A Few Interesting Reads

Eileen Collins Redux

National Review had a decent discussion of the recent paean from on high to environmentalism delivered by Eileen Collins, the captain of the last shuttle mission. This was good.

As for Eileen Collins's comments themselves, a moment's thought reveals them for the platitudinous claptrap we have come to expect from people who don't know all that much about Spaceship Earth. She has seen "widespread environmental damage," whatever that may be. "Sometimes you can see how there is erosion." Huh? That is one of the most fundamental and basic processes on the planet. There is uplift and there is erosion -- the two big players in the geological game. What are wind and rain and freezing and thawing supposed to do besides erode? "And you can see how there is deforestation." Again so what? And why? Why do you suppose the trees get replanted in the vast clear-cuts of the giant timber companies, but not in mankind's common tropical forests?

But they missed the supreme irony of the comments, coming as they did from a possible human sacrifice to Gaia.

Does she realize the implications of what she is saying? Does she not know why the inferior foam is being used in the first place? Does she really mean to advocate environmentalism? Was she told to make this statement? Was she, as I cannot realistically hope, misquoted, or quoted out of context?

I'm relieved that they got back alive.

Another Assault on Private Medicine

Capitalism Magazine sounds the alarm on an effort in California to get rid of Health Savings Accounts.

One of the few bright spots in paying for health care today has been the introduction of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), in conjunction with low-premium, high-deductible insurance policies. In what is perhaps the most popular medical insurance reform in history, more than a million consumers in California and elsewhere have already established these plans that provide tax incentives, reduce cost and increase personal choice.

The California Department of Insurance is now taking steps to outlaw these insurance policies and savings accounts in California. The Department has just released a report and public relations effort that attacks such consumer choice as a threat to the Insurance Commissioner's personal agenda to bring all health care under government management through a "universal" health care system.

The time to get up to speed on the medicine debate is now.

The Foreign Policy of Guilt

Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate address the moral weakness of the West in the current war.

What we desperately need is a leader who proclaims that the rational ideals of the West, reason, science, individual rights and capitalism, are good--that we have a moral right to exist for our own sake--that we don't owe the rest of the world anything--and that we should be admired and emulated for our virtues and accomplishments, not denounced. This leader would then demonstrate, in word and deed, that if those opposed to these ideals take up arms against us, they will be crushed.

That's me you hear in the "Amen corner".

-- CAV