The World Food Crisis

[brought to you by the war-on-warming]

Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble.

Last year, the food import bill of developing countries rose by 25 percent as food prices rose to levels not seen in a generation. Corn doubled in price over the last two years. Wheat reached its highest price in 28 years. The increases are already sparking unrest from Haiti to Egypt. Many countries have imposed price controls on food or taxes on agricultural exports.

Last week, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, warned that 33 nations are at risk of social unrest because of the rising prices of food. “For countries where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption, there is no margin for survival,” he said.

The rich world is causing this situation by supporting the production of biofuels. The International Monetary Fund estimates that corn ethanol production in the United States accounted for at least half the rise in world corn demand in each of the past three years. This elevated corn prices. Feed prices rose. So did prices of other crops — mainly soybeans — as farmers switched their fields to corn, according to the Agriculture Department...

[again: dumbest idea in the history of this {or for all we know, any} planet - yet watch how long it takes our 'leaders' to admit it and undo it]

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Global Warming 101: Professor Carter Explains Climate Realism

For years the foreign press outlets have been doing a far better job of covering both sides of the manmade global warming debate than American media. Friday was a perfect example as New Zealand television's "Nzone Tonight" broadcast an interview with Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University, Queensland, Australia.

As you watch the video embedded to the right [follow link], notice the respect and courtesy Carter is given by host Allan Lee as he calmly and methodically explained the position of climate realists without being insulted or referred to as a "denier."

Compare that to the disgraceful job ABC's Dan Harris did last month when he interviewed Dr. S. Fred Singer on "World News" in a segment entitled "Welcome to 'The Denial Machine'" that actually began:

"One of the most influential scientists in what's been called "The Denial Machine," for decades, Fred Singer has argued loudly that global warming is not dangerous despite the vast majority of scientists who agree it is. His critics say Dr. Singer has helped create the mirage of a scientific debate which has preventing the American public and American politicians from taking action."

With this in mind, I challenge American television news outlets to reciprocate, and begin interviewing climate realists on the air, with courtesy and decorum, so that the citizenry can better understand all the intricate facets of the real science involved in this matter...

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Congress Picks a Loser

Congress doesn’t trust consumers to make the right decision when it comes to selecting the right source of energy. Congress knows better. That’s why legislation out of Capitol Hill is all about weaning us off oil and putting us directly on a “renewable energy” diet.

Witness the energy tax bill the House passed in February that slaps $18 billion in taxes on oil production to fund wind, solar, biofuels, and other “alternative” sources.

Witness the new energy law passed in December mandating that Americans increase the use of ethanol and other biofuels at the pump to 36 billion gallons by 2022, up from 7 billion gallons required now. And witness the new farm bill that gives corn growers $10.5 billion in subsidies over the next five years, no matter how fast the price of corn rises—which, incidentally, has gone from $3.50 a bushel to a record $5.50 over the past three months.

The problem is that Congress, unlike consumers who make decisions based on price and availability rather than political pressures, gets it egregiously – and damagingly – wrong...

[and then defends their ideas to death. a 57% increase to corn prices in three months, producing 7B gallons/yr. - what's it going to be like in 2022 at 36B gallons/yr.? this is insanity - which you are going to pay for ]

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COMPETITION SOLVES HEALTH CARE

For all the rhetoric of "change," this election is a contest between two very old, and very important, competing visions of government.

Free-market thinkers have a clear and compelling case that the problems in our health care system do not represent a failure of markets, but a failure of government. For example:

• While government's role in health care has expanded -- one out of two health care dollars is now spent by the government -- health care has become more expensive, less efficient, and less accessible.
• Health insurance premiums have nearly doubled since 2000 while inflation grew at 18 percent and wages grew by 20 percent.

A market-based system that would unleash the power of innovation and competition in health care is within reach - a key reform would involve transferring health care tax benefits to individuals rather than employers:

• McCain's plan would do that by providing every American with a tax credit of $2,500 per individual ($5,000 per family) to buy their own insurance plan.
• Switzerland, hardly a bastion of conservatism, has used a similar individual-based model where costs are 50 percent less than in America, with better outcomes.

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The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilised by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security. Why has this happened so quickly? What caused the prices to rise?

Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, puts the rise in the price of commodity crops such as wheat down to a number of factors: higher demand for grain to feed livestock in China, where increasing affluence means more people want to eat meat; drought in Australia for three years, meaning it has had to import wheat; market jitters brought on by the sight of several countries stopping exporting grain; speculators seeing a chance to make money; and, of course, the sudden extra demand for food crops such as maize for use in biofuels, in both Europe and the United States.

A few years ago, he points out, no one could have predicted that we would be aiming to produce five to 10 per cent of our petrol and diesel from crops.

[note who's talking - chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, yet what's missing from the list of causes? Global Warming (we had a heavy rainfall year except for Australia). Isn't that strange. Well - it's kind of there - our war on warming looks to have its first true casualties (and they aren't bears)...][BTW: genetically modified food holds the best promise to feeding the world, but alas, that's not allowed either - for equally scientific reasons {bad policies have bad consequences}]

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CNN: Media Deserve 'Shame' for 'Complicity' w/ Dems Ignoring Immigration

On Tuesday's Lou Dobbs Tonight, which was repeated on Sunday, CNN host Dobbs chided the media for not including illegal immigration in exit polls of Democratic voters simply because Democratic candidates have avoided discussing the issue. Dobbs:

"Would it surprise you if I were to tell you right here in front of God and everybody I had to convince CNN a couple of years ago to include illegal immigration in a poll because we didn't even in this organization believe it was an important issue, some of us didn't?"

He even got Schneider to agree with his contention that the media's "complicity with that motive" of the Democratic candidates in ignoring the issue should "bring a sense of shame to these [media] organizations."

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Firefighters fined for speeding to blazes

Firefighters are being issued speeding tickets by the NSW Government for rushing to life-threatening emergencies in fire engines. In an astounding case of bureaucracy gone mad, the Government is sending infringement notices to the homes of individual fire truck drivers. It is then left up to the officers to sign statutory declarations or take the matter to court to avoid paying fines.

[this is government, eventually, any country. Healthcare anyone?]

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Bullies

Our legal system invites lawyers to act like bullies. Only in America can I sue you for dubious reasons, force you to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers (not to mention the psychic costs -- the anxiety and lost sleep that lawsuits create), and when a judge rules that my claim is bunk, I don't even have to say "sorry." I can blithely move on to sue someone else. In other countries, I would have to pay your legal fees to at least compensate you for some of the financial damage I caused. "Loser pays," it's called.

The trial lawyers have even gamed the language. They call "loser pays" the "English Rule," as if it's some weird British law. But it's not. It's really the Rest of the World Rule. America is the odd man out because we rarely punish litigators who misuse force.

America needs judges willing to say no to the lawyer bullies. America also needs "loser pays." Otherwise, the parasites will bully away your money and your choices.

[we also need a law that requires lawyers who sue on their own behalf to also hire attorneys to do so - and so remove the nearly-free cost to them of perpetrating such legal extortion]

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The Washington Monument Strategy...

California

The Washington Monument Strategy is so named for a predictable bureaucratic reaction to any suggestion that a government budget should be reduced. Whenever a Congressman suggested that the National Parks Service budget could be trimmed, the standard bureaucratic response was always, “Well, then we’ll just have to close the Washington Monument.” [aka; 'fire house strategy' at the local level][snip]

“Across-the-board” cuts are the most stupid conceivable way to make budget reductions, because they treat the highest of state priorities the same as the lowest. Thus, instead of making 100 percent cuts in utterly indefensible expenditures like tuition subsidies for illegal aliens and a vast array of duplicative or obsolete state programs, the governor proposes throwing the prison doors open. The governor is obviously employing the Washington Monument Strategy when he proposes releasing 20,000 dangerous felons – including burglars – onto California streets and closing the most popular beaches in Southern California.

Yet he refuses even to consider the obvious question: why should it cost California $42,000 per year to house a prisoner when Florida does it for just $18,000? (When we recalled Davis, California’s cost was $32,000 per year). Last year, the governor had the opportunity to save $7 billion in construction costs and $1 billion in annual operating expenses by contracting out 50,000 prison beds – as many states already do. Instead, he approved a law that makes it impossible to do so. (Click here for my speech to the Senate last April)

So who does he think he’s kidding?

[A: all those who get their news from TV, which undoubtedly will focus on the pain and suffering such uncompassionate across-the-board-cuts will cause... [more, recommended >]

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THE HAZARDS OF TELLING THE TRUTH

Afrocentrism began on college campuses in the 1980s and gained astonishing momentum with the publication of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" (1989). Though the arguments were contradictory and scattered, the point was that Western civilization had been founded on materials and discoveries borrowed or stolen from black Egyptians.

During this whirlwind of dubious scholarship, the academic world mostly remained silent, hiding behind the curtain of academic freedom and withholding its criticism lest a statement of simple truth be branded "racist". The scholar who did the most to break this silence was Mary Lefkowitz, a classicist at Wellesley College. Outraged by the nonscholarly approach of Afrocentric writers, she somewhat naïvely imagined that facts would put their extreme theories to rest. She noted, for instance:

• Socrates couldn't have been black, as alleged, because his parents were Athenian citizens and blacks, in classical Athens, were not eligible for citizenship.
• Aristotle would have had a tough time stealing his philosophy from the library at Alexandria, since he died before the library was built.

Such arguments went nowhere, Lefkowitz writes, with those who saw Greek philosophy "as yet another case of a colonialist European plundering of Africa."

[after universal vouchers for K-12 we need internet-based college to take professors as much out of the loop as possible]

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New class of campus police is bigger and better-armed

University police departments are bigger and more likely to arm their officers than a decade ago, according to a recent study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Texas, law enforcement departments on college campuses seem to be ahead of this trend, with nearly 94 percent
of surveyed universities arming their police and just as many employing sworn officers. "Texas is Texas: We are a state that has firearms," said Bill Taylor, chief of police at Rice University, which has sworn and armed officers.

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Gore's Alarmism Failing: Concern for Global Warming Same as 19 Years Ago!

Want to talk about really inconvenient truths?

Well, despite Nobel Laureate Al Gore's massive campaign to scare the world into thinking the planet is facing imminent doom at the hands of global warming, Americans don't seem to be buying it.

In fact, a new Gallup poll released moments ago revealed, "a little more than a third say they worry about [global warming] a great deal, a percentage that is roughly the same as the one Gallup measured 19 years ago."

[don't break out champagne yet: 300M$ a fair chunk of change to sound-bite American TV watchers...]

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