Stromata Blog

Russia Retaliates in Space

Roscosmos, the Russian Federation’s space agency, has struck back at the United Kingdom in retaliation for the U.K.’s support of Ukraine. Its director-general has announced that a Soyuz launch scheduled for Friday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is to carry 36 OneWeb communications satellites into orbit, will be scrubbed unless OneWeb guarantees that they won’t be used for military purposes and the British government agrees to sell its stake in the company. Britain has turned down the demands.

Separately, Roscosmos denied reports that the hacker group Anonymous has infiltrated and shut down its computer network and declared that interference with its satellites would be a casus belli.

Russia’s leverage is feeble, but these rumblings show that war no longer stays earthbound.

Update (March 22, 2022): Elon Musk soars to the rescue. SpaceX will launch the stranded satellites.

David Cameron’s Short, Dim Future

The Tory-LibDem coalition agreement is grounds for full-blown pessimism about both Britain’s future and the future of the new Prime Minister. David Cameron may be the youngest PM since Pitt fils; he is likely to be the least successful since Frederick, Lord North.

While the specifics of the deal include a number of wretched ideas, such as tripling the tax rate on capital gains, the fatal trap for Mr. Cameron and the Tories lies in the constitutional change that was a sine qua non for Liberal Democrat support:

The parties agree to the establishment of five year fixed-term parliaments. A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will put a binding motion before the House of Commons in the first days following this agreement stating that the next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May 2015. Following this motion, legislation will be brought forward to make provision for fixed term parliaments of five years. This legislation will also provide for dissolution if 55% or more of the House votes in favour.

We can see how this will play out: In September, the Labour Party will elect a new leader to replace the toxic Gordon Brown. The LibDems will then be in a position to form a “progressive coalition” with Labour. Labour and the LibDems hold 315 seats between them. A majority (assuming that Sinn Fein follows its tradition by refusing to take up the five seats that it won) will be 323. With adequate bribes to regional parties, a Lab-Lib coalition can oust the Conservatives. Under the prior constitution, Mr. Cameron could scotch that threat by dissolving Parliament and going to the country. He has now given up his right to do so. Hence, he will be faced with a choice between handing power over to the electoral losers or making further concessions to Nick Clegg.

To put it another way, the choice will be between going into the record books as being the shortest-serving Prime Minister whose term was not ended by his death or being PM while Britain goes the way of Greece. Doubtless, he will pick the second. The going the way of Greece is inevitable in either event.

But maybe he’ll succeed in banning chocolate oranges along the way.

Why Bother Being America’s Friend?

On the one hand, the Obama Administration seeks to charm Syria out of the Iran/Hezbollah camp. The current Syrian tyrant’s only virtue is that he is a more selective murderer than the previous tyrant, his father. He responded to our “open hand” by holding a press conference with the president of Iran, during which the latter expostulated on his dream of a future Middle East “without Zionists and without colonialists”. There is no sign that our President regards this performance as a rebuff.

Meanwhile, the State Department has declared above-it-all neutrality regarding Argentina’s latest threat to the British-inhabited Falkland Islands. The Administration offers not a shred of diplomatic, moral or military support to the nation that has historically been our closest ally and is fighting at our side right now in Afghanistan. If the Argentine government contemplates bolstering its shaky domestic prestige through a quick conquest, as its predecessor tried to do in 1982, the U.S. has done nothing to deter it. The precedent set by President Reagan, who furnished both material support and military intelligence to the Prime Minister Thatcher’s forces, has been hypovehiculated.

Why? Is this another instance of outsourcing our Latin American policy to Hugo Chávez? A display of President Obama’s ill-disguised hostility toward Great Britain? A mere product of State Department lassitude?

For those governments inclined to draw morals, the one here is as clear as a first grade Sunday School lesson: Reversing the old Greek maxim, the present American disposition is to do harm to our friends and good to our enemies. If that lesson is taken to heart in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, President Ahmadinejad will see his dream come true.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

According to the Guardian (so keep the salt shaker handy), the British government is considering a new set of criteria for identifying Islamic supremacists:

According to a draft of the strategy, Contest 2 as it is known in Whitehall, people would be considered as extremists if:

• They advocate a caliphate, a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries.

• They promote Sharia law.

• They believe in jihad, or armed resistance, anywhere in the world. This would include armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military.

• They argue that Islam bans homosexuality and that it is a sin against Allah.

• They fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

While I suspect that the only consequence of the “extremist” label will be increased welfare benefits, there’s much to be said for singling out mullahs whose principal message is hatred of Western civilization. Four of the five markers look eminently reasonable. Believers in a pan-Islamic caliphate, the importation of Moslem law into Western lands, jihad or attacks on British troops are clearly enemies of Her Majesty.

But what elevates opposition to homosexuality to that level? “Calls for violence against homosexuals” would be a sign of extremism, no doubt, but is it equally pernicious to argue that homosexual acts are morally blameworthy? And is a negative attitude toward them a surer sign of extremism than approval of forced cousin marriages, “honor” killings or wife beating?

Hope from Across the Pond?

It would be easier to cheer heartily at the British Conservative Party’s electoral triumph last week if the party leader, that guy who demanded that W. H. Smith stop selling chocolate oranges, didn’t have approximately the gravitas of the Earl of Ickenham. Still, perhaps Iain Murray is correct in his assessment:

After Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair, in September and October last year he was riding high. If he’d called an election then, Brown would have seen Labour re-elected with a bigger majority than Tony Blair and he would have destroyed David Cameron’s claim to be a viable alternative. This concentrated the Conservative mind wonderfully. Starting at the party conference in October last year, the Tories started advancing genuinely conservative policies on tax, crime and education, for example. Yes, Brown proved to have a political ear as tinny as Al Gore’s, but the Tory decontamination of the brand (Cameron’s genuine acheivement) meant that people reacted well to Conservative policies for the first time in 15 years. Boris [Johnson, the new Mayor of London] is a solid conservative (with a small ‘c’) and Labour attempted to use this to paint him as the bastard son of Cruella de Ville and Lord Voldemort. It didn’t work. Nor did people turn to the Liberal Democrats. People are not just tuning out Labour, they are willing to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again. And about time, too.

The Wall Street Journal pinpoints as decisive the moment when Mr. Cameron forgot about oranges and remembered an old Conservative theme:

Mr. Cameron has been wary of Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, and understandably needs to find his own identity. But some old Tory ideas, such as low taxes, are proven winners. When Mr. Cameron called for lower taxes at the party conference last fall, his polls shot up and Mr. Brown got cold feet about early elections. That was the beginning of this Tory comeback.

So let’s indulge in a jot and tittle of optimism. Europe has often been a leading indicator for our elections. Margaret Thatcher foreshadowed Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair’s slicing and dicing of Michael Howard’s Tories hinted at the GOP calamity in 2006. Now we have seen Nicolas Sarkozy and a reasonably conservative Droit sweep into power in France, Silvio Berlusconi return in Italy, and the Tories garner their biggest victory in local elections since recordkeeping began. More significantly, the Conservative turn-around in Britain took almost no time at all. Half a year ago, Labour was unbeatable; last Thursday, its share of the vote fell behind that of the comical Liberal Democrats.

It may seem like an overwhelming task to persuade American voters “to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again”, and it may be an impossible one. Unfortunately, many conservatives have been so demoralized that they haven’t been trying.

Just today, for instance, Slick Barry Obama once again declared that Iraq is hopeless and not worth saving: “If we cannot get the Iraqis to stand up in seven years, we are not going to get them to stand up in fourteen years or fifty-six years.” To that Jim Geraghty says nothing more than “I don’t like that answer, but I think it will resonate with many Americans.”

C’mon, Mr. Kerry Spot. Whether or not it resonates, Senator Obama’s insinuation is ridiculous. “Standing up” is what the Iraqi military has been doing in Basra and Sadr City, to an extent that surprises even its warmest sympathizers. That the likely Democratic Presidential candidate refuses to look at the facts on the ground is a measure of how tenaciously he and his party are committed to American impotence.

Given that the Bush Administration is strangely reticent about speaking up in its own defense, the rest of us should do out bit by vowing not to let Hill-Bama’s stale talking points pass by uncorrected. The history of the past eight years has become clouded by left-wing legendary, and the shrieking carriers of Bush Derangement Syndrome have drowned out rational discourse. Perhaps resistance is futile, but that’s no reason not to try. It wasn’t long ago that politics looked just as grim in the U.K.

Random Reading: Saxons, Vikings, Celts – And Ice Cream Parlors

[First of an occasional series]

The wanderings of primitive peoples are one of the great romances of history, made more romantic and mysterious by the shortage of direct evidence. Somehow, somewhen the Indo-European languages reached points as far separated as the Ganges River valley and the British Isles, and the cultivation of plants spread from a handful of locations to the entire world. Other languages and technologies, too, wandered far from their birth places. No one recorded the ways and means. We do not know what to attribute to mass migrations, what to the travels of a few artisans, what to the adoption of techniques from neighbors, what to independent invention. Did agriculturalists and metal workers colonize new territories, driving out or exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants, or did such advances spread through peaceable interchange? Can we trace mass migrations in the prehistory of language, or only the success of an elite dialect or commercial lingua franca? Parallels in recorded history show that many causes can produce identical effects. English prevailed in North America and Australia, because the indigenes were overwhelmed by migrants, Latin in Western Europe because it was the language of the Roman conquerors, Swahili in sub-Saharan Africa because it was useful for trade.

Lately the ambiguous evidence of archeology and linguistics has been supplemented by DNA analysis, which offers insights into the direct ancestry of living humans. Geneticists can establish, for instance, that everyone alive today is descended from a woman who probably lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. (Those facts don’t, incidentally, prove that the human race originated at that time and place. Logically, we all must have a common ancestress. She might lived before homo sapiens existed as a distinguishable species or long after. There are, however, other reasons, notably the lack of diversity in the human genome when compared to other species, that lead to the conclusion that we are a very recent arrival in the biosphere.) Similarly, seven maternal and five paternal ancestors have been identified for the vast majority of Europeans. They are dated and placed variously, from 45,000 years ago in Greece to 8,000 B.C. in Syria, using methods that rely on an heroic assumptions, e. g., that the rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA was constant over the pertinent time periods. Still, despite all uncertainties, it is suggestive that one ancestress apparently dwelled in an early center of agriculture and that her descendants seem to have arrived in the various regions of Europe pari passu with neolithic farming.

Bryan Sykes, an Oxford professor and the founder of Oxford Ancestors, which ingeniously combines fund raising and research by selling individuals the results obtained by examining samples of their DNA, is one of the pioneers in this field. He has also written three books to explain it to the layman, the most recent of which is titled Saxons, Vikings, and Celts in America or, much more colorfully, Blood of the Isles in Britain.

Unhappily for such a promising topic, either Professor Sykes or his publisher has evidently decided that people who buy books about the scientific exploration of human ancestry know no history and want to know no science. Or it could be that the author has taken the human genome as a model: Most of the material in our chromosomes is “junk DNA”, serving no purpose but padding. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is padded like an insecure debutante: sales pitches for Oxford Ancestors, descriptions of the scenery of the Scottish isles, praise for the fine organization of British blood drives, reminiscences of professional colleagues, accounts of local folklore, even a recommendation for a particularly fine ice cream parlor in Lampeter, Wales.

The on-topic padding consists of potted history, mostly very elementary with little focus on population movements. In places, it is absurd. Do you think there is a direct intellectual line from Polydore Vergil’s denial of the historicity of King Arthur to the Nazi death camps? Professor Sykes does. He is also under the impression that the Arthurian romances were ecclesiastical propaganda that became outmoded after the Reformation, leading to Arthur’s eclipse as a British hero in favor of King Alfred. As a quick check on that thesis, compare the number of poems, novels, plays, paintings and motion pictures featuring each of those figures over the past few centuries. For everyone who can recount the legend of Alfred’s cakes circumstantially, a hundred can tell you about the Table Round, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Gaiwan, Mordred, the Sword in the Stone, and other tales of Camelot.

The second rate fustian squeezes out what is interesting in Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, namely, the evidence concerning the ancestry of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people. That is covered in a few bland pages, so devoid of details that it’s hard to figure out what the author has concluded or why. The scantiness of the presentation also makes it hard to judge whether he has taken all of the known historical facts into account. For instance, has he made allowances for the huge Irish immigration into England in the 19th Century? If not, his reconstruction is tainted by a very recent Celtic incursion and isn’t of much use in answering the vexed question of whether the Anglo-Saxons literally drove the Celts out of England or were, like their Roman predecessors, a relatively small ruling clique.

Historical genetics looks like a highly promising tool, but how are we to know if its practitioners are more interested in rating ice cream parlors than revealing the secrets of their art?

The Joys of Monopoly Medicine

From Britain, whose “single payer” (i. e., government monopoly) health care system is much admired by American liberals, comes this story:

A smoker is facing years of pain after an NHS hospital refused to set his broken ankle unless he gives up cigarettes.

John Nuttall, 57, needs the operation to fix the ankle he broke in three places two years ago and which was not healed by a plaster cast.

Doctors at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro have refused to operate to rebuild the ankle because they say Mr Nuttall's heavy smoking would reduce the chance of a full recovery.

They have told him to give up smoking before they operate but the retired builder has been unable to break his habit.

Mr Nuttall says he is in constant pain from the grating of the broken bones against each other and has been prescribed daily doses of morphine. . . .

A spokesman for the hospital trust said: “Smoking has a very big influence on the outcome of this type of surgery and the healing process would be hindered significantly.”

I don’t know how much influence nicotine has over the healing of ankles, but I do know that, in America at least, many operations are performed that have less than a perfect chance of a perfect outcome. Patients are allowed to evaluate risks and rewards for themselves. Not in the single-payer utopia.

Did Michael Moore Get This on Film?

From Great Britain, land of the single payer health care system that so many liberals see as the key to curing all our medical woes comes this report:

A high-flying television producer died from a suspected epileptic fit while waiting for vital brain scans on the NHS [National Health Service]. . . .

The evening before she died, Miss Price, from Notting Hill, west London, had begged a junior A&E doctor for anti-seizure drugs but had been told they could only be prescribed by a neurologist.

Two days earlier she had visited a specialist at Charing Cross hospital and was told she would have to wait six weeks for a brain scan. She had felt “concerned and afraid” at having to wait that length of time for a test before being treated for a recurrence of childhood epilepsy, Westminster coroner’s court heard.

She had not had a seizure for more than 10 years, but after a series of “strange episodes”, including a numb face and flashing lights in her vision, she had visited her GP and was referred to the specialist.

On the night before she died Miss Price entered her flatmate Sarah Jackson’s room in a confused state. . . .

At lunchtime the next day Miss Price was found lying on the floor and an ambulance pronounced her dead at the scene. A post mortem examination concluded it was a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

Patients die unexpectedly and unnecessarily here, too, but not because they have to wait for brain scans and anti-seizure medication.

It’s possible to have universal medical care, economical medical care and high quality medical care. What isn’t possible – certainly not from the benevolent hand of a government-run monopoly – is all three at once.

The Message

Had it not been for what can only be termed “beginner’s luck”, Gordon Brown’s first two full days in office would have been marked by at least three terrorist atrocities and several hundred British deaths. While terrorism deniers Keith Olbermann and Larry Johnson instantly decided that the London bombs were nothing more than a non-threat from “yuppie terrorists”, ABC News had this to say:

Donning an approximately 90-pound Kevlar suit , one technician took “the long walk” from his armored response van to the Mercedes E 300 sedan and found a carefully constructed, large vehicle bomb with a complicated fuse. The bomb technician defused the device by hand, officials in London said.

ABC News has learned the bomb was composed of tanks of propane, butane and 125 liters of gasoline (33 U.S. gallons), roofing nails and a fuse that initial reports indicated was constructed of simple light bulb or flashbulb filaments and designed to be triggered by a mobile telephone. . . .

London authorities investigating the case and U.S. authorities monitoring it say the Mercedes car bomb, if correctly made, could have sent a shrapnel-filled fireball into the air, maiming and killing people in a several hundred yard radius that included a popular nightclub.

The authorities so far haven’t released more than sketchy information about the four men arrested in connection with the attempted murders. I’m going to guess wildly that they were not Anglicans aggrieved by the policies of the Archbishop of Canterbury. They were clearly aimed to send a message to Britain’s just-installed Prime Minister.

And what might that message be?

Was it, Congratulations on having gotten rid of warmonger Tony Blair?

Was it, Thanks for your repeated shows of sympathy for Islamic concerns?

Or was it more along these lines? We’ve seen that you infidels are soft and easily intimidated. Bow down and be good dhimmis, or we will keep killing your women and children until you submit.

And where would Islamofascists get the notion that such a message would be effective? Think about it, and a few answers may spring to mind.

[Michael Ramirez, Investor’s Business Daily (click to enlarge)]

Quote of the Day: Return of the Chocolate Oranges Watchdog

David Frum says all that is necessary about David “Chocolate Oranges” Cameron, aspiring leader of the Other Labour Party:

In his speech today to the UK Conservative Conference, party leader David Cameron opposed reductions in taxation, endorsed same-sex marriage, praised government-controlled healthcare as “one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century,” omitted any words of praise for the British mission in Iraq, attacked Tony Blair for drawing too close to the United States, aligned himself with a more liberal approach to Britain’s surging crime rates, urged the Anglican Church to admit non-Anglicans to church schools while endorsing more state funding for Muslim schools.

Along the way he aimed this blow at Tony Blair:

Twelve years ago, there was an energetic young party leader.

He stood before his party conference for the first time.

He said he’d change his party.

He made promises about changing the country.

Remember him?

I do.

And look what happened.

Apparently that experience was so disappointing that Britain today requires something completely different: a listless, opportunistic young party leader who promises to change absolutely nothing.

An Investigation in Britain

In “The British Way”, two lawyers summarize how the U.K. and the U.S. differ in their approaches to investigating terrorism. Some of the British advantages are institutional, such as a less disloyal bureaucracy and longer experience in dealing with terrorism, “thanks” to years of fighting the IRA, but others should chill the heart of “Constitution-as-suicide-pact” civil libertarians:

British officials need not meet the very strict requirement of “probable cause” to obtain warrants that U.S. investigative bodies must satisfy under the Bill of Rights. In Britain, a warrant can generally issue on a showing of “reasonable suspicion.”

In addition, the British police have certain extraordinary tools designed specifically to fight terrorism. These include “control orders” issued by the Home Secretary [not, nota bene, by a judge] that not only allow the police to monitor terror suspects, but also – although the more stringent ones are the subject of continuing legal challenges – permit the police at the minimum to monitor and restrict terror suspect movements. . . .

Although the British virtually invented the notion of personal privacy – the saying “an Englishman’s home is his castle” can be traced at least to the 16th century – the concept is not as broadly defined in law or politics as in contemporary America. For example, virtually all public spaces in Britain are surveilled round the clock by cameras, and the government engages in extensive data-mining operations. . . .

[T]here appears to be much less hostility in Britain toward government secrecy in general, and little or no tradition of “leaking” highly sensitive information as a regular part of bureaucratic infighting – perhaps because the perpetrators could far more easily be punished with criminal sanctions under the Official Secrets Act in the U.K. than under current U.S. law.

Many of these British practices are quite repugnant as day-to-day police powers. I’d prefer a few more burglars and shoplifters to a “reasonable suspicion” standard for warrants, executive issuance of “control orders” and 24/7 government surveillance of the commons. On the other hand, those burdens are preferable to 9/11. While we are at war with groups whose major tactic is brutal attacks on civilians, moving toward “the British way” is distinctly the lesser evil. When peace returns – and the more robust our anti-terrorist measures, the sooner that will be – we can, and should, go back to the status quo ante. In the meantime, while we should remain vigilant against the misuse of anti-terrorist means for personal or partisan ends, let’s not fantasize that wars of this kind can be won through playing by the Marquis of Miranda rules.

Father Nanny

The last time I animadverted to David Cameron, he was denouncing chocolate oranges. Since then, the British Conservatives have been doing well in the polls, suggesting either that Brits don’t really like chocolate or that the multiplying blunders of Labour make any alternative, even one that compels WHSmith to add a produce department, attractive.

On this political tailwind, Mr. Cameron is now soaring higher. The Daily Telegraph reports that he has turned his attention to the hospital delivery room:

David Cameron will tomorrow call on fathers to "bond" with their children by being present at the "magic moment" of child birth.

The Conservative leader, who became a father for the third time in February, will announce that the party's review of family policy will look at the "time around child birth”. . . .

“Our policy review will be looking to learn lessons from successful projects around the world addressing this specific aspect of the couple relationship,” Mr Cameron will say.

Party officials said that the Tory leader did not intend to “force fathers into the delivery room” and that he was talking about the importance of establishing close bonds during the time close to the birth of a child.

And that is very important, I’m sure, just as it’s very important for fathers to teach their children the rudiments of cricket and metric football, answer their questions about the color of the sky and pay attention to their school activities. So, shall the government set up an inspectorate to make sure that Dad is doing his duty? Or will the Tory policy be tax credits for time spent with the kids? Mr. Cameron’s current ideas are a bit timid:

He will also announce support for a network of family relationship centres, which would provide help, support and advice at all stages of relationship. They would also be able to help separating families make workable arrangements for their children without having to go to court.

All stages? Jack’s first date with Jill is a bummer, so he trots down to the Family Relationship Centre for courting tips? Mary finds lipstick on John’s collar and asks the FRC whether she ought to be suspicious? Herbert, trying to decide whether to dump the old battleaxe for a trophy wife, can enlist a government counselor to review the pros and cons? Oh, and will there be a Headache-Tonight-Dear Rapid Response Unit?

You can tell that a policy is descending to the Department of Silly Walks level when Gordon Brown, of all people, can see what’s wrong:

The Chancellor . . . told the Mail on Sunday that Mr Cameron's mistake was to “drop the aspects of Thatcherism that people like [Mr. Brown means tax reduction, though he can’t bring himself to say so] and take up with namby-pamby policies that people dislike”.

At a time when jihadi terrorists were organizing for war, Bill Clinton plumped for school uniforms. He was a model of seriousness next to the man who wants to assume the mantle of Winston Churchill.

When Lawyers Run Wars. . . .

It becomes inevitable that newspapers will run headlines like “British troops in Iraq are afraid to open fire, secret MoD report confirms”.

British troops in Iraq “lack the confidence to open fire” because of a “fear of prosecution”, says a confidential Ministry of Defence (MoD) report seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

It confirms that soldiers believe that if they shoot dead insurgents they will become embroiled in a “protracted investigation” and if prosecuted will receive “no support from the chain of command”. . . .

Senior officers from the Land Warfare Centre flew to Iraq to question dozens of soldiers from the 7th Armoured Brigade. The report’s observations are “drawn solely from those discussions”.

Under the heading “Confidence to Open Fire”, the report says: “All agreed that there was a certain British reticence to open fire, and that this was largely a positive feature at the start of an operational deployment. Further, given that this reticence will be reduced as the tour continues there should be some caution in case it is reduced too much. However, there remained a common belief that many soldiers lack the confidence to initiate opening fire when it is tactically and legally sound to do so.

“There is a widespread fear of being investigated for having opened fire, and of a protracted prosecution system that might ensue. Some believe that individual soldiers would not open fire as a result of this fear.” . . .

The Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch has conducted more than 150 investigations in Iraq involving British soldiers, with more than 100 of these launched after troops opened fire when attacked by insurgents.

I’d be as horrified as anybody by a My Lai in Iraq, but My Lai didn’t happen because Lt. Calley was unaware that gunning down women and children was wrong. The rush to investigate ordinary firefights, viewing them through a prism of desktop legalities, is unlikely to deter a single genuine war crime. It is certain to lead to more casualties on our side and fewer on the enemy’s. And we may also be sure that men who behead prisoners and plant bombs to blow up civilians will not be impressed by our Marquis of Queensbury brand of war.

Not Smoking Is Harzardous to Your Pension Plan

The Daily Telegraph has, I suspect, “sexed up” its report on a Hewitt Associates study of the effect of Britain’s coming smoking ban on pension costs.

Hewitt Associates, a human resources group, said the ban, which is expected to encourage around 600,000 of the nation’s 13m smokers to quit, will substantially increase people’s life expectancy and therefore their pension costs.

Figures compiled by the company show an average improvement of just one year in life expectancy will increase the average deficit of the FTSE 100’s pension funds by £15 billion to £20 billion.

And the increase in annual pension costs could reduce profit before tax for the FTSE 100 companies by around £1 billion a year. . . .

Kevin Wesbroom, a Hewitt Associates pensions consultant, said: “The numbers do highlight just how sensitive profit and loss charges, deficits and hence cash funding requirements are to assumptions made about future morality rates.

“Companies and Trustees that are responsible for defined benefit schemes need to recognise that this announcement is likely to affect the company’s financial statements as well as how their schemes are funded.”

An overall one-year life expectancy increase from a five percent reduction in the smoking population is implausibly huge, but the general point is a good one. Smokers are, on the whole, an economic boon. Harvard Law School Professor Kip Viscusi’s empirical studies make that claim unarguable. For example,

To be sure, smokers do incur higher medical costs—about five cents per pack in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. Yet, because smokers have a shorter life expectancy than nonsmokers, smokers incur a cost of 11 cents per pack less in nursing home costs and nine cents per pack less in pension costs. On balance, smokers incur about 14 cents less per pack in costs paid by Massachusetts, while contributing an additional 51 cents per pack in excise taxes.

That doesn’t mean that we ought to encourage people to light up, but it does suggest that the smoking habit harms only its victims, not society at large. Why, then, is there such fervor to stamp it out?

My theory is that mankind labors under an Iron Law of Puritanism. The quantity of busybody interference in other men’s lives is a constant. It can be redirected but not diminished. Since society no longer feels inclined to discourage adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, vulgarity, public indecency, etc.,the impulse to control others’ lives has migrated to a minor personal pleasure. Once tobacco is stamped out, I wonder what the next target will be.

First they came for the smokers, but I didn’t complain, because I don’t smoke. . . .

But what did it matter? My pension plan was broke, and I couldn’t afford to go on living.

Maybe Britain Shouldn’t Have a Conservative Party

Boris Johnson is both a journalistic celebrity and the U.K. Conservative Party’s spokesman on higher education. It is therefore beyond appalling to learn, via Melanie Phillips, that he combines historical illiteracy with moral equivalence:

I was watching Boris Johnson’s BBC2 TV programme The Dream of Rome this evening, marvelling at his re-invention in yet another new guise as telly presenter, when I nearly fell out of my armchair having heard him say that the Christians who martyred themselves for their faith under the Romans were the equivalent of modern Islamic suicide bombers. [emphasis added]

As Miss Phillips goes on to note, there is a modicum of difference between being executed for refusal to renounce Christ and blowing up bystanders in the hopes of frightening the survivors into acquiescing in theocratic tyranny. Yet a highly cultured soi disant “conservative” casually ignores the distinction.

Is it any wonder that the Islamofascists expect to prevail?

David Cameron's “Potatoe” Moment

Dan Quayle and the spelling of the name of an edible root; Al Gore and the invention of the Internet; Bill Clinton and “I never had sex with that woman”; Howard Dean and The Scream; John Kerry and the “Global Test”. Now: David Cameron and the Chocolate Orange Menace (gleaned from Best of the Web (last item)):

Outlining a new Tory approach to health, Mr Cameron asked why WHSmith sold chocolate oranges instead of real ones. . . .

“Why? As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WHSmith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its check-outs instead of real oranges?

“So many consumer businesses could do more to promote healthy diets and lifestyles. It simply requires corporate responsibility to be matched by marketing creativity.”

Not only is this risible nanny state thinking, but it suggests that, for all his straining to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Englishmen, Mr. Cameron doesn’t often set foot in any outlet so plebeian as WHSmith. They aren’t the sort of places where one can “creatively” install a produce department.

When the Conservatives chose Mr. Cameron as their leader, a lot of British right-wingers were delighted. Iain Murray called him “a breath of fresh air in Tory politics, having a charisma and communication style well-suited to the early 21st century”. Once in office, he turned out also to have a natural list to port, leading Mr. Murray more recently to lament that he had not “expected that at the same time as improving the party’s PR Cameron would also junk about half of conservative thought”.

The Cameron we have seen as leader is not, it appears, the Cameron we were advertised during the leadership election. I wonder how many of the senior, genuinely conservative figures that backed him in the contest following the unfortunate defeat of Liam Fox’s bid feel the same way. If Cameron is as conservative as many of us were assured he was, he needs to make that apparent soon.

The riposte by Cameron defenders is that his tactics are the path to victory: “So Tory activists – calm down dears, its only modern politics. Don't you want to win?”

Until the chocolate oranges came up, my only answer to that question was that I define winning as putting good policies into place, not as getting jobs for the boys. Now I can add, What makes you think this scolding buffoon is going to win anything except, perhaps, a kiss on the cheek from Ralph Nader?

Equality, Where Are You?

Great Britain has enjoyed the beneficence of the Welfare State for six decades now, since the Labour Party election victory of 1945. The great goal of the new regime was to bring to an end the wide gap between the conditions of the rich and the poor. The Daily Telegraph reports on the results of a study, carried out by left-of-center academics, of how much progress has been made toward that objective:

The university study, which looked at social inequalities across the country, found that residential areas with the highest levels of poor health have the lowest numbers of doctors and dentists.

Areas with the greatest number of young people with no qualifications also have the lowest numbers of teachers per head of the population. Areas with the highest number of qualified youngsters have four times the density of teachers.

The research also recorded a geographical divide based on access to cars, with about a million poor urban households having none. An equal number of households in the wealthy areas of west London has three or more cars. . . .

People in the poorest neighbourhoods with the greatest needs were often the least likely to have access to services and support that would help them “improve their lives and life chances”. . . .

Although the study found that living standards in Britain had risen since the welfare state was founded, it showed that the rich and poor still live in different worlds.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, young people are more likely to obtain good qualifications if their parents’ generation, aged 40 to 45, is also well qualified.

Those sound a lot like the complaints that liberals make against the American economic order: The affluent pass on their “good fortune”, while the poor are not given the keys to a better life. It seems that the evils that the Left attributes to “cut-throat capitalism” are not cured by socialist panaceas. Since socialism and its watered-down cousins also fail to compete successfully with capitalism in the creation of wealth, one wonders what, other than spite against prosperity and success, keeps their adherents faithful to a discredited cause.

Thoughts on London

The last time that I was in London was ten years ago, and my principal memory is the dire sore throat that the smog inflicted on my delicate ear, nose and throat system. (The ailment vanished the instant I left London for Bristol.) Aside from that, I recall that plays were better, cheaper and more numerous than in New York (or a fortiori anywhere else in America), that the restaurants belied my prejudices about English cooking, and that prices were the same as in the U.S., except in pounds rather than dollars.

This time I have a place to record impressions contemporaneously. While I forswear any intention of writing a vacation narrative (the itinerary in the extended entry will interest only my mother), here are a few notes:

• To get politics out of the way first, the Underground closures occasioned by the 7/7 attack and the 7/21 squib are inconvenient, but I doubt that this degree of terrorism will bring Britain to its knees. The best indicator is not the gripes about how British participation in freeing Iraq “caused” the bombings; it is the public reaction to the Metropolitan Police’s “shoot-to-kill” policy. (Let me note, BTW, Clinton Taylor’s top-notch “Prometheus, Deterred”, which tells why the Police are right.) By that measure elite public opinion here is in better condition than in the United States. Our policy of “torturing” the Gitmo prisoners with excessive food, pretty girls and boring tropical weather is roundly condemned by our media. Their U.K. counterparts mostly shrugged when the first shoot-to-killee turned out to be an unarmed, probably innocent Brazilian (innocent of terrorism, that is; his aversion to law enforcement personnel hints that he was guilty of something). That sang-froid perhaps stems from a long colonial history and early reading of Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”). Whatever the cause, America badly needs the same realistic attitude toward our enemies.

• Reading about “Londonistan” doesn’t match seeing it. In principle, I’m not bothered by a plethora of women in dark, all-enveloping garb. If that distinctive clothing were evidence only of rejection of modernity, as it is among the Amish and the chasidim, I would be tempted to mild applause, for modernity breeds many evils. Those evils are not, however, a sufficient excuse for violence, and doubly not an excuse for violence without a realizable goal. More and more, I incline to the view that the Islamofascist brand of terrorism is motivated by sheer nihilism, its religious veneer a fraud. If per impossible the Caliphate were restored and the Western nations paid head tax to Mecca, would the terror abate, or would al-Qa’eda and its ilk simply unveil new demands pursued by the same means? I’m confident that I know the answer.

• The U.K. price situation hasn’t changed, leading me to puzzle over how average Englishmen, with two-thirds of an average American’s income (and higher taxes, too), scrape along. Some prices are grotesque. Yesterday I took my dirty laundry to a laundromat, where the washers charged £3 ($5.21), £4 ($6.95) or £5 ($8.69) a cycle and dryers were 20p. (35¢) a minute. The one exception to the general rule was U.S.-branded household goods. I saw shampoo that I had heard of priced only a few pence above a drug store chain’s house brand.

• A week in England reinforces one’s fondness for the dollar bill. It’s a good thing that the English are comparatively poor, because, if they had lots of money, they couldn’t lift it. The one nice thing about the solid one and two pound coins is the engraved mottos around the edges, a relic of the age when coins were made of gold and coin clipping worried the Exchequer.

• One of the most striking contrasts between the two sides of the Atlantic, from a tourist’s point of view, is the degree of accommodation to foreigners. My first day in Britain, I discovered that the electrical adaptor that I’d brought along was defective. Within ten minutes, I located a shop that sold me a replacement. How long would it take, I wonder, be for a Briton in Chicago to find a place that sold U.K.-to-U.S. adaptors? Another indicator: Many crosswalks are painted “Look Right” or “Look Left”. In the U.S. we just assume that everybody knows which way the cars come from. And then there are the ubiquitous foreign exchange shops, though that is an ambivalently useful service; their rates are noticeably less favorable than an ATM’s.

• Speaking of ATM’s, they don’t charge fees. The corollary is that there are not two or three on every block. In the U.S., machines scattered so thinly would sprout block-long lines. Here hardly anyone seems to use them. I’ve yet to see more than two people in a queue.

• I expected plenty of traffic in London. The city is famous for congestion, isn’t it? What I didn’t expect was that even light traffic would be so noisy. Cornwell Road during a non-rush hour was as loud as the Kennedy. An Englishwoman whom I asked blamed the road surfacing, though I’m fairly sure that noise standards for mufflers must be more lenient here. In any case, the phenomenon has a virtue: When one looks the wrong way, despite the crosswalk warnings, it’s nonetheless easy to hear approaching cars. Back home, they can sneak up on you.

• British newspapers complain incessantly about the deterioration of rail service since the breakup of the government monopoly. If only Amtrak could deteriorate to this extent! I’m composing this entry on the Virgin Trains run from London to Glasgow. When I arrived at Euston Station with more luggage than I could manhandle, a porter with a motor cart appeared, whisked me to the platform and loaded my bags onto the train, which was enough to endear VT to me forever. Admittedly, the train is now running late – seven minutes late. On an American railroad, that’s called “early”. It’s also a remarkable fact, though I don’t benefit personally from it, that the first class food carts give out Scrumpy Jack Cider free of charge.

• The air quality evidently has improved. In 1995 my sore throat arrived within hours. In 2005 it barely got a foothold in a full week.