Around the Web on 10-11-05

Prager: Three Strikes for the Left

If I can fisk Dennis Prager, I can give him his due. He wrote a mostly good article today on how the left harmed America this week.

From the pointless judicial weakening of American security, to the fight to force airlines to allow passengers to display obscenities, to the ongoing libel of Bill Bennett -- a libel as far from truth as is the infamous "blood libel" that claims that Jews slaughter Gentile children to use their blood for baking matzo -- this was just another week of harm to a great civilization by barbarians inside the gates.

Of course, my praise is somewhat limited. For one thing, Prager pretends that blind faith (what he sloppily terms "Judaeo-Christian values" -- See first link.) is the only alternative to nihilism, which is ultimately just as bad as advocating it. For another, .... Has anyone let Prager in on the secret that the Christians in the Middle Ages invented the blood libel?

Oh well. I guess if Noam Chomsky can give succor to Holocaust deniers (esp. pp. 117-160), Dennis Prager can help us forget that Christianity, undiluted in the Middle Ages by the Greco-Roman tradition, gave us the blood libel.

Acrylamide: Today's Alar?

And speaking of danger from the dying left, there's an informative column about the latest food scare, acrylamide.

[A]crylamide is not a new or growing food contaminant due to modern cooking techniques, as was recently claimed by Alise Cappel, with the Environmental Law Foundation, the California environmental group which has led the use of lawsuits against violators of Proposition 65. Researchers at the Second Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Acrylamide Workshop held in Chicago in April 2004 stated that acrylamide is formed naturally during the Maillard browning reaction, a series of reactions between proteins and carbohydrates during cooking....

...

[I]t also forms in uncooked foods and at room temperature during storage. In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Total Diet Study survey has found acrylamide in forty percent of the foods we eat, with significant variations even among samples of the same foods. Clearly, labeling every food containing acrylamide would be nonsensical.

...

A person would have to consume about 195 pounds of french fries, 142 pounds of graham crackers, or 5,350 one-ounce servings (333 pounds) of cheerios every day, for life, in order to approach the lowest level of risk observed in laboratory rats.

So it looks like acrylamide might be about as dangerous as Alar, eh? Well, it gets even better: Acrylamide may actually turn out to be beneficial!

... [T]here is no evidence that acrylamide actually causes cancer in humans. In fact, for years scientists have been finding a number of Maillard molecules are not only not human carcinogens, but appear to have antioxidant properties.

Hmmm. Perhaps we will end up calling acrylamide (in normally-occurring doses, anyway) "Today's DDT" if this lunacy continues.

A Democratic Gingrich?

A columnist outlines the scandals embroiling the Republican Party, notes the similarity to what the Dems faced in the early 1990's, and asks whether that party needs its own version of Newt Gingrich? The column never really answers the question, but Terry Neal's discussion came within a hair's breadth of correctly identifying what the Democrats do need: better ideas.

Neal notes that one Democrat is attempting to build a pro-national-defense coalition within his party, but that such Democrats will be viewed with suspicion anyway -- by both pro-defense voters (for being insincere) and by the far left part of their own party (for wanting to defend America).

And then Neal discusses how Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was unable to answer the question of whether we should pull out of Iraq:

... [H]e quickly tried to move the conversation in another direction, focusing on a platform that included universal college education, universal health care, cutting the budget deficit and reducing dependence on foreign energy.

For better or for worse, the Left is nearly dead as a political force in this country. This is why I recently expressed agreement with the prediction (but not the positive evaluation) in this Power Line posting.

A corrupt opponent does not alone ensure electoral victory. Just ask anyone from Louisiana who voted for Edwin Edwards (that is, against David Duke), in 1991. This is bad news for the Democrats who seem institutionally unable to adopt new ideas and possessed only of a reflexive, vehement hatred of Republicans.

Will there be change in China?

I have often blogged on events in China and wondered whether Western-style consumerism, communications technology (coupled with evasion of censorship), simmering discontent , or backfiring propaganda might help precipitate a revolution there. This article argues that a confluence of factors might be making a revolt against the Communists a bit closer than we think.

The end may come from above, conceivably by a well-planned transition but more likely when a would-be leader tries to break an elite deadlock by turning to the people. Or it may come from below, as increasing dissatisfaction with poverty, corruption and violence leads to change at the top or to regions taking over self-government

Party rule from Beijing is increasingly an elaborately staged play. Its intricacies will doubtless continue to engage the attention of China-watchers. But they should not forget the people, crowding ever more noisily outside the theater. One way or another, we will hear from them -- and we must be ready.

In addition to some of the factors I pointed out, the article points out some structural weaknesses of the current regime and claims that the Communist Party does not have moral sanction to rule. It further implies that the Western notion of the people being the source of governmental legitimacy has taken hold. I agree that the Communists have no moral legitimacy, but worry that it might be too optimistic to hope for anything substantially like a Western republic to result.

Russia's Oily Embrace

This is quite an alarming article on how Russia -- the one that has been feverishly curtailing freedom lately -- has been using oil as a means of intimidating Europe.

... 50 percent of the oil burned in Europe and 30 percent of the natural gas comes from Russia. The natural gas percentage is likely to rise dramatically with the new northern pipeline, under the Baltic Sea, extending all the way to Britain. Some countries, such as Germany, are likely to become entirely dependent on Russia for gas. They will also be dependent on Russia for some of their electricity because most new electric generation that has been installed relies on gas turbines.

Western Europe should note how their brethren in the East, who know what a bear's embrace feels like, are reacting to this state of affairs. They should also note that Russia, never a subtle nation, is already abusing its power.

Poland, desperate not to slide back to dependence on Russia, is building liquefied natural gas terminals to diversify its supply, and little Latvia is already crying out in pain. The Latvians have been fiercely critical of the Russians, and the Russians have responded by doubling the price of natural gas sold to Latvia. [bold added]

So far, though, the Greens -- that is to say, the Reds -- are ascendant in most of western Europe and so Russia's influence will grow in the short term.

...[O]f the major western European countries, Germany is moving the fastest into the Russian orbit. As the Green Party increased its influence, it became part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition, and Germany turned its back on nuclear power and scaled back its use of coal.

Natural gas turbines filled the void, at a point when natural gas production from the North Sea was in decline. Ergo, German diplomats worry that Germany will not have an autonomous voice in criticizing Russia, and particularly the conduct of its war in Chechnya.

Europe is in heap big trouble.

A liberal writes a decent column on Creationism.

This column on ID made quite a few points I agreed with. Its central one:

For several decades the philosophical ground has been softened up by the relativism and political correctness of the secular left, which succeeded in undermining the very idea of objective reality and of calling a spade a spade -- so now, in the resulting marsh, fantasies like intelligent design (or Scientology or feng shui or 9/11 as a CIA plot) take root and spread like weeds. Liberals pioneered squishy-minded indulgence of their key constituencies' unfortunate new ideas, like reparations and criminalized hate speech; now it's the right's turn. [I wrote on the right's adoption of hate crime some time back. --ed]

His column is far from perfect, but it is quite good. If for no other reason, read it for the sake of seeing a member of a dying breed: a liberal who makes sense.

-- CAV