A BBC Poll reveals that the U.S. and globalization is viewed as more harmful than terrorism and war.

Now, the in this country we haven’t had a stellar 4 years (or 60), but in general, we’re just not that bad, especially when viewed with a little relativity. However I can understand that in the heat of the moment people look at the big thing in front of them and focus on it–and it’s no shame to hold us up to the standard we set for ourselves and find us wanting.

What’s remarkable to me about the survey results is that they are almost in 100% opposition to the number of people killed by each problem. Arguably tainted water has killed and continues to kill more people than any other problem in the history of humanity. Bar none. Yet it only beat out migration as a world problem.

By comparison, the US and terrorists together have managed to kill only a few thousand people in the last three years, even if you account for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as 9/11 and the Madrid bombing–even if you include the death penalty. That’s sad, but it accounts for something like 0.000003 percent of the world’s population, even if you assume the total is on the order of 20,000.

But tainted water (and water-borne diseases) and illiteracy kill millions every year. Globalization is negatively correlated with illiteracy and tainted water. Yet Globalization is right behind the U.S. as a world problem. Assume 20 million in the same time period, and it’s 0.003 percent of the world’s population. Looks small, but it’s many orders of magnitude larger.

I’d say it should make everyone think, but with my previous post as evidence, people don’t seem to be in much of a mood for reflection.

In Salon, a woman learns her therapist likes Rush Limbaugh and freaks out. Make this her PhD-having urban Jewish therapist.

The writer doesn’t learn this at first, of course–she has several months of insightful therapy (so she says), then in the process of complaining about her husband comes the revelation:

“He’s a loving, caring, selfless man — but his politics are all about hatred,” I said. “He’s not educated, and more significant, he’s ignorant — he actually listens to Rush Limbaugh.”

I waited for a “Whoo boy!” or a sympathetic smile, but my shrink just stared at me, expressionless.

“I assume you’re not a Limbaugh fan,” I ventured, assured that this woman, so nuanced in her thinking, couldn’t possibly be a Dittohead. She was so reasonable that I couldn’t imagine her getting off on Rush’s demented tirades. She didn’t seem square enough for his politics, and I was certain no hate radio fan was capable of her intellectual sophistication. Besides, she was an educated urban Jewish professional, and Rush’s audience consisted largely of white suburban males.

She held my gaze a few excruciating seconds longer. “Actually, I am,” she said.

Now, there are two ways the writer could have taken this:

1. Freak out and never get over the fact that this woman could simultaneously hold right-wing views and yet not drool or club the writer about the head while screeching, “Obey! Obey! Obey!”
2. Take this as an opportunity to do the sort of introspection and questioning of assumptions that a mature, sensitive, educated person should do.

So it’s Salon–guess which option she took.

Actually, she took a variation on option 1, in true Salon fashion: she freaked out and then endlessly agonized and moaned about it in self-concious and very public Soulful Angst. Yet this woman never once in the article seems to question her assumptions, even though she baldly states the contradictions several times.

I’ve encountered this–supposedly educated people who assume that their echo-chamber is all there is, and if you aren’t an intellectual clone with only mild differences in emphasis of concern, you are obviously Not Intelligent. And if you’re Not Intelligent, you’re, well, just a teensy bit less than human.

The funny thing is, of course, that conservatives have much the same but mirror image views of liberals. “Them pointy-headed types get themselfs all mixed up with that book larnin’ and fergit common sense.” They view liberals as some sort of Satanic Moth–fascinating to look at for the irridescent spectacle but insidious if you discover them in your closet, leading to moral decay and naughty bits being shown in public.

I have seen intelligent, sensitive people who have divergent views on just about everything. Godwin’s Law states that whoever brings up Hitler or the Nazis in a political argument has left the bounds of reasonable discourse and the opponent should win by default. However, we need Hitler, because he’s the only guy we can all agree we hate. Lots of people to this day make excuses for Stalin–he doesn’t provoke the same instinctive disgust for them that, say, Ronald Reagan does.

I find myself more willing to forgive a closed-minded attitude in conservatives, as they don’t claim to be more intelligent, better educated, and more compassionate. But the writer of the Salon piece would do well to actually turn that brain power she alleges she has to a bit of self-reflection: perhaps her assumption that everyone who doesn’t share her exact political views isn’t automatically evil, stupid, incompetent, ignorant, or aching to revive the Third Reich. Especially as she’s married to one such.

I’d say to the same to conservatives, but everybody knows they can’t even read, let alone use computers. Chuh!

Despite the current demagoguery about gas prices, it turns out that gas prices aren’t really at their highest level ever if you account for inflation. However, they are rising, partly due to the annual price rise as refineries switch to EPA-mandated summer reformulations, partly due to gas taxes, and partly due to increased demand from China and other countries coupled with a reduction in supply by OPEC.

So Kerry plans to pressure OPEC and invade the national strategic oil reserve (by halting additions to it) to reduce US demand, a dubious strategy. But he does want to lower prices. So why aren’t environmental groups protesting?

In the past, environmental groups argued for higher gas prices. Sure, they prefer taxation to market rises in the price, but nonetheless, they want it. As a way of reducing oil consumption, they’re right: gasoline demand may be inelastic, but that doesn’t mean it never changes. Higher prices will cause people to conserve their trips and buy more fuel-efficient cars. It happened in the late 70s and early 80s when Japan’s econoboxes became popular cars due solely to gas mileage.

In the recent past, we’ve actually had some of the lowest gasoline prices ever, and that has fueled the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs, also much decried by environmental groups. I share their antipathy toward SUVs, though not their desire to use the government to force manufacturers to stop making them. I’d much prefer that the government simply cease subsidizing them by giving them preferential treatment under fuel economy and safety regulations. This is what many environmental groups have called for, but many of them would go further, and I wouldn’t.

So now price increases are hurting the poor soccer mom and her monster SUV that she uses to take her 80-pound son to soccer practice along with is one-pound soccer ball and nothing else. Awwww. As Nelson would say, “Ha-ha!” Screw you and your asshole driving habits, SUV lady. Eat high gas prices.

But apparently I’m alone in celebrating this and criticizing Kerry, who is supposed to be a member of the party that is friend to the environment, for supporting continued SUV subsidies through artificially cheap gas prices. So where are they? I haven’t seen a single word in the major press from them.

Now it could be that none of the factors I’ve mentioned above are responsible and all the price rises are due to Dick Cheney’s friends screwing the American consumer for their own greed. Still, whatever the reason, environmental groups should welcome anything that will take SUVs off the road and make people drive less. It doesn’t matter why, as long as it happens.

I Admit It, I’m Being Disingenuous

Now obviously these groups think they will get more with Kerry than they will with Bush, so they want to remain silent in the hopes of getting him elected. But couldn’t he pound Bush for saddling people with SUVs by refusing to regulate them as passenger cars instead of saying “I’ll lower your gas prices more than Bush will! I’m a bigger Republican than he!” Surely some environmental group could at least release something blaming SUV popularity for the negative effects of gas price increases, adding a nice little “I told you so,” as I have above.

Still, it would be very nice to see a little ideological consistency out of them. If I can’t count on Democrats to be Democrats when it counts, then how can I count on them the rest of the time?

Looks like Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski has publically criticized the Bush administration’s WMD justification for war in Iraq. However, they are not planning on pulling out troops.

Partially this is a “well, duh” moment, but when as staunch an ally as Poland begins to be critical, it does not spell Good Things for the “coalition of the willing.”

Thanks to Oscar for the link.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cohen cites a paper that contrasts health data in Russia and the former Soviet Union with Poland and the Eastern Bloc countries that were essentially captured by Russia at the end of the Second World War.

The results are somewhat surprising. Given Poland’s greater growth, one might expect people at the margins to be healthier, such as the elderly. But it is among young males that the difference is most stark, as Russia has exploded in violence, alcoholism, unsafe sex, and smoking. This despite the fact that Poland opened its markets more completely to cigarette and alcohol advertising (advertising in general is more prevalent in Poland than in Russia).

The conclusion is that democracy and free markets are healthier than unfree markets and despotism, despite the relative availability of things to damage ourselves with.

I point to this mainly because the argument against shock therapy as opposed to gradualist reform has been that a sudden transformation to a free market is too hard on people. I have no doubt that it is in the short term psychologically harder than gradualism, but the data both within the two groups of countries and between supports the hypothesis that any delay in reform hurts far more than it helps.

I can assure you that despite the smaller moves toward a free market, even by 1993 Russians I met were far more distressed and discombobulated by changes than Poles I met. This also cannot be accounted for simply by arguing about relative wealth–the health statistics before transformation were roughly equivalent between Poland and Russia.

My hypothesis at the time was that the degree to which a country implemented and stuck to shock therapy was proportional to the amount of progress they made by the mid-nineties. Recent policy changes in the Eastern Bloc countries has damped the affects, but it still appears to be roughly true.

Shock therapy may cause you momentary mental distress, but in the long run, it’s much better for you.

This time, Salon bites the big one over Spain vs. al Qaeda. They claim that since Spain is taking away European support for the war, it is undoing al Qaeda’s raison d’etre.

Contrast this with Virginia Postrel’s link to a Washington Post piece by Fareed Zakaria (linked to her post because the WP tends to expire pieces quickly) that states, in part:

Al Qaeda’s declaration of jihad had, as its first demand, the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden does not seem to have noticed, but the troops are gone — yet the jihad continues. The reasons come and go, the violence endures.

The point being that our Yemeni friend doesn’t really care if his specific demands are met; only that his larger goal of provoking a war between radical Islam and everybody else is met, with him becoming the Caliph of the Umma, or body of Muslim believers. So all Spain is doing is saying, “Hey, Osama, you’re right, it works! Do it some more!”

People at Salon might want to review the history of aircraft hijackings, particularly in the 1970’s. Left uncontested, they grew more popular as they were a safe and easy way to make money. Then, as stricter security measures were put into place, they declined. Vigorous prosecution and international cooperation did them in until September 11, 2001 saw more hijackings in one day than had taken place in the previous ten years in the U.S.

You don’t have to say “Bush is right” to acknowledge that capitulating to terrorist demands is counterproductive–tragically so. I beleive the U.S. was wrong to go into Iraq since the claims of WMDs have proven false. That doesn’t mean I think that prosecuting terrorists by military as well as legal means isn’t valid, or that part of that means not being seen to give in to their demands. Like it or not, the Bush administration wasn’t seen to be giving into their demands when it pulled out of Saudi in the wake of the Iraq war. It may have been, but it wasn’t seen to be, since it was busy cheesing them off in other ways.

Nor does vulnerability in Europe depend solely on a country’s stance on Iraq. France has already been warned that, despite its very public support of Palestine and opposition to the U.S. on Iraq, it faces terrorism in response to its decision to ban head-scarves and other overtly religious symbols from public schools. Spain’s move makes it more likely that France will suffer for its secularism.

Is that what people at Salon really want? Seriously, guys, stop and think about it for just a second. You can be internationalist without bending over and spreading ’em for every armed thug on the planet.

Update: The link to Virginia Postrel’s piece was wrong; I fixed it.

…and this news report on the Coalition of Unconcerned Americans emphasizes that. I particularly like going to talk to your elected representatives about something other than politics.

Anything to keep them from “helping” us. Only one in ten of us really like that sort of thing, anyway.

I want to joke about this, but it’s truly disgusting.

A UK government trainer that taught young girls how to avoid pedophiles has been sentenced to seven years in jail.

Sure, I guess the person with the most knowledge to train people on how to avoid child molesters is a child molester. You’d think that they would screen just a BIT more carefully. I don’t know if the British system is like the American one, where we were taught all about strangers, when most molesters are friends, family, or authority figures such as, apparently “child molestation avoidance trainers.”

Just more evidence, if any were needed, that giving a function to the government is no more a guarantee of quality or diligence or lack of criminality than giving it to anybody besides the mafia.

Two things I saw/read in the past two days are just clear examples of people Not Getting It.

The most recent was this Salon piece on the Oscars™®^{patent pending}, LLC, and how "boring" it was, mainly because Lord of the Rings swept, but also because the show was family-friendly. Fair enough, though why anybody watches the Oscars is beyond me in the first place so I can’t comment.

But this comment was the kicker:

Actually, I think the horrendous cash success of The Passion of The Mel was responsible for all possible fun being extracted from this year’s ceremony — cranky old Oscar figured out that most of America hates sex, dancing, gay people, ethnic people, ribald or drug-related humor, and opinionated or irreverent takes on current political events, so the golden man decided to show us just how well-behaved and self-censoring he be; Hollywood fidgeted like kids in Sunday school, and us unwashed heathen out here in TV land had to resort to binge drinking.

Well, sure, the success of The Snuffing of the Jesus is doubtless sending shockwaves through Hollywood, who evidently haven’t been looking at the receipts that NASCAR gets for the past 20 years. But, c’mon, ribald and ethnic humor have enemies that are much closer to home. Ring! Political Correctness called, and it wants its vacuous Hollywood starlets to denounce making fun of the homeless again. The buildup of umbrage at all humor has been a car bought, paid for, and driven by the Left for the last 30 years. The Right has just successfully managed to hitchhike and convince the Left that it can drive for a while. Apart from Fox News, the Right hasn’t even bought any gas.

The other big “Duh” moment was Sunday night before I went out to dinner during the Show I Am Not Officially Licensed to Name, when Andy Rooney demonstrated that simply living on Earth longer than Strom Thurmond does not bring wisdom. He was whining per usual, this time about commercials before movies. That’s a trend that was imported from Europe, the bastion of all that’s culturally significant, such as Survivor. And it was started four or five years ago. But hey, professional journalism is showing us it’s Johnny-on-the-spot and soon they’ll call the 2000 election.

So Andy proceeds to call up the seventh-largest theater chain in the nation and ask one of the top guys there why they don’t do it. The guy explains that he doesn’t think it will bring in as much revenue as it will lose and thinks that, given a choice, people will come to his theaters since they don’t show commercials.

So the seventh-largest chain in the country has figured out that this cheeses people off, and in a customer-centric business it’s not a good idea to cheese your customers off. That point was made, among others, in 1776 by Adam Smith (no relation that I know of) and is obvious, though often missed. Does Andy Rooney confidently predict the death of commercials before films and encourage other chains to do the same?

Noooooo…Andy says the words that have done more to encourage petty and not-so-petty tyrants since the first caveman bonked another on the head and was called statesmanlike for it, “There oughtta be a law…” Now, he didn’t call for a ban on commercials–I guess too ironic even for a guy admittedly appearing on a show entitled 60 Minutes, 15 of which are commercials–but he called for a law that says that only the time the movie actually begins can be advertised.

Um…Andy, you just demonstrated that, long before the lumbering leviathan of Government can react, the market has already begun to redress the problem. The SEVENTH-LARGEST chain in the USA does not show commercials. If people want to watch commercials, they’ll go to a chain with them. If they don’t, they’ll go to a chain without. It’s actually more democratic than democracy, and it’s called…shhhhh…the market. I know it’s a dirty word (see point above about who’s really been censoring America), but, c’mon, you just demonstrated how quickly it works, and how much faster than government it responds.

Here’s another hint, Andy–most people are smarter than you. They don’t show up to see all the commercials, except when they think it will be crowded and want a good seat. They already know there are 15 minutes of commercials and previews, and adjust their schedule accordingly. If people who think NASCAR is entertaining can figure this out, then surely a senile old reporter could stop transcribing press releases to flesh out his copy long enough to do the math.

“I’m confused,” said in a smug tone.

Translation:

“My parents made up my mind for me when I was 3 years old, but I’ll feign confusion over a false dichotomy based on fallacious assumptions designed to make me feel better about a choice I never thought about, while pretending I’m part of the intelligensia.”

See also “pseudointellectuals” and “People who think Joseph Campbell is deep.”

PS – I know the Roman numerals are bullshit.

Update: If you’re wondering who Joseph Campbell is, read this. Basically he is the pseudointellectual justification that people who think Star Wars had any validity beyond a range war in space hide behind. He notes that various myths all have heroes in them that…do stuff…and then…learn something. Thank you, Captain Obvious.