John's Recommended Articles

Why there's only one drug to fight avian flu. : "Whatever the risk, some good will come out of this public alarm if we use it as an opportunity to understand why the U.S. is now so poorly armed to cope with a deadly flu outbreak. The reason is that our political class has spent the past 30 years driving the vaccine industry out of business with its own virus of over-regulation, price controls, litigation and intellectual-property abuse.
The U.S. today has only three large vaccine makers--down from 37 in the 1960s. This is the reason that, as recently as 2001, there was a shortage of eight of 11 critical childhood vaccines. It is also the reason the U.S. fell drastically short of flu vaccine a year ago, after a shut-down of one of two major flu-vaccine makers. "

Iraqis are much more optimistic about their country than American opinion makers.: "The referendum result again demonstrates that American policy- and opinion-makers are more pessimistic than are Iraqis. Part of the problem is that Pentagon officials and journalists alike chart Iraq's success through misguided metrics. Counting car bombs does not demonstrate progress or lack thereof in Iraq. Objective indicators show that Iraqis have confidence that did not exist prior to liberation.

...one in six Iraqis had fled their country under Saddam. Millions left because of war, dictatorship and sanctions. Today, several hundred thousand have returned; only the Christians still leave. If Iraq were as chaotic as the media implies, it would export refugees, not resettle them.

Other indicators suggest Iraqis have confidence in their future. The Iraqi dinar, freely traded in international currency markets, is stable.

When people fear for their future, they invest in gold; jewelry and coins can be sewn into clothes and smuggled out of the country. When people feel confident about the future, they buy real estate. Property prices have skyrocketed across Iraq."

"Smoking can cloud the brain, according to a new study that found long-term tobacco use was linked to dulled thinking and lower IQ."

There's a crackdown over Miers, not a "crackup." : "I love being a conservative. We conservatives are proud of our philosophy. Unlike our liberal friends, who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our ideals. We are confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism. And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation--the U.S. Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.

We conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles. And that's the nature of our current debate over the nomination of Harriet Miers. Will she respect the Constitution? Will she be an originalist who will accept the limited role of the judiciary to interpret and uphold it, and leave the elected branches--we, the people--to set public policy? Given the extraordinary power the Supreme Court has seized from the representative parts of our government, this is no small matter."

Originally the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek, languages unknown to common people throughout Europe. Then, about 400 years after the Savior's death, the Bible was translated by Jerome into Latin. But still the scriptures were not widely available. Copies had to be written by hand, usually by monks, each taking years to complete.

Then, through the influence of the Holy Ghost, an interest in learning began to grow in the hearts of people. This Renaissance or "rebirth" spread throughout Europe. In the late 1300s, a priest named John Wycliffe initiated a translation of the Bible from Latin into English. Because English was then an emerging, unrefined language, church leaders deemed it unsuitable to convey God's word. Some leaders were certain that if people could read and interpret the Bible for themselves, its doctrine would be corrupted; others feared that people with independent access to the scriptures would not need the church and would cease to support it financially. Consequently, Wycliffe was denounced as a heretic and treated accordingly. After he died and was buried, his bones were dug up and burned. But God's work could not be stopped.

While some were inspired to translate the Bible, others were inspired to prepare the means to publish it. By 1455 Johannes Gutenberg had invented a press with movable type, and the Bible was one of the first books he printed. For the first time it was possible to print multiple copies of the scriptures and at a cost many could afford.

So about a year ago, the students formed a group promoting chastity. While similar groups exist at other universities, it is a first for the Ivy League.

It's time to start talking about differences between groups of people:
"Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.

The taboo is not perfect--otherwise, I would not have been able to document this essay--but it is powerful. Witness how few of Harvard's faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair. In the public-policy debate, witness the contorted ways in which even the opponents of policies like affirmative action frame their arguments so that no one can accuse them of saying that women are different from men or blacks from whites. Witness the unwillingness of the mainstream media to discuss group differences without assuring readers that the differences will disappear when the world becomes a better place.

The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences.

How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America's social problems? The part played by sexism in creating the ratio of males to females on mathematics faculties is not the ratio we observe but what remains after adjustment for male-female differences in high-end mathematical ability. The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains. In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions."

**This article is very long, but interesting if you have the time**

Chuck Muth.com - Political Action with an Attitude!: "The visceral objections to Harriet Miers have more to do with the fact that many conservative activists have been toiling in the political trenches for MANY YEARS to elect a Republican president and a Republican Senate for the expressed purpose of being able to seat individuals on the nation’s highest court who have the conservative judicial and intellectual star-power and brain-power we were denied by the Left when they “borked” Robert Bork. The fact is, with Republican kiesters warming 55 of the Senate’s 100 seats, a superior Bork-like nominee COULD HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED to join Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court of the United States of America."

I survived Soviet health care--barely.: "I recently came face to face with a level of Western ignorance that I hadn't encountered since the 1980s, when Russian immigrants were still a novelty to Americans. A British-American asked my father a question that could only come from someone who has known freedom his whole life: 'Why did you leave Russia? Your family was there, you had a job, you had free health care. Why did you leave?' The questioner, a former editor with the New York Times, then proceeded to assert that today's Britain and U.S. are no longer free.
The exchange reminded me just how out of touch many who live in the free world are with the reality of life under tyranny--and why, therefore, so many Americans and Brits think nothing is scarier than war. On the subject even of that oft-cited 'perk' of Soviet life, universal health care, a picture of the system in practice on its happiest occasion would shock Americans and Western Europeans alike."

*Warning - this article depicts graphic treatment of other human beings

...some governments and NGOs are using supranational bureaucracies to undermine private property rights, one of the pillars of the free society, global growth and prosperity.

One such campaign goes as follows: Millions of people throughout poor countries suffer and die from preventable or easily treated diseases; some of the medicines needed to treat those diseases are expensive; because medicines are essential, they should be sold at cost; if patentees will not lower their prices, governments should use "compulsory licenses" to break patents and authorize local production as "generics."

The latest battle concerns an antiretroviral (ARV) drug called Kaletra, produced by U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories, used to inhibit the spread of HIV. Although the highest price in the U.S. of around $4 per pill is more than three times the price in Brazil, the Brazilian government claims it is still too expensive. Egged on by activists and supported by the Pan American Health Organization and other U.N. agencies, Brasília has threatened to produce the drug locally while circumventing the patent, claiming it can do so for $0.41 (with the rights-holder receiving a nominal royalty at most). Like many firms, Abbott uses price differentiation to sell its products more cheaply in poor countries than in rich ones. And while Brazil is a lot richer than the poorest countries in Africa, it pays only slightly more for this important ARV component.

Circumventing the patent would indeed provide even cheaper Kaletra in Brazil now -- though it would have a very limited impact on the overall cost of treating HIV/AIDS, since drugs account for only a quarter of those costs. But HIV quickly develops resistance to existing therapies, so where will the next line of ARVs come from? If companies are unable to reap some profits on new ARVs in countries outside Africa, where they are sold at cost or below, they will have no incentive to undertake risky research to develop new AIDS drugs, especially if those are likely to be appropriated. Pharmaceutical companies spend an average of $800 million to develop a new drug, take it through trials and gain regulatory approval for it. For every success, however, 12 candidates fall by the wayside.

Moreover, if patents should be breached when medicines are deemed essential to human life, why stop there? Food and shelter are essential too -- why should anyone turn a profit on these basics? And given the current high prices of oil, the same logic would suggest that governments should slap a compulsory license on, say, Venezuelan or Norwegian oil -- paying only the extraction costs, not additional royalties or the amortized investments that are also factored in.
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The profit motive, combined with a competitive market underpinned by the institutions of the free society -- property rights, contracts and the rule of law -- is the best driver of innovation. It has emancipated billions from poverty and servitude. The true friends of development acknowledge this and support the spread of these free institutions, not their abrogation.

In most countries with national health insurance, the preferred treatment for prostate cancer is ... to do nothing.:
"Though American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than their counterparts in other countries, we are less likely to die from the disease. Less than 1 in 5 American men with prostate cancer will die from it, but 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men will. Even in Canada, a quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer die from the disease.
The one common characteristic of all national health-care systems is that they ration care. Sometimes they ration it explicitly, denying certain types of treatment altogether. More often, they ration more indirectly, imposing global budgets or other cost constraints that limit availability of high-tech medical equipment or impose long waits for treatments. "

"One of the longest and most detailed studies of UK childcare has concluded that young children who are looked after by their mothers do significantly better in developmental tests than those cared for in nurseries, by childminders or relatives."