a million people attended the April 15 protests, according to the conservative Pajamas TV network. Events ranged from amateurish to professional: One in Atlanta featured massive TV screens and professional bands, while another in Lake City, Wash., drew only two dozen protesters.

The significance of this movement is still not established but it could be important.

Many Republicans, including this one, are tired of the weakness of our candidates who, once elected, choose the same big spending, big government pathway to electoral success. This occurs even at the local level and the Bush Administration did little to rein in the big spending Republican Congress. The result was an inability to distinguish the two parties on the issue of big government and the loss of the majority in 2006. Now, there is a level of despair in Republican circles I haven’t seen before. The closest thing to it is the aftermath of the Nixon resignation.

There are many, many – many – Americans who are no longer impressed with the qualities even the smartest political pundits consider essential in our politicians. We’ve had all the politicians who do everything the way they are supposed to – and their record is inexpressibly unimpressive. Many people have reached the point of saying, Don’t tell me only a politician who follows your set of rules is good for me. The rule-followers are the ones who have given us a national deficit so colossal we almost certainly can’t recover from it without severe economic dislocation – and an anomic, irresponsible, ignorant, and yet irrationally arrogant electoral demographic that voted Barack Obama into office, and threatens to make sure that government of, by, and for the people shall, if they have anything to do with it, perish from the earth, by next Thursday – and covered in a “Townhall” by ABC.

What we are enduring today is the America that the politics-as-usual rule-followers have delivered for us. It is far from unreasonable to recognize that having a comfortably conventional political profile, one that pleases Charles Krauthammer and Rick Brookhiser, is no indicator that a politician will guard constitutionalism, limitations on government, and individual liberty.

I wonder if the next trend is one of libertarian revision, either within the party or as a third party. I also wonder if Sarah Palin sees this, as well. She really governed Alaska as a libertarian, given the level of federal control of the state’s economy. For example, she vetoed a bill that would have banned benefits for gay partners. Although that source grumbles that she was reluctant, that is just left wing politics.

In 1856, the Whig Party, which had been formed to support business interests and the development of new territory (by building roads and canals), collapsed because the members could not resolve the issue of slavery. There were southern slave owning members, as well as northern abolitionist members. The Compromise of 1850 had postponed the issue but by 1856 the party was over. From the shell of the Whigs came the abolitionist Republican Party than won the presidency in 1860. Might we be seeing something like this happening to the Republicans now ?

Dennis Hastert is largely responsible for the failure of George W Bush to veto spending bills as deficits piled up. Hastert convinced him that the key to continued Republican control of Congress was spending and improved relations with lobbyists, the so-called “K Street Project.” Unfortunately for this theory, Democrats are the natural allies of lobbyists and will always outbid Republicans in spending. Hastert’s own seat in Congress was lost to a Democrat in 2008, partly because of local scandals about Hastert’s family connections.

Might there be a libertarian future for the Republican Party ? They have to do better than the British Conservative Party which seems unable to represent traditional values voters in their concerns about the decline in patriotism and family values. Even feminists who might be considered opposed to Sarah’s positions, may rebell at the abuse she has received. We’ll see how that works out.

At the end of the Thatcher years Britain was transformed. Europe’s sickest economy had become its strongest. The recipe had been low taxes. Simple taxes. Effective regulation. Privatisation. Free trade. Reform of the trade union movement. Intolerance of inflation.
They were necessary things to have done and I don’t say that lightly. They saved Britain from terminal economic decline.?? But somehow they didn’t create a nation that was quite at ease with itself. Margaret Thatcher knew that herself and used her memoirs to regret that she hadn’t been able to initiate ‘Social Thatcherism’.

We know how that feels. We still have a greater pool of traditional values in the population than Britain, which has suffered from years of Labour progressive education. Here, education is still local although George Bush and Ted Kennedy tried to make it national. What we have now is the financial quagmire that has engulfed Britain and is engulfing us. What we need is libertarian reform, either within the Republican party or without it. Maybe Sarah Palin sees this, too.

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Why I worry about my daughter’s college experience

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

This fall, my fifth child will begin her college career. She will attend the University of Arizona and we have discussed her choice of major. The Humanities are not a good choice these days, I fear. My oldest son entered the University of Southern California in 1983. He and I were both happy that one of his first semester courses was on the democracy of Athens. I wonder what such a course would be like today after reading this account of a present day History class at Northwestern University. For a while, after returning to USC to complete my pre-medical courses, I was an English major. I still recall those classes with affection for the interpretation of English LIterature they left me with. That, of course, was before the “Critical Studies” movement gutted the study of actual literature. Consider this example of such material being promoted at the University of Iowa, and tell me you are comfortable about your child’s college education.

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The post-American world

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

This essay by Fareed Zakaria is interesting although some of his suggestions for solutions are weak. His analysis of the decline of the British Empire is incomplete. He blames the Boer War for the beginning of the decline.

Britain’s exalted position, however, was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when British power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours while losing only 48 soldiers of its own. Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was “the British Empire against 30,000 farmers.”

In fact, as pointed out in several books on the history of technology, Britain did not absorb the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by Louis XIV in 1685, sent the Protestant tradesmen and technicians of France to England for refuge and they took with them the Industrial Revolution. The inventions of the early 19th century were a result of that diaspora from France. By mid-19th century, however, England was failing to adopt the new science of chemistry. In France, now recovered from the convulsions of the Revolution and Napoleon, Louis Pasteur studied wine chemistry and from there moved on to bacteriology and the revolutionary advances in medicine. In Germany, newly united, the Kaiser supported science education as a way to catch up to the great rivals of Germany in Europe. Organic chemistry took off from its origins in Germany and the other nations did not catch up until after the Second World War.

Individual genius still was prominent in England as the discoveries of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were fundamental in the new science of electromagnetism and electric power. Still, the tradition of the “gentleman amateur” held back British science finally and Germany built the great chemical industry that brought the second Industrial Revolution.

He does make a good point that Britain would have been far better off to have stayed out of the First World War, although the building of the German High Seas Fleet made that very difficult. Had they, and we, stayed out, it would have been another Franco-Prussian War. As a practical matter, however, the Kaiser was determined to be a rival to his British family. He was Queen Victoria’s grandson and had a pathological inferiority complex that led to disaster.

Some of Zakaria’s conclusions are reassuring for America.

No statistic seems to capture this anxiety better than those showing the decline of engineering in the United States. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that the United States could soon lose its privileged position as the world’s science leader. The report said that in 2004 China graduated 600,000 engineers, India 350,000, and the United States 70,000 — numbers that were repeated in countless articles, books, and speeches. And indeed, these figures do seem to be cause for despair. What hope does the United States have if for every one qualified American engineer there are more than a dozen Chinese and Indian ones? For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the United States, the report pointed out, a company could hire five Chinese chemists or 11 Indian engineers.

The numbers, however, are wrong. Several academics and journalists investigated the matter and quickly realized that the Asian totals included graduates of two- or three-year programs training students in simple technical tasks. The National Science Foundation, which tracks these statistics in the United States and other nations, puts the Chinese number at about 200,000 engineering degrees per year, and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira puts the number of Indian engineering graduates at about 125,000 a year. This means that the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either China or India does.

Others have questioned his focus on education, pointing out that 40% of the population, the “left side of the bell curve” are not likely to benefit by advances in nanotechnology and biotechnology industries except as consumers. This makes Zakaria’s emphasis on the benefits of unlimited illegal immigration less logical. He writes:

Immigration also gives the United States a quality rare for a rich country — dynamism. The country has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are eager to make a new life in a new world. Some Americans have always worried about such immigrants — whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. The United States has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other past great economic powers that have grown fat and lazy and slipped behind as they faced the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.

That is all very well for the hundreds of thousands who are educated and are waiting for the sclerotic legal immigration system to process their applications. The illegals who flood the border states, however, are mostly illiterate and uneducated and unlikely to contribute anything but competition for low-wage jobs for that “left end of the bell curve.” He needs to get out of his ivory tower at Newsweek to see the reality.

His political prescriptions are also unlikely to be helpful as he is blind to the regressive politics of the Democratic party which favors dead end education in “Women’s Studies” and “African-American studies” while attacking free trade and favoring high capital gains taxes even if they lose money for the tax system.

It’s worth reading even if I disagree with some of his points.

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More results of multiculturalism in Britain.

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

I have previously posted about my concerns over the British trends that mimic similar trends here in the 1960s. We wound up with cities that were unlivable and the movie “Death Wish“, which portrayed a man who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered by thugs in New York City, was greeted by standing ovations in movie theaters. The movie was so successful, it made a huge star of Charles Bronsan and spawned three sequels.

The Labour government has relentlessly pressed forward with policies that reward bad behavior and with education “reform” that removes the British culture and history from the society. I recently noted an absence of historical knowledge among tour guides at an historic castle in Britain.

The result of the Labour policies has been prosecution of protesters who oppose Muslim influence while Muslims attack government ministers verbally and collect welfare benefits for their many wives.

Although already married with three children and reportedly living off £700 a month in state benefits, the 31-year-old is seeking more wives, with the intention of fathering more than nine children.

The same courtesy doesn’t extend to non-Muslim protesters collecting petition signatures. The new law is called  the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill and illustrates a fact often unappreciated by Americans. Britain has no “First Amendment” free speech rights. The results are now becoming apparent. A new BBC poll suggests that Britons are worried about racial violence.

Certainly they have seen plenty of evidence recently.

The trial of the airplane would-be bombers.

The 2005 Underground bombings.

There are plenty of warnings. Are they being taken seriously ?

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Posted in education, general, History, terrorism | 3 Comments »

The second era of bacteriology

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

The history of medicine, as distinct from surgery, took giant steps in the 19th century when bacteria were identified and then linked to human illness. Surgery had been able to treat battle wounds for centuries although bacteriology would also lead to major advances there. For the medical doctor, however, there was little that could be accomplished for the sick prior to Louis Pasteur. Medicine in that era was concerned with diagnosis and prognosis, a significant benefit if accurate, which it sometimes was. Treatment was more harmful than effective.

William Withering had introduced the first effective medicine in 1785.

Paracelsus had discovered that mercury would inhibit syphilis in the 14th century but that was the only previous effective use of medicine. It was said, in an era when syphilis was endemic, that “A night with Venus leads to a lifetime with Mercury” as the treatment required continuous use to be effective. There would be no other treatment for syphilis until the 20th century.

Edward Jenner discovered the ability of cowpox infection to prevent the far more dangerous infection of smallpox. These few pioneers were bright supernovae in a dark universe of ignorance. Infectious diseases were the most common cause of death prior to this century.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a chemist who first recognized that living organisms were responsible for such phenomena as fermentation of wine and souring of milk. His research resulted in an age of bacteriology for the next 50 years.

Robert Koch

Robert Koch was a German physician who learned to grow bacteria in cultures that could be purified and subcultured. He established the principles of infection by a specific organism. Pasteur grew bacteria in liquid medium that did not lend itself to purifying cultures. Koch began the use of solid medium and his assistant invented the Petri dish. Koch also discovered the organism that causes cholera, which cannot be grown in artificial culture. It lives only in the human intestine and is transmitted in water supplies contaminated by fecal material.

John Snow

John Snow the founder of epidemiology (along with Florence Nightingale), had identified the connection of cholera to water supplies in 1859 but he could not go further because bacteria had not yet been discovered.

The microscope, especially after improvements by Joseph Jackson Lister allowed these men to see the bacteria in wounds, diseased organs and rotting flesh. Lister’s son would add the first great step in treating these diseases.

Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister, the son, was an orthopedic surgeon who learned to prevent infection by applying carbolic acid to compound fracture wounds after the fracture had been reduced. Lister was still somewhat vague about the organisms he was treating because they were still poorly visualized. In fact, that lack of proof caused great resistance to his innovation.

Hans Christian Gram

In 1884, Hans Christian Gram discovered that some bacteria would stain blue with crystal violet and that this characteristic was related to other features of the organism. A powerful new tool was available to bacteriologists called Gram staining.

The era of the bacteriologist reached its pinnacle when Koch described the tuberculosis organism in 1882 , proving that “consumption” was an infection, and then Pasteur was able to prevent rabies with a vaccine. Unfortunately, Koch’s career ended with a bit of farce as he announced a cure for tuberculosis that was, in fact, no such thing. He fled with a girlfriend to Egypt proving there is nothing new under the sun. His other innovations survived.

Domagk

Vaccines would dominate medicine until the discovery of antibiotics, first by Domagk, , when he discovered the sulfa drugs in 1937. A German physician, he was not permitted by Hitler to accept the Nobel Prize and was awarded the Prize after the war.

Alexander Fleming

Even before Domagk’s discovery, in 1928, Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin but did not follow up his discovery after a few tentative attempts at treatment.

Howard Florey

Ten years later, Howard Florey, an Australia physician at Oxford, resumed study of penicillin with the result that infectious diseases caused by bacteria would recede into a secondary role in medicine. Other antibiotics were discovered and new ones continue to be synthesized. Cancer, and other degenerative diseases, became the most common causes of death.

The New Era

Carl Woese

In 1977, a microbiologist named Carl Woese proposed a new kingdom of biology. It was called Archaea and he met considerable resistance at first. They are also called Extremeophiles as they were often found in extreme environments such as steam vents on the ocean floor, or in national park geysers, with temperatures at far above boiling. Bacteria and most other forms of life could not exist there because proteins denature at temperatures well below those found in these environments. However, it was soon found that these organisms are widely distributed and some are quite common, such as Methanococcus, which makes swamp gas by metabolizing rotting vegetation and producing methane gas. Some varieties are even found in the gut of cows.

The genomes of over 50 varieties have now been sequenced and similarities with higher life forms have been found, placing them between the bacteria and higher forms. They may well represent the first life forms and there is a possibility that similar organisms may be found on other planets. Since some of these organisms are capable of synthesizing carbon chains, like those in oil, the secret of the energy crisis may be found here. Some of them are capable of scrubbing CO2 from the exhaust of coal burning power plants. Some are capable of making methane (natural gas) from coal without burning at all. This may even be possible without digging up the coal. For example, it is now known that Archaea organisms are still making methane in abandoned coal mines. This creates danger for anyone entering these old mines but may provide a source of natural gas from residual coal that was left behind. In the future, it may be possible to inject coal deposits with the culture of Archaea and collect the gas without ever digging a mine or stripping surface layers above the coal.

The possibility of processing nuclear waste should not be ignored. The organism survives in a high radiation environment and other Archaea are capable of generating electricity in fuel cells

The future is with biotechnology and the limits are not yet visible. We are entering the second Age of Bacteriology

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Posted in medical history, medicine, science | 5 Comments »

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