Thou shalt not buy
Chi Trib headline today, “Congress seeks limits on sales of cold drugs,” leads my friend Jake (not his real name) to wonder if they mean hot ones, the kind sold by email all the time.
Another thing, on apparently (but maybe not) entirely different topic, he reads in F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1973), p. 160, n. 3, what A.V. Dicey wrote long ago:
The beneficial effect of State intervention [seeking of limits on drug sales?], especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie outside our sight. . . . . Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favour upon government intervention.
This natural bias can be counteracted only by the existence, in a given society, . . . of a presumption or prejudice in favour of individual liberty [even when buy cold (or hot) drugs?], that is of laissez faire.
In other words, a law seems like a good thing at the time, but watch out.
As for Dicey,
[a]n 'Old Liberal' in the 1850s, [he] was disenchanted with [John S.] Mill by the 1880s. Dicey divided the nineteenth century into 3 phases - 'old Toryism' up to 1830, 'Individualism' or 'Benthamism' up to 1870, succeeded by 'Collectivism'. His analysis was highly influential in shaping subsequent perceptions of the century's political development, and his work marked English political language before 1914. Other works include Conflict of Laws (1896) and Law and Public Opinion in England (1905) [cited above].
Hmmm.
Delicate confrontation
Too clever by half, brandishing my twenty at the teller’s counter in anticipation of many happy hours washing and drying, I asked the nice lady, “How are your quarters today?”
She might have said, “Fresh,” with a dash of double entendre, but simply smiled tolerantly and asked, “Two?”
Dear Reader, she had that right, and in seconds I was back on the street, two rolls in my pocket and the sun in my face as I headed homeward.
Cynthia rebuts
More on the flu business, replying to Marta:
While it’s true that antibiotics do not treat viruses, it is still true that the reason more people live older today is because of antibiotics. (And there are plenty of antivirals now available, both natural and chemical, but that’s another discussion.) A vastly higher percentage of the population is now growing old than has ever been experienced in the history of the world. This is not just an opinion, but the results of research at the University of Chicago, where they are studying the aging process both for individuals and population groups.
Everyone I know who gets flu shots gets the flu. Only the people I know who don’t get flu shots but boost their immune systems stay well. This is the choice I’ve made.
The thing that concerns me is that it is beginning to look like flu shots will be mandated. They should still be a choice. They do contain mercury, they do have a well-established track record of causing flu in a lot of those who get the shots. They also are very often not for the type of flu that strikes in a given year. They do, however, boost the immune systems of some older patients, and of those some don’t develop flu after getting the shot, and therefore shots may have value for some. They should still be a choice, and more information should be published about other options.
And there should be lots less hysteria. The avian flu virus is predicted to mutate so that it will afflict humans, but it hasn’t done it yet. We are now at the point where everything is a crisis, and the media try to cause panic at every event. Of course, as the President tries to react to the panic, he has now come under attack for making the drug companies rich. That’s the other thing the media like to do — make everything a political football.
So whichever way you fall on the shot/no shot debate, at least don’t panic, and don’t blame the President.
Pandemic flu advice trashed . . .
. . . by Cynthia Clampitt, who says of the experts cited in “Plans to fight pandemic flu must focus on senior citizens, of whom I said I was suspicious:
And they get their info wrong right off the bat. Seniors are NOT healthier and they are NOT living longer. The reason the expected life span has gone up in the last hundred years is because we’re not losing everyone at age 10 to polio, scarlet fever, etc. The seniors who would have lived, despite those diseases, are just as healthy and living just as long as before, but all those people who would have been picked off by childhood diseases have given us a much weaker older population. That’s the reason we’re seeing so much more disease in the aging population — we don’t see more dementia because of McDonald’s, we see more dementia because a vastly higher percentage of the population is living older. And the reason fewer people die from flu today is not because we have more seniors, it’s because we have antibiotics. Penicillin wasn’t discovered until 1928, so of course more people died of the flu (and other diseases) in 1918.
So, if they’ve got that wrong, what else do they not know? And since the flu shot contains mercury, what are we going to be battling in the future because people got the shots?
Best bet is just to keep your immune system pumped during the coming months (good vitamins and supplements, eat your veggies, and avoid sugar — because sugar trashes your immune system). You may never catch it. If you do, go to the doctor.
Why don’t they ever suggest the simple, inexpensive route to avoiding problems?
More, from Reader Marta, picking up on the above:
Interesting thoughts, Jim, but a bit off-base. The flu is a virus and does not respond to antibiotics. Penicillin would have no impact on the flu, avian or otherwise. I did my Master's capstone project on the effectiveness of flu shots in preventing absenteeism in a healthy working population. Although the study revealed no significant difference in rates of absenteeism between those getting the shots and those who did not, I still line up every year for my shot. Back in the 60s, I was the only person in my dorm who did not get the Hong Kong flu - because I had gotten the shot at St. Francis Hospital where I worked.
I'm suspicious
“Plans to fight pandemic flu must focus on senior citizens” — Sun-Times headline 11/5/05. What are they going to do to us? Send us outside in the cold and not let us talk to anyone?
The story's the thing
Novelist Anne Rice is something else for our days of sturm, drang, and sex, to judge by Frank Wilson’s review of her Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in Phila. Inquirer, “With Jesus himself telling his story, Anne Rice scores a hit.”
This telling a story on its own terms is or has not been where it's at. It’s been agenda, agenda, agenda; make your point, etc. in too many circles. As I gather from this review , Rice has told the story with her accustomed literacy, looking at Jesus of the gospels and not blinking. That's childlike in the sense Himself used in his "suffer the little children," etc.
While we’re at this, note Wilson’s literary blog “Books, Inq. A behind-the-scenes look at a book-review editor's world,” he being the Inquirer’s book editor.
Site for sore minds
Let us hear it for Lowell Anderson’s Braveneworld, which is funny, funny, funny. He’s a onetime Lutheran minister now in Florida, allowing his mind to run riot, which in his case is a good thing.
Important message
The only person getting his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
– Much quoted joke, can be found at Profession Jokes
– Used by Indira Gandhi and who knows whom else?
PENNSYLVANIA CARRIES ON
A "pooper scooper" violation was reported by the Manheim (Pa.) Borough Police in the Lititz Record Express for 11/3/05. The incident on Oct. 8 at 9:05 a.m. was corroborated by a witness. The violator was a 36-year-old woman.
Another offender, male, 51, was nabbed for excessive volume on his stereo. It was a second offense.
Elsewhere in the borough, a male high school student, 16, was cited for harrassment after elbowing a fellow student in the face. The defense will be that his face got in the way of his elbow. This is the classic definition of freedom to move around the country: put your face anywhere you want but not in the trajectory of someone else’s elbow.
The same goes for the case of the female complainant who answered the door of her residence on Sunhill Road and encountered a male, 43, who screamed at her and grabbed her hair and began pulling her around. What was her hair doing in his fist?
In the Lititz Borough, on the other hand, where drunk driving was on the upswing, there were also possession, harrassment, and "disorderly teen" charges. The latter was filed against a middle school student, 13, who started his day (9:19 a.m.) by screaming and throwing things in the classroom. It was not a first offense for this student.
All the above was learned while waiting for flight to Chicago, which was finally announced for "Chicago O’Hara." The mistake is natural in a Philadelphia where Cardinal O’Hara once cut a large swath and the high school named after him is a household word. No such excuse was available for Mayordaley I, who always called it O’Hara Field.
SOME ODDS, SOME ENDS . . .
The name escapes me now, but F. Scott Fitzgerald had a Minnesota contemporary who, wealthy, did not have to write for money and (therefore?) never realized his full promise.
Anthony Hecht’s poetry was very violent. He described the torture death of a Roman emperor captured by a Persian king in excruciating detail, for instance. He had his own brush with (virtual immersion in) evil in 1945, when as an Army officer in Germany he interviewed concentration camp survivors. For years afterward he would wake up gasping at the recollection.
Norman Mailer called longtime New Yorker writer Ved Mehta "the imposter" because though blind he saw so much. At the 80th-birthday party for Fr. Martin d’Arcy SJ, Mehta told Edmund Wilson, who was wondering what they were doing there, that he had been invited because d’Arcy wanted to convert him — as he had converted Evelyn Waugh. Wilson abruptly turned to the diner on his other side. Mehta turned to his other side, where sat the wealthy Annette, who invited him to her island and became his patron. Mehta had great love and respect for his father, by the way, and when he married, he stayed married and loved his wife deeply.
A TASTE FOR THE GRITTY . . .
Times Literary Supplement 2/18/05 reviews three novels that appeal for their detail, plot, and telling us something we don’t know – Clare Clark’s The Great Stink (Viking), St. Aubin de Teran’s Otto (Virago), and Philippa Stockley’s A Factory of Cunning (Little, Brown) — as opposed to a mulling of our discontents in a fourth book reviewed, Alice Munro’s story collection, Runaway (Knopf), which "dramatizes . . . an impulse of avoidance," etc.
The other three offer "dogs slavering over dead rats" (Stink), the misdeeds and exculpation of a professional revolutionary (Otto), and tales of "the villainous rake Lord Much" and "assassins in Amsterdam" (Factory). Lord Much?!
Another novel reviewed here, Human Capital (Viking), is unoriginal but engaging, like TV melodrama, says reviewer Sean O’Brien: author Stephen Amidon looked unsentimentalism in the eye and blinked, leaving us in a Hollywood-dictated lurch. This novel is no "Ice Storm," a Hollywood product that O’Brien, a poet and translator (of Aristophanes), called "markedly unsentimental."
Can’t say I agree or disagree with any of it, but what reviewers choose to say and emphasize is a clue to their reliability. Same with newspapers and books. What people consider important is surely a clue. The great man (also God) said it nicely: Where your treasure is (what you consider important), there your heart is also."
French revolution
Among reasons for Euro-alarm at riots and in France and elsewhere, all dealing with heavy Muslim-immigrant presence, Daniel Pipes cites “a cradle-to-grave welfare system that lures immigrants even as it saps long-term economic viability.” This would do it. You lure people to paradise that never quite works out that way.
[A]fter a ninth consecutive night in which rioters boasted they had made parts of France "like Baghdad", more than 750 cars had been set ablaze, the highest tally on a single night so far.
reported UK Telegraph Nov. 6. So. France opposed taking the war to Islamic jihadists, who now have taken it to them.
Above one desolate street on the outskirts of Paris, a helicopter clattered but firefighters were forced to watch helplessly as a car burnt itself out. Any attempt to approach it resulted in a terrifying hail of stones, Molotov cocktails and other missiles.
Elsewhere in France, fire officers were pelted with metal petanque balls [bocce, or small lawn bowling balls], car batteries and even cooking pots.
Another comparison is with Northern Ireland.
Across France some 751 neighbourhoods, housing around five million people, are classified as severely disadvantaged. In Clichy, less than 10 miles from the chic Champs Elys�es, half the 28,000 population is under 25 and unemployment is more than double the national average of 10 per cent.
Immigrants have not been integrated:
[P]oliticians, social commentators and journalists have been picking over France's failure to integrate its burgeoning immigrant population.
“Cultural identities are not sufficiently recognised and there is no longer any mediation between the inhabitants of these areas and the politicians,” says a respected sociologist.
But the interior minister, Sarkozy has this to say:
"This minority of hooligans and assassins must not be confused with the immense majority of youngsters in the banlieues," he said. "I refuse to let these organised gangs make the law. The Republican state will not give in."
But at the heart of it are Muslim issues, says Daniel Pipes:
As in other European countries (notably Denmark and Spain), a bundle of related issues, all touching on the Muslim presence, has now moved to the top of the policy agenda in France, where it likely will remain for decades.
And it’s not a first —
it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another in �rhus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979. What is different in the current round is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.
Pipes calls his essay, which appears in today’s New York Sun, “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” He took the title from Edmund Burke, who in 1790 wrote a famous letter.
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More on same topic from the estimable Thomas Sowell:
Riots in France: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Thomas Sowell (November 8, 2005)
Read about Sowell
here, by the way. His life forever deep-sixes the obloquy attached to being a high school dropout.
