Category: Politics

Hoodlum-Loving Pro-Life Ninjas

The reference to ninjas is tucked inside Simcha Fischer’s otherwise apolitical posting of a Loretta Lynn housewife song:

It seems like a pretty good follow-up to the March for Life, doesn’t it?  You know, that day when hundreds of thousands of ninjas march to show their support of women and babies.  I say “ninjas” because they somehow slip by the attention of the media — amazing!  It’s like they were never there.  And yet they get the job done.

Our local March for Life, however, was not entirely ignored by the media.  Our free entertainment weekly, which doubles as our incisive political reporting weekly*, made mention of the event:  Our intrepid reporter tells us that the March happened, and then utterly topples the foundations of the Pro-Life movement, by pointing out that all those aborted babies would have grown up to be criminals anyway.

Not his idea, he was citing Levitt & Dubner in the very famous Freakonomics.  (The hardcover was published William Morrow, 2005.  You can buy other versions now, of course.)  The book doesn’t make any moral prescriptions, by the way — economists general don’t.  But it really does set forth the theory that the drop in the crime rate that occurred in the 1990’s was the direct result of Roe v. Wade.  The idea being that the really bad mothers know they are really bad mothers, so they abort their children rather than raising them up to a life of crime.  And 18 years later, you and I reap the benefits of that instinctive act of preemptive genocide.

If only all those marching ninjas had known!

But all mockery aside, our reporter got to the bizarre heart of the Pro-Life movement: We actually believe that even the children of ne’er-do-wells should not be summarily executed.  We are willing to take the risk that you, child of poverty, decadence, and a very broken home, may or may not live out the hope embodied in your cute little baby smile.

Radical freedom.  The idea that the right to life belongs even the children of those other kinds of people.   The idea that having lousy parents is not, in itself, a capital crime.

And so I’m thankful to our reporter for giving us such a clear vision of the divide.  We see how those who want to apply the abortion chapter of Freakonomics to public policy feel about the human race:  What’s a few million dead bodies, if it lowers the crime rate?

Which explains why you would need thousands upon thousands of ninjas, if you wanted to go head-to-head with a regime like that.

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*I am not kidding about the politics — in addition to vast coverage of bars, restaurants, and services with 1-900 phone numbers, it really is the only local paper that does investigative reporting.  And we wonder why the mainstream newspapers are failing.

nice Haiti riot coverage

The riots are not nice.  The riots are violent and destructive.   But here is some clear, informative coverage of what is going on in Port-Au-Prince. Includes some quotes from peaceful protesters that sums up the situation.

(At least one bloody photo, but it isn’t all that bad.  This guy can take some good photos.  How come mainstream news coverage is always so . . . I don’t know . . . distant?  When you have guys like this on the ground?)

Previous entry explains why all the protests.

how God uses even the grumpy

[Grumpy would be me, not the long-suffering soul to whom I am wed.]

December is our month to send in charitable donations.  We do all gifts in one big batch, because it makes the deciding and record-keeping that much easier.

So the other night the SuperHusband and I sit down for our evening couple time after kids are in bed, and I’m roving through the topics, mostly just exercising my not-so-inner curmudgeon.  No lofty goals intended.  I mention this blog post about expat parties in Haiti.  My conclusion is this:  But really, we’re the same way.  I feel bad for all those poor people, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have my beer.

And SuperHusband, who is a generous and charitable person, says: I’m not sure aid to Haiti really helps.

I concede that there are no doubt problems in Haiti that no amount of aid will fix, but that certain projects, especially certain Christian humanitarian mission projects, are helping.

SuperHusband brings in North Korea.  If you send money to North Korea, it only supports the corrupt regime, and no starving people are saved.

I suspect he is probably correct, but point out that we talking about Haiti tonight, not North Korea.

SuperHusband says that UN aid to Haiti is helping maintain the status quo.

I agree, but observe that for all a UN water truck might discourage the local government from building its own water treatment plant, for the person who will be dead tomorrow without clean water, it might be nice to live long enough to agitate for reform.  But in any case, I am not proposing we send money to the UN.  I would like to send money to some Christian missionaries.

SuperHusband says that he does not believe change can happen from without.  That people must decide for themselves they want change.  Therefore, outside aid is not helpful.

Yes, I say.  I have discovered that every time I try to work through a major policy problem, I keep coming back to how the answer is Jesus.

Yes, he says.

And isn’t it interesting, I say, how the New Testament doesn’t tell us to send extra money to government aid programs.  But curiously, it does tell us Christians to provide for the poor ourselves.  Pure religion is this: providing for the widow and the orphan.

And he says okay.  Send some money to missionaries.

Cholera in Port-au-Prince

Not cheerful reading:  http://goatpath.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/cholera-reaches-port-au-prince-as-victims-are-left-in-mass-graves/

Thanks to the Livesay’s for the link.

UPDATED to add:

Sanitation and the cholera panic from the Mangine’s.  Additional perspective, not graphic.

Here and here are photos of the RHFH Rescue Center’s Cholera House in action.

And if you are a Catholic Relief Services supporter, here’s their report on what they are doing to help curb the spread of the epidemic.

 

Made a section in the sidebar for Haiti blogs, including a few extras I didn’t have on my list the other day. The Pye’s write about their work distributing emergency food aid:

We talked with World Food Program and they said we could use their food if each pastor wrote their name, their church, a phone number, and each person’s name that would receive the food. So we did and we were given hundreds of list; from 14 people to 2,000 people on them. Saturday we started calling pastors. We would get a pile of food together that would feed the number of people on their list. They would come in a vehicle and pick it up. On Saturday we were able to give to 20 pastors food and water for the needy in their congregations.

I think this is a good response to the WSJ op-ed the other day questioning the role of foreign aid.  Using the Pyes as a distribution-point, World Food Bank is getting food into the hands of specific individuals.  There is a mechanism in place for accountability and transparency.  (On the topic of corruption and graft, see Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s  WSJ column today.  Chilling.)

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On another note, I signed up for the Coalition for Clarity.  I’m not usually the joining type, but I make an exception for this worthy cause.  Because you know, torturing people is just plain wrong.  FYI, you don’t need to be catholic to join.   Just as you don’t need to be catholic to know that torture is evil.

Haiti Blogs

Three blogs I’ve been following for Haiti updates:

The Anchoress, who has been posting reports from a friend in Petit Goave.

The Livesay Weblog, missionaries working in Haiti with several ministries — currently running a makeshift hospital at their location.

The Rollings — their ordinary work is making water filters for Clean Water for Haiti, based out of Pierre Payen.

Follow these.  When you can do almost nothing, at least you can know how to pray.

(Thank you to the several people who first pointed me to these.)

Pine Beetles and Climate Change

Listened to Marketplace last night on NPR.  I almost never listen to the radio anymore, as it is difficult to hear an entire story with small children present, and I don’t think the part where I yell at the kids not to interrupt is all that healthy.  So mostly I read.

But last night I happened to catch (most) of an article about how pine trees were dying in Montana due to global warming.  I was stunned — are temperatures really getting so high that pine trees are perishing in the heat??  Maybe I should take this problem more seriously.

No no, it’s that pine beetles are eating them.

Ah.  So, er, what do pine beetles have to do with global warming?  Well, our reporters contend that the 1.something degree rise in global temperature over the past fifty years has suddenly made the pine beetles not get killed off by winter freezes, and hence the attack.

Now if I lived in Montana, I might buy this.  But as it happens, I’m rather familiar with the *southern* pine beetle, which has been on a feeding frenzy for quite awhile now.  (Note to Montana: Start chopping.  Do not leave those dead trees standing there.)  And the thing is, the southeastern US hasn’t had a Montana-style winter in quite a while.  [Thousands of years? Millions? Some geologist please quick speak up.]  So apparently *our* pine beetles are much slower on the uptake than Montana’s . . .  Or else no one is blaming our beetles on global warming, and it’s just a coincidence that Montana gets climate-change beetles, while ours are extra hungry for some other reason.

My reaction?  Linking the pine beetle infestation to global warming is lousy science.  We may or may not be experiencing some kind of human-induced climate-warming.  Or maybe human activity is causing wider swings in weather patterns than in the past (hence, warming and cooling both.)  I’m doubtful, but it could be — I won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.   But claiming anything and everything just must be due to global warming is silly, and ruins the credibility both of the scientists who make these claims, and the journalists who report on them.

That said, as I mentioned, I live with small children, and there’s a chance I missed some pivotal moment in the report when the Marketplace journalists displayed their healthy skepticism.  In which case, good for them.

About that international dateline . . .

I’m looking at my schedule for the weekend, and estimating that ‘Friday’ will show up on this blog sometime Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, my thought for the weekend:

How ’bout a square-feet-per-occupant guideline on that housing bailout?  Not persuaded that the bailing-out is the best way to proceed.   (Said by a person who is very keen on affordable housing and owner-occupied housing.)  But I’m certainly sympathetic to those who were faced with the choice of ‘if you want to own a home, you have to buy at this ridiculous price’.   We were fortunate not to have needed to relocate during the big bubble.

So my thought is this: If I am going to be subsidizing your housing, I would like it to be reasonable housing.  Kind of rankles to imagine someone went out and mortgaged a McMansion, and I have to pay taxes to make sure the poor folks don’t have to downsize to a house like . . . mine.  Just envy speaking, don’t mind me.

Plus I’m curious to see what the government would come up with as a ‘normal’ home.

Ridiculously tired today, and as I’m finally getting around to writing tonight, my head is about as foggy as I’ve ever known it. So rather than try to put together a good article for you (lost cause), I’ll just let loose on something funny I read during the last weeks of the presidential election campaigns.

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So the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the editorial page comparing the two major candidates’ stances on various topics. Shoehorned into the ‘education’ category was the topic of volunteering. Working from memory, here’s the executive summary:

McCain: Tells people they really ought to volunteer more.

Obama: Plans to expand the Peace Corps and launch a handful of similar government-run, tax-funded volunteer organizations to target other areas of need (education, local community service, etc.). Encourage mandatory ‘volunteering’ by tying certain federal education funding to community service requirements for students.

Not to jump all over our president-elect (really, if this were his only fault, I’d be a very happy person), but what?! It’s volunteering. I have never, ever, in all my long life, had difficulty finding an outlet for my freely-offered labor. Hard time finding a paying job? Yes. Yes indeed. Hard time finding people willing to hire me for no pay? Nope. Not once.

And here we are, a government in debt, with expensive wars and corporate bailouts going on, and we are going to spend more money on more programs . . . so people can work for no pay? Um, really, they can do that without a government program. If you have to pay people to do a given job, it is not actually volunteering. It is a federal program that pays a very low wage.

(–> Now if what you want is a low-wage jobs program, just come out and say so.)

I expect the origin of this particular plank of the campaign platform came from two bad habits we’ve gotten into. The first, is thinking that if our country has a problem, or a perceived problem in this case, the president ought to have a plan for how to fix it. When really, some of the time, the president ought to look us sternly in the face and say:

Well, get your act together.

But I suppose that is not very popular with voters, and we have thus trained our candidates to pretend they can fix us.

And then from there, it is only a matter of what kind of fix the candidate is used to tossing out. As a democrat, a shiny new program, or a beefed-up old program, is just the thing. If a republican felt the need to propose a fix, it would be a tax deduction, a tax credit, or maybe a special law allowing employers in certain altruistic industries to hire workers at lower-than-minimum wage.

[Republicans are at an advantage in this particular example, because we already have the tax deduction thing in place. Now they can just smile and tell their voter base to go start a 501(c)3 and be done with it. I agree. But don’t kid yourselves, if republican voters were still itching for more help in the ‘volunteering’ department, I am sure, just sure, there is a way to make a corporate subsidy for the purpose.]

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What significance for the junior economist? Well, a couple summary points:

Our candidates can’t necessarily add, it isn’t your imagination. I think ‘economic platform’ ought to be read as a kind of form of poetry, one of those genres that you must not read literally. Luckily much of what they put on their economic platforms would never pass through congress anyhow, so in the off chance they really mean what they say (the policy-platform equivalent of discovering that someone really does have butterflies in their stomach, or that cats and dogs truly are falling from the sky), there is still hope that it won’t come to pass.

Really smart people can still come up with dumb ideas. (Just ask my children about their mother.) As I mentioned in my ‘why economics is so confusing’ post, sometimes when something doesn’t make any sense to you, it is because it doesn’t make any sense, period.

If we voters actually want ‘change’, we are some of the people who are going to have to change. We can’t be pushing for a federal program or a new law or some other government action every time we see a problem, and then be surprised that our politicians are always trying to come up with new programs and laws for us. Do you want a shorter tax form? Quit asking for so many tax credits.

–> And so long as we evaluate a candidate’s stance on a given issue based on whether they voted to fund this or that special program, or put into place this or that new law, we are going to keep getting the programs and laws. It is entirely possible to be, say, in favor of helping the poor, without necessarily voting in favor of every bill that is labeled ‘help for the poor’.

And this last bit is tricky. Because if your representative voted against this or that social justice bill, how do you know whether it was because of an anti-social-justice bias, or just a disagreement with that particular bill? It means you have to know the candidate much better, over a much longer term. Which is not easy.

Don’t Make Me Take You To Nebraska

Like something out The Onion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that parents — even those from out of state — are taking advantage of a loophole in Nebraska’s new Safe Haven law in order to drop off their teenagers. Apparently the legislature wants to close the loophole.

I’m a bit mystified. On the one hand, I understand that when you set up a law intending to protect newborns from abuse and infanticide, it is disconcerting to discover that all the ‘wrong’ people are taking advantage of your law. On the other hand, if you’ve just uncovered a serious societal problem, covering it back over hardly seems like the solution.

–> And frankly, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The abuse, abandonment, and even murder by parents of older children is not exactly news. What is new, is that instead of waiting for the authorities to discover the abuse and take action after the fact, parents in Nebraska now have an option for coming forward for help before the problem reaches the danger point. I can see arguments for why the Safe Haven law is not the best mechanism for abuse-prevention of older children, but I don’t see why it is such a terrible thing. It seems to me that it is doing a valuable service.

The Journal reports that 19 children have been dropped off since the law went into place in July. Not an insignificant number [though nearly half of them apparently came from a single family – the father was feeling overwhelmed after the death of his wife – so take the total figure as not quite representative of the number of families involved], but given that the Nebraska foster care system is currently serving some 6,000 children, and the state is not reporting that the system is overloaded, this is hardly a dire emergency. It seems to me that rather calling a special session of the legislature to quick close the loophole, better to take the time to understand the situation and figure out how to best address the whole problem.