Useful Fools

Check out Kultursmog’s piece to get a little perspective on how we are “Losing The Victory.“

Victor David Hanson is one of the best writers on the poorly named “War on Terror.” His latest commentary (which should be read completely) has this nice little tidbit:

French newspapers may blare, “The slowly rotting situation in Iraq, the Mideast and Afghanistan has destroyed the myth American omnipotence,” but they don’t tell us how removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein is worse than selling weapons to them — or why and how France lost 30 times more of its own citizens to heat in a month than we lost soldiers in battle in two years. Apparently French apartments are far more deadly places than the Pakistani border or the Sunni Triangle.

This is not the heart of the article… just funny. Read the whole thing for a nice perspective on our war.

Law professor and master blogger Glen Reynolds makes the interesting point that journalists have no first amendment right to refuse to reveal their sources to police. Furthermore, he points out that a journalist who agrees not to reveal the source of illegal leaks may legally by a co-conspirator. In theory, Novak could be in handcuffs, and he and his fellow leaker receivers in the Wilson controversy could be forced to disclose the identities of the leakers.

Interesting angle!

Danegerus has a good perspective on the definition of poverty in America. Take a look.

In his excellent article on the Left Wing origins of Eugenics, Jon Ray quotes an author who says: “Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand.”

This temporal correlation is more coincidental than causal (with the caveat that rising living standards in the west have resulted in improvements in medical science, causing reduced infant death rates in poor countries).

Rather, the important trend is that rising living standards leads to reduced population growth. Thus the ZPG’ers should be advocating free market capitalism for the world… as people get more prosperous, they have fewer kids.

Also, as infant mortality rates decline, so does the rate of population increase, but there is a lag which results in a temporary population growth bulge.

A German lawyer, in response to another blog entry (German Justice: 2 Days Per Murder), repeated the common European belief that the United States has a much higher crime rate than major European countries. The facts are quite different…

[UPDATE 8/15/2003 - For sources, see end of article]

[Warning: this article is politically incorrect. If you are likely to be offended by this, you need to read it!]
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