There oughta be a law.Supermodel Giselle Bundchen thinks we need a world government to ensure — wait for it — that all mothers breast feed their babies.
She says:
'I think breastfeeding really helped. Some people here think they don't have to breastfeed, and I think, "Are you going to give chemical food to your child, when they are so little?"
'There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months.'
All right, lads, take it easy. We know you volunteer as her inspector to enforce the edict.
I have absolutely no opinion on the subject of breast feeding, but I do on health policing. Look at the article in the Daily Mail (I will not write "keeping abreast of the news" — uh-oh, I just did) from which the quote is taken. The tone is snide, but only because she is perceived as "smug." And it's rounded out with quotes from other "celebrity mothers," who dissent, but only in practical terms. The letters from readers, at least those I could bear to read before utter boredom set in, are much the same.
Maybe Ms. Bundchen didn't mean her "worldwide law" comment literally, and it was just a figure of speech. But figures of speech tell a lot about the social environment they arise in. I don't know what country she calls home (as a jet setter, probably she has multiple domiciles), but her habit of mind fits like a key in the statist mentality that has reached its apotheosis in the European Union and the Failed Messiah's dreams for America.
In 50 years, we've gone from public health measures to eradicate terrible diseases like malaria and polio — reasonable exercises of state power — to proposed laws about how much salt a restaurant can put in a dish. Every health issue, like obesity, is described as an "epidemic" and the vast forces of government are mustered to overcome it.
The situation goes beyond health. It's about government power over the individual (always described as being for the individual's own good, of course). When every health problem is conceived as a field for state intervention, the fallout includes two bad consequences — not even considering cost, which the state can only obtain through direct and indirect taxes.
First, health bureaucracies are like other bureaucracies. They are ruled by groupthink and internal politics. They promote orthodoxies, such as that cholesterol causes heart disease, which may cause more harm than good.
Second, and in the long run worse, turning every health issue into a problem that requires government solutions undercuts one of the individual's most potent resources: himself. Instead of encouraging the capacity to make wise life choices while developing personal responsibility, health policing delivers the message: don't try to figure it out yourself. You aren't smart enough. We'll let you know how many calories per week or alcohol units per day you should consume. The Breast Feeding Council has just published the third, revised edition of its report, When Breast Is Best. Do not attempt to breast feed before reading and following the guidelines.
Certainly, people should get the best medical advice and treatment they can, but at the same time they need to take the initiative, learning about how the spirit-brain-body system functions and what causes it to go haywire. They particularly should teach themselves all they can about any ailments they suffer from. That includes getting a feel for disagreements among health professionals about prevention and treatment — yes, researchers and doctors in opposing camps can go at each other like over-caffeinated wildcats!
No state, much less a "worldwide" one, has the last word on health and well-being.
Don't touch that water!
It contains molecules.
I'm a responsible chap. So I worry, a lot.
I worry about dust mites. Mold. Mercury in fish. Pisces in Mercury. Lead. Asbestos. Pesticides. Herbicides. PBCs. Arsenic. Particulates. Chlorine. Radiation. Genetically modified foods. Drug-resistant E. coli. Melamine. Sunshine. BBCs -- sorry, I mean CFCs. Drug interactions. Aerosols. Methane. And so much more.
Yesterday I received in the mail a sales brochure from VitaCost.com that offers hope of surviving a few more days. Now I should mention that I like VitaCost and order nutritional supplements from them. Their proprietary label, Nutraceutical Sciences Institute, seems cost-effective. They also offer good discounts on other high-quality brands like Nature's Herbs, Country Life, Carlson, New Chapter, and Life Extension.
This catalog, however, isn't pitching food supplements. "Go Organic! Good for Nature, Good for You!" "FREE Shipping with Purchase." (Unless you purchase, what is there to ship?) The products may be organic and natural, or as natural as anything processed and packaged can be, but their common denominator is that they don't have various insulting substances in them. For example:
Sodium lauryl sulfate-free body wash
Oxybenzone-free sun protection
Paraben-free moisturizers
Petroleum-free shave (who knew?)
Ammonia-free hair color
Propylene glycol-free toothpaste and rinse -- I mean, "oral health"
BPA-free drink bottles
Chemical-free laundry detergent ("Did you know? Some chemicals found in conventional laundry detergent can take up to 10 years to break down in the environment." That's brill! I've been in environments where people break down every other day.)
Don't forget your nippers: "Safe and gentle for baby." Organic toys.
And your pets. Non-allergenic cat and dog treats, from which corn, eggs, wheat, mold and chemical detergents are banished. Natural solutions for fleas and ticks. (What problems do fleas and ticks have that we can help them solve?)
Is this concern for purity in every aspect of life progress -- "conscious living," as the New Age sages claim -- or the signature of an effete, self-obsessed decadence? Smart choices, love for Gaia -- or a hip form of conspicuous consumption by people who wouldn't dream of having a backyard barbecue (food cooked at a temperature above 200 degrees F is dangerous, you know) or driving anything but a water powered car?
Ubiquitous Environmental Anxiety Syndrome.
Here's a little perspective to measure "Good for Nature, Good for You" against.
Throughout most of human history, as well as in some parts of the world today, people were swept out of this life by uncontrollable diseases. The Black Death in the 14th century is estimated to have killed a minimum of one-third of Europe's population. It often took only a few days between coming down with the symptoms and expiring. Even in the 19th century, as you can read in books about that time, people took sick and were gone shockingly fast.
If you were a soldier wounded in battle during the War Between the States, your chance of being given anesthetic was almost nil. A military surgeon who decided it was between your dying and having an infected limb amputated (no one had heard of antibiotics) gave you a shot of whiskey and started sawing.
Less than a hundred years ago, nearly two decades into the century when most of us were born, the influenza epidemic removed 50 million people from the world's population, a greater death toll than any single war in all recorded time. This site says, "Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours of their first symptoms. Others succumbed after a few days; their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death."Are you trembling because there is no organic avocado extract in your bar of soap?
Anything that makes your body-mind system work better, whether physiological- or placebo-based, can perhaps be justified. The state of the soul outranks the health of the physical body, but the second can facilitate or thwart the first. It's hard to meditate when your insides are in open rebellion, your nerves are sending distress flares, and your brain cells are walking off the job because of creeping Alzheimer's. Those who are ill, or suffer from a physical dysfunction such as diabetes or Parkinson's Disease -- or are just getting on in years -- will never scoff at good nutrition and avoidance of pathogens.
But will they ask themselves, as the VitaCost flyer does: "Why are you washing your HAIR with chemicals?"
Was anybody surprised by the ruling yesterday gutting SB 1070? Not likely. I, for one, expected it. Using federal power to remake the country by any means necessary — including judicial quasi-legislation — is par for the course these days. We live in a parody of a republic where the central government, its employees, and crony capitalists exist for no higher purpose than self-aggrandizement.
The spirit of liberty has been corrupted before, but on a local level: Tammany Hall in 19th century New York, Jim Curley in Boston, the Daley machine in Chicago — the political process run by and for bosses. But never before has the political class openly expressed its contempt for the United States as a whole.
Now you see it in its awful glory, taking over corporations, telling banks who they must lend money to, passing bills thousands of pages long that no one has read in their entirety but full of plums for special interests, condoning voter intimidation, refusing to enforce laws and the Constitution whenever they feel like it.
It would not be entirely correct to say that the Failed Messiah wants to subvert the Constitution. He is simply indifferent to it, hardly knows that it exists. His law is street law. He's the leader of the pack. Plenty of followers, as well as collaborators from the opposition party, function as his enablers. And of course the FM is only a more extreme version of his predecessor: Shrub II also didn't like borders, and looked the other way as they became the thinnest gauze; invaded two countries without bothering about the formality of asking Congress for a declaration of war.
Now a federal judge has ruled (in effect) that Washington doesn't have to protect and defend the United States, and that no state can either force it to or step in and take responsibility itself. While the ruling is bad to the point of immorality, the net effect could turn out to be positive. It shows Americans in no uncertain terms that their national government is neither of the people, by the people, nor for the people (aside from the people it has chosen to import for population replacement). If Americans are truly Americans, they will react fiercely but cannily, individually and in association with one another. Big Government is powerful and increasingly intimidating, but it is also stupid and clumsy. It is to be feared, but not as much as it can be taught to fear an aroused citizenry.
Sorry, Gringos, we got los global hots, you got us.
The leftist media have latched onto a new study to help them promote la Reconquista.
A reduction in crop yields caused by climate change could mean up to 6.7 million additional Mexicans will emigrate to the United States by 2080, says a study by Princeton University researchers.
A reduction in crop yields caused by global warming could mean up to 6.7 million additional Mexicans will emigrate to the United States by 2080, says a study by Princeton University researchers. The authors say that a 10 percent decline in agricultural productivity would lead two percent of the Mexican population to migrate.
Stories in the Christian Science Monitor, the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, and Reuters can't decide what they're more gleeful about: another bunch of "academic experts" waving the global warming flag, or the prospect of yet more Mexicans overrunning the United States.In none of these news propaganda pieces is there so much as a suggestion that the United States doesn't have to accept a new wave of invasion ("human migration"). This faith-based prediction of a heat wave south of the currently borderless border will send more millions of Mexicans to El Norte.End of story. What, you thought it was possible to stop "migration"? That would make an owl laugh."Indeed it looks like the climate change could be an important factor in future migration," said Oppenheimer, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It underscores the need to grapple with greenhouse gases."
Oppenheimer, old boy, you go get yourself another grant to grapple with greenhouse gases (commonly known in academic dole-receiving circles as a GGGG). Some of us are going to grapple with another "important factor in future migration": the federal government's policy of population replacement and erasing immigration control.
Oppenheimer stressed that the study did not address the cause of the variation in climate that affected Mexican crops. He also said it did not look at whether the migrants moved to the United States legally.
Of course not. He's a Princeton professor. He has his tenure-based sinecure, Party membership in the ruling class, and his dacha in the country. Why should he care if a bunch of border state community college riff-raff have to live in occupied territory? They're probably global warming deniers, to boot. Serves 'em right."Yet, to our knowledge, no study has directly associated a component of the increase in emigration with changes in climate, despite numerous reports and anecdotes of Mexican farmers fleeing to the United States because they no longer could maintain their previous way of life because of climate-driven crop failures."
Well, Professor Oppenheimer, some of us intend to maintain our previous way of life despite climate-driven patriotism failures like you. You might think about fleeing before the climate gets too hot for you.
James Quinn, writing at Financial Sense, gives an overview of America's economic debacle that we are living through. A lot of it has been said before (and ignored by our political overlords), but Quinn points to one element in the Great Downfall that few of any persuasion want to acknowledge: the role of institutionalized "compassion." Quinn says:
A nation of 310 million people cannot be governed based on emotional sob stories, but this is the tactic used by liberals to enact ever more entitlements and safety nets without consideration of cost. Steven F. Hayward describes the liberal mindset:
“Liberalism’s irrepressible drive for an ever larger welfare state without limit arises from at least two premises upon which the left no longer reflects: the elevation of compassion to a political principle (albeit with other people’s money) and the erosion of meaningful constitutional limits on government on account of the imperatives of the idea of Progress.”
Compassion is a virtue, but it is a human virtue. Only people can have compassion. Governments cannot have compassion, any more than governments can feel love or tenderness. State institutions exist, by their intrinsic nature, to give their administrators access to the public purse and aggrandize their power. The best the public sector can do for those who need help is provide a safe, orderly, and reasonably efficient framework for individuals to make the most of their abilities, so they will not normally need compassion.
True, people can suffer through no fault of their own — illness, accidents, the physical deterioration of old age; arguably, even stupidity is a congenital handicap, not a moral quality. A compassionate society (that is, one that encourages individuals to be compassionate) will find ways to help them, and those ways will sometimes involve government institutions.
But that's a far cry from turning every need into, as Hayward says, a political principle. "Compassion" then becomes a trump card, an emotional argument that overrides any other consideration. The Left in particular no longer has to show how any program works in the big picture, rather than just for one group on which the "disadvantaged" label is bestowed.
Emotion based sob stories always overcome rational debate, discussions of cost, and overall impact on society. The problem with making decisions with long term fiscal implications based upon compassion only is that you will run out of money before you run out of compassion. Author William Voegeli points out that there is no end to the liberal compassion-fest:
"Because compassion is an emotional response rather than a moral principle, it defeats every attempt to make wise choices about which sufferers do and don't deserve governmentally dispensed solace."
But even that's not the whole story. Mission creep is inseparable from government activity. Ever more client needs must be found — some would say created. The reductio ad absurdum, catastrophic for fiscal (as well as ethical) responsibility, is that everything that would benefit someone becomes a remedy the recipient is entitled to.
For the liberal mentality, it isn't necessary to show that society as a whole would benefit. It isn't even necessary to show that the recipient would benefit in the long run. All that matters is that someone would feel better at this moment. Vote some more largesse! Create a new department to dole it out! As Quinn says, "The more programs that are created and expanded the larger the constituency for never ending the program. There is no example in the history of the country where a program has been deemed a failure and scrapped. Entitlement programs never die. The current lot of myopic, bought by special interests politicians do not have the guts to cut or even reduce the growth rate of entitlements."
Look at this poor woman. Her day care center's funding has been reduced. It might even have to close. Woe, woe! She has five kids, none of them with a father who found it worth his time to stick around. What will she do with the kids if she can't drop them off at the day care center while she's working at the dollar store?
She's in a fix, all right. But she's in a fix largely because of previous "compassion." No one ever asked her to breed responsibly, or not breed at all until she was in position to raise kids right. Never mind; for the government breedy is needy.
I'm not saying the woman or her kids should be left to their fates without a helping hand. I'm saying we should stop producing situations like this and demanding that others, who may be in better shape because they worked, saved, and planned (and who might have troubles of their own) pay for it. Perhaps all this wouldn't matter so much, except on moral grounds, if money grew on trees. For some people, especially those in the government ruling class, it has long seemed as if wealth was infinite — one of the few natural resources not needing conservation. But it's mistaken to blame our present end stage economy entirely on government. Not only have the majority of Americans enabled its folly, but they have themselves morphed from citizens into consumers. The only way for a country to achieve long-term growth is for its citizens to save more than they earn. These savings can then be invested within the country to insure that prosperity would continue for future generations. A country of only consumers will eventually collapse under the weight of debt and lack of investment.
Two generations of Americans have been brought up to believe they are owed a pension, owed tax subsidized housing, owed free healthcare and owed the right to happiness provided by Big Brother. The conviction that government can coddle and provide for all the underachievers, disadvantaged and un-ambitious in society has taken root like a weed. This belief is a fallacy.
There is still time, brothers and sisters. But not much.
Most films involving espionage are a branch of the action genre, even when they're not parodies like the James Bond series. At most you get a dash of "love interest," as in Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, for a breathing space between the detonations.
Farewell (titled in French L'Affaire Farewell) is a welcome exception, interested at least as much in personality and politics as in the mechanics of spying. Based on historical events, it is both suspenseful and psychologically powerful.
In the early 198os, a Soviet dissident called Colonel Gregoriev in the film (his real name was Vladimir Vetrov; code name "Farewell") chose to defect in place. He had access to secret documents that he was willing to convey to the West. Being a KGB insider, though, he knew too well that the agency had penetrated its opponents' intelligence ops in Moscow. He needed a foreigner who was squeaky clean with no connection to any spy ring to act as a go-between.
He found just such a person in Pierre, working for the French company Thomson in Moscow. At first unwillingly, and never comfortable with secret meetings and carrying stolen material to his boss in Paris, Pierre proved to be the catalyst for events that reached the highest levels of government. Ultimately, the information obtained by "Farewell" and smuggled by Pierre not only enabled the French to roll up Moscow's network in Paris, but provided Ronald Reagan with evidence of the Soviet government's weakness. According to the film, this knowledge gave Reagan an edge in the Cold War: with a military build-up and the threat of the "Star Wars" anti-missile defense, the United States forced the Soviet Union into a new chapter of the arms race that bankrupted it and led to its downfall.
Gregoriev/"Farewell" and Pierre, interestingly, are both played by film directors. Emir Kusturica (Gregoriev) has made lots of movies, albeit few have had a U.S. release; some 20 years ago, I reviewed his Time of the Gypsies for the Santa Fe weekly paper. All I can recall is that I thought it was imaginative. Guillaume Canet (Pierre), in addition to an acting career, directed the excellent 2006 mystery thriller Tell No One.
Kusturica, a first-rate actor, turns out to be revelatory as Gregoriev. He has terrific screen presence and creates a complex, heroic but humanly fallible character — a man who has taken a step he knows he can never go back from, giving him a slow-burning intensity. Canet was a problem for me at first. He plays Pierre as emotionally closed, precise and formal. He probably designed the performance for maximum contrast with Gregoriev. Pierre's repression is convincing, but dramatically his first scenes are numbingly inert.
Yet, while staying in character, Canet gradually lets us in on a little of Pierre's emotional life. He is lovingly committed to his wife and children, and some of his granite demeanor is because of fear, knowing that he is endangering them. And — although we don't find out why — we see that Pierre is drawn to the secret world, continuing as a conduit between Gregoriev and Pierre's masters in Paris (who now include the French president, Mitterand) when, despite pressure to carry on with the business, he could have shut the door.
Ironies abound. Gregoriev isn't anti-Communist, he's an ultra-believer in the worker's paradise, which he thinks the post-Leninist leadership has corrupted and sabotaged. His wife Natasha is having an affair with another KGB agent — who later turns out to be his interrogator. His son doesn't give a toot for politics, and sullenly lurks in his room listening to the rock band Queen. Gregoriev too has a side dish, an attractive KGB functionary named Alina. There are further ironies, but to reveal them would be a spoiler.
Director Christian Carion's previous film was Merry Christmas, about the temporary fraternization of German and French soldiers on the front lines during the holiday in 1914. I found it to be an impeccably made snoozer, with an obvious story line. No such problems here. The plotting is as suspenseful as it should be, with a few "Hitchcock moments" for extra electricity, and the performances Carion obtained from his actors are spot-on: not only Kusturica and Canet (and it cannot have been very comfortable directing other directors), but also Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Natasha, Alexandra Maria Lara as Pierre's wife, and Dina Korzun as Alina.
Fred Ward's portrayal of Reagan is notable — he makes the Gipper's vocal inflections, phrasing, and even the tone of the voice uncannily accurate, without exaggeration or caricature. Even Willem Dafoe, whom I don't care for as an actor, offers just the right blend of bureaucratic patriotism and smarmy cant as a CIA officer.
Production values are terrific. The settings are convincing, including Ukraine and Finland for Russia; the musical score is spare but effective; and the sound recording and mixing are as good as I've ever heard in a film, providing ambience rather than artificial excitement. But the technical virtues would not have gone for much without its insight into the characters' inner drama. Farewell should take its place among the finest espionage films ever made.
Disclosure: I received a DVD "screener" from the public relations company for Farewell's U.S. release.
