Mn Kurmudgeon

The University of Minnesota is a very good institution of higher education, featuring world class scholars and researchers in a number of disciplines. By one study measure (from the University of Florida) that examined a number of different benchmarks (NIH grants, research budget, numbers of refereed publications, patents granted, etc), it is a top 5 public research university. All this despite the fact that it bears the burden of being my alma mater (my family couldn’t afford Harvard or Dartmouth, and in fact, I was the only one of five kids who went to college) and the stigma of my lousy scholarship. Of course, I’m no worse than the football program, and I don’t demand a million bucks a year to be mediocre.

But I digress. The Twin Cities campuses of the U of Mn have more than 40,000 students, and there are two primary locations, one in Southeast Minneapolis, the other in Northwest St. Paul. They are separated by about three miles, and students and staff can travel between the two locations via shuttle bus that runs on a dedicated private road. It only takes about ten minutes to get from one to the other because the bus basically does not have to stop for traffic- there is just one point on the busway where it crosses a thoroughfare, and the drivers have transmitters to lower stop arms against cross traffic. So far, we fit the urban green ideal- buses, mass transit, poor students, discriminate against big bad private cars, and so on.

Recently, the University teamed with the city of St. Paul to establish a business start-up “incubator”, a building where new companies that are spun off through the research discoveries of the university could find floor space and biomedical “wet labs” on an affordable basis where some rent and support services can be paid for in equity shares of the company. This is similar to the way many of the Silicon Valley and Boston 128 corridor biotech firms got their starts; it is hard to manage effective anti-cancer drug discovery in the kinds of garages where Apple and Medtronic were midwifed.

Happily, the Minnesota “University Enterprise Labs” (UEL) incubator happened to find a home in a recently vacated building right smack on the private bus road between the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses. You can literally stop the bus at the one place where it needs to slow down to check for crossing traffic, jump out, and walk from a figurative fifty yard line to the end zone and be at the building. The location is so perfect that the University moved its business development support office from the campus to the incubator. Thus, now there are not only companies associated with the U in the building, companies that professors have to go visit frequently and that have license agreements with the university, but actual university employees.

Perfect, right? In our world of traffic, gasoline price hikes, pollution, and all that, we can just jump on the bus at the McNamara Alumni building, where the University’s intellectual property and legal departments are housed, ride to the UEL, and hop off! Now we can even take mass transit to work in the morning, knowing that we won’t need to have an automobile available to get to meetings at the UEL!

Not so fast, bub. I tried that once. I was smart enough to ask the driver if he knew where to stop, and he told me that he could not, and that I couldn’t ride because I would not be able to get off the bus. So I sent an e-mail to the university transportation department and asked why (which e-mail was never answered; maybe it was my sarcastic tone about air pollution?).

However, I did learn, finally, from an inside source what the problem is. Children, can we all say “government regulation”?

It seems that the trend of the court decisions regarding the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has been to order specific and advance compliance with strict standards for bus stops. Even for private bus lines. In order to set up a bus stop at that point, they determined that they would have to construct shelters and access ramps for all possible variants of passengers, at a cost of near $250,000. This when the buses all have hydraulic lifts already to assist wheel chairs in and out. And, the need to possibly cross the (private, with no traffic other than university-operated buses) street means that they need to add full traffic light systems with pedestrian walk signs, and the like.

Now, I believe that the provision of lifts on the bus is exactly the right thing to do, and I will happily pay added taxes to ensure that it gets done. And I can’t think of a soul whom I would want to be around who would object to making sure that those with special needs are safely accommodated under such circumstances. The issue here is that the bureaucratic powers that be felt that this could only safely be done, from an ADA-compliance and/or tort liability standpoint, by looking at the extreme solution. For less than $100 I could install an alarm buzzer from the non-bus stop up to the receptionist in the building so that someone could come to assist. I am sure that there are many other ideas that would work as well. But the game today is CYA.

So, we drive to work, then drive to the UEL, burning gas, adding to traffic, polluting the air, and (worst of all) losing our regular parking spots in the ramp closest to the building. Someone put in an emergency call for Walter Olson at “Overlawyered”.

Maybe Nick Coleman could write a column about it.

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Walter Olson fans.

The Newsweek managing editor produces this lengthy and intended “myth-busting” account of how we misguided evangelicals simply Don’t Understand Enlightened religion. It is the standard explanation “Jesus Seminar” treatment, focused on the lack of positive proof of all of the Biblical events.

But, I suspect that Meacham is one of those people who is trapped by the world he has chosen to live in. He actually has a history of respectful interest in matters of religion, which would make sense given his choice of a little-known religious-origin college for his undergrad studies. Read his description, in his fine book Franklin and Winston, of the church service conducted by FDR and Churchill aboard ship up in the Arctic, where Roosevelt read the prayers and robustly led the hymns (“O God, Our Help In Ages Past”) in a way that would give apoplexy to Barry Lynn if it were reported about Bush and Blair today.

I almost feel sorry for Meacham, because he gives off an almost wistful sense of wanting to believe, but not being able to harmonize “simple” faith (that is not the same thing as “simpleton faith”) with the hyper-sophisticated and cynical world that the editor of a major national newsmagazine must inhabit, that of a nice “god” who stays out of the way and doesn’t interfere with how we want to lead our lives.

In this way, he reminds me a lot of the late and now little-known (in America) Chuck Templeton, who was the closest associate (and acknowledged superior preacher) to Billy Graham in the late 1940’s. He lost his faith after attending Princeton Theological Seminary, and died unhappy after a polymathic media career in Canada. Despite that apostasy, incidentally, he and Graham remained good friends until his death, with Templeton telling anyone who would listen, “Billy Graham is a NICE guy!” Templeton cried at times because he wanted the warmth of the relationship with Jesus back in his life, but simply could not believe no matter how much he desired to do so.

The entire “expert analysis” approach trumpeted by The Jesus Seminar has been thoroughly debunked by many people, including Dr. Greg Boyd’s Cynic, Sage, or Son of God (now unfortunately out of print), Penn State’s distinguished professor of history, Dr. Philip Jenkins’ Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195156315/qid=1103151724/sr=2-2/ref=pd_ka_b_2_2/102-0185129-7198507) going all the way back to Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus,

(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800632885/qid=1103125525/sr=2-3/ref=pd_ka_b_2_3/102-0185129-7198507).

The most interesting account I have found is Charlotte Allen’s The Human Christ- The Search For The Historical Jesus (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684827255/qid=1103132668/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/102-0185129-7198507?v=glance&s=books), because she summarizes, in very readable form, the attempts made by every different new group of liberal scholars going back 2,000 years to suddenly re-manufacture Jesus in their own images. Today’s “Jesus Seminar” clone of those previous militant naturalists straightening out us superstitous “Jesusland” residents is painting a picture for us of a pacifist, tolerant, feminist and (especially- the common trait) non-divine philosopher named Jesus. Certainly not the Son of God.

But all of history is what we believe based on the best accounts we can find, minus what we have falsified, not what we have built up because we found another brick; we start imagining the edifice without having all the bricks because they simply do not all exist any longer. If we didn’t reconstruct the past this way we would never be able to know anything at all. So, Jesus and all elements of His life we read about in the most comprehensive accounts we have of any character of antiquity, with generally such supportive compatible accounts that schlars invented a supposed common document, “Q” that they were all supposedly copied off of. Where we can, we discard errors.

Then we believe or we don’t believe. And nothing significant to Christianity has been falsified.

But the dirty little secret in the entire controversy is the “catch 22”: if you are a debunking, anti-divinity scholar, your views are credible. But, if you have the same or far better credentials, write for publications that are as prestigious, but you also happen to be a Believer, your scholarship is tainted and your work does not exist. This is the way that Mr. Meacham and his friends justify ignoring the large majority of scholars, through the centuries dating back to Origen, up till today. If they believe, they are not qualified- they reach the wrong conclusions.

OK, OK, that title is a bit misleading, I admit, because the winning entry has nothing to do with sex, which says (confirms?) something all by itself.

It has been fairly widely asserted that what porn is to men, romance novels (“bodice rippers”), with their discreet descriptions of passion and suggested- as opposed to blunt- physicality, are for women. I can see certain ways in which that might be the case for those females who are starry-eyed and thinking about men all the time. But if you are a more, er, “normal” woman, you don’t see the world that way. There are lots of higher priority thoughts regarding much different matters. Such as the kids, for example.

Let me explain. Men think of sex, conservatively, every eight seconds or so, unless something intervenes to increase the frequency, such as, for example, an attractive female walking by. Or a slightly less attractive female walking by. Or any female thinking of walking by. You get the idea.

What is the equivalent obsession for women? What will make them risk their reputations, lives, and careers because of its irresistible hold on their psyches and all waking thoughts? Not sex, that is certain. Fashion? For some, perhaps.

But the real winner is: home remodeling, as represented by HGTV. If I had football or basketball running on the television as much as my wife has HGTV going from the instant she arrives home after a long and stressful day at work, I would be the most expert data wonk in history, and ready for a prime-time job at ESPN. And look at the rise of first, Home Depot as the initial outlet for such impulses even as the high couture department stores fade away as major economic players. And what chain is now rising fast as the competitor to Home Depot? Lowe’s. Why? Because its store formats are more appealing to women. Home Depot has too many power tools and too much wood (men). Lowe’s is full of stainless steel appliances and window coverings.

Men, do this experiment. Next time your one-and-only is watching HGTV, stand in front of the television (if you dare), and wave a thousand dollar bill, all the while screaming “Free shopping spree! Here’s the cash! I’m watching the kids!” She will decapitate you as she responds, “Move, dumbbell, Candice Olson is describing why she stenciled a polar bear next to the fireplace!”

A woman can do a striptease in front of the Super Bowl on the TV screen. Or the NCAA championship game, and he will follow her to the next room, panting, having lost all curiosity about who might win. But if you interrupt or block “Designer’s Challenge”, God help you.

UPDATE: Welcome, all ye who observe and hallow the name of Instapundit. I always wondered how I might react to the ecstasy of an Instalanche(TM). Actually, I haven’t quite yet grasped the reality. I’ll go home tonight and ruminate on it as my lovely bride watches HGTV.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE (final version):

The New Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary defines “satire” as “n. biting wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose vice or folly…” I suspect that my unpardonable sin here was to treat the compulsive viewing of HGTV as “vice”. Excuse me, folks, gotta go add one more thing to the list of things that you aren’t allowed to say!

The reactions to this post, less here than at Michele Catalano’s “A Small Victory”, ranged from the Not Me refrain of “Well, I’m a woman and I LIKE porn-power tools-whatever”, to the Catherine MacKinnon radical feminist school of “You slimy men only think of one thing” to “I’m a man and I LIKE HGTV”. Forthe record, I know all kinds of women and men, and viva la differences both ways, as well as the similarities. My basic text is UVa Prof. Steven Rhoads’ book, a serious meta-analysis of the hundreds of studies on gender differences.

If Jonathan Swift were alive today, he would be a blogger. He would also post “A Modest Proposal”, and he would get reactions from:

PETA (If you are going to insist on hamburgers, at least be consistent and eat your own young)

Policy Wonks (Mr. Swift’s proposal appears to have merit on its surface, but he makes a mathematical error that defeats his entire thesis; the better solution is to raise taxes and set up collective farms)

Anti-abortion activists (This debauchery just goes to illustrate how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope…) (Disclaimer: I am pro-life, anti-Eric Rudolph)

Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome (If we had instituted universal population controls, this wouldn’t be necessary……)

I wonder how Scott Ott (Scrappleface.com) handles this. Of course, he is actually funny……

Vaccines- Why Can’t We Buy Any?



Kevin Drum is here partly right in his blog comments about the current shortage in flu vaccine supply, talking about Chiron and Aventis as the only remaining manufacturers willing to sell into the US market. He completely misses the core issue, because he wildly and verifiably writes off the primary cause of the problem.

There is absolutely no reason that there could not be a thriving and competitive human vaccine market in the US. We have a lot of vaccine manufacturers here- several large producers, and a lot of start-ups. Big companies buy up smaller ones all the time and new ventures try to get started.

There are also many research organizations, both non-profit, and commercial, who are exploring vaccine-based cancer treatments, which makes sense because the very basis of the vaccination process is stimulation of our own body’s immune system to fight off and destroy abnormal cells (e.g., humoral immunity associated with lymph filtration, etc.). If our own natural immunity did not work as well as it does against cancers, we would all be dead at a very young age; the best illustration of this is the high cancer rates experienced by transplant patients, whose immune systems must be depressed in order to prevent rejection due to graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). I saw one case history of a heart transplant patient who developed over one hundred new skin cancers in the year following his receipt of a new heart for this exact reason. Therefore, vaccination, for a variety of ailments, is still an extremely important method of treatment and subject of on-going, cutting-edge research.

What about all those missing vaccine manufacturers? Drum talks about low margins and small markets- the fact that the potential revenue numbers are not that high and the prices not that appealing, causing firms to exit the business.

So, what constitutes an attractive vaccine market? How about less than $50 million per year in the US, for about six major diseases, and yet, attracting at least six eagerly competing suppliers? If that is true, there must be another problem scaring the manufacturers away.

Well, the total annual market for broiler chicken vaccines is $38 million. Chasing that market in the US are Merial, Ft. Dodge, Schering Plough, Intervet, Solvay, Lohmann, and Biomune, to list the bigger players. Other animal vaccine producers and marketers for the total animal market include, with those listed above, Boeringer-Ingelheim, Novartis, and Pfizer (which just bought another animal vaccine company, in Australia). The most telling fact is that the revenues margins on this business are even smaller than those for human application, reaching grosses of tenths of a cent per dose for many types.

Drum suggests that a possible deterrent might be market volatility (“some years you sell out, but other years you make 50 million doses and only sell 20 million”). First of all, that difference looks large but is not actually terribly important- marginal costs of production, as with most pharmaceuticals, is extremely low; the biggest costs are “licensing” (the federal regulatory approval), R&D, and set-up. Once you turn the process on, you make large batches (which is why the Chiron lot failures are so problematic). But second, look at a market where the government is telling everyone what vaccinations to get, and how often to get them, along with the AMA, Academy of Pediatrics, and so on- people who compete to sell wristwatches or diet soda pop would kill for a market like vaccines.

The problem is not new production technology, either. There is nothing beloved or sacred about the current processes; suppliers are always doing R&D looking for more reliable methods of creating different vectors, whether “hot” or “attenuated” viruses, and new ways to grow them. If any new production technique really works, it will work for far more than the annual US flu outbreak, it will be used for your dog, your cow, and 40 billion chickens around the world. Production process investment amortization is not a barrier.

Then he proposes regulation as the bugaboo. Not. Each animal vaccine is regulated and must be licensed prior to any sale by the Department of Agriculture (DoA). Furthermore, the standards are not trivial, because you cannot have contamination entering the food supply; just ask the mad cow people, if you need an example. I would venture that if you compared the pre-market steps required of a supplier by the FDA and the DoA, you won’t find a huge difference.

So the shortage issue is not about market size, margins, volatility, production processes, or regulation.

Finally, Mr. Drum falls back on government monopsony procurement. If that were the problem, there would be no US Department of Defense. There is no market more fraught with roller-coaster monopsonistic volatility on a program basis, more regulation, or more scrutiny on margins- just ask Halliburton. The only reason that this marketplace works, and works a lot better than many out there is because of I*N*D*E*M*N*I*F*I*C*A*T*I*O*N!

Kevin Drum wastes an entire post dancing around and discarding the one elephant-in-the-room issue because it really messes up his major political ally. John Edwards can’t channel the words of a wounded GI in front of a jury as the grief-stricken mother wails in the background and demands $500 million as punitive damages. The product liability risk, absent fraud by the manufacturer, rests on Uncle Sam, and he ain’t buyin’ into it, which option he does not afford Pfizer or GM. There are claims, but they are not adjudicated by whiny ambulance chasers in front of credulous juries selected for their very credulity. Until the John O’Quinns, and Peter Angelos of the world are reigned in, we will deal with this over and over.

My hometown newspaper is the StarTribune (of Minneapolis, though they call themselves “the newspaper of the Twin Cities” because of larger circulation (than the St. Paul rival) leavened with a healthy dose of plain ol hubris. Because of their execrable editorial policies (on both the commentary pages and the alleged “news” pages- it is hard to tell the difference at election time), I don’t subscribe to the daily editions, but do read the weekend papers.

As part of the current full-court press to save Minnesota from the ascending conservatives, led by very popular and personable Governor Tim Pawlenty, the “Strib” has gone into bunker mode for the full dress battle over the soul of the state, which battle culminates on November 2. Among the stories on the business pages last week, all more or less positioned to try to persuade us that the economy is in the tank (hey, it worked in 1992…..), was a piece Sunday, Oct 17 piece on page D-1, discussing relative stock market performance under Democrats and Republicans. The most interesting element of their analysis was this little point on the graphic sidebar with the usual simplistic and a bit inflammatory title:

“Bush tide didn’t lift all boats- Of four industry sectors that were widely expected to do better under a Bush presidency than if Al Gore had been elected, two advanced smartly between Inauguration Day and the day before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The oil sector showed only a small gain, however, and pharmaceuticals declined during the period.”

Stop and think about that revealing statement for a moment. It makes three important points:

1) They admit that any economic slowdowns we have experienced over the last three years were powerfully affected (not caused- the market actually peaked in 2000 before the election) by the wrenching events of 9/11. Of course, Mr. Kerry and his friends (read: MSM, most particularly and explicitly including this very same Strib) are still selling the snake oil about Republican economic management, outsourcing, whatever, causing job losses.

2) Pharmaceutical stocks have dropped? Gee, I thought that, according to the Kerry commercials, Bush was in the tank for the drug manufacturers and doesn’t care about prescription prices. Not so.

3) Oil stocks have only showed a very small gain? Hey, I thought that we were at war for oil and all that kind of stuff, to make the Texans and Enron rich. Scratch that one too.

I wonder what else about old Bushitler these guys have been lying to me about? Maybe there are even elections in Afghanistan and progress in Iraq, where the French were blocking Iraqi liberation and freedom in order to preserve the TotalFinaElf oil concessions they would be awarded after getting the sanctions lifted……

FactCheck.org Needs a Fact Check

It appears that “FactCheck.org”, run out of the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania has really screwed up in some basic ways in their zeal to help Senator Kerry as he tries to extricate himself from his latest self-made disaster, this time about medals.

The self-styled media watchdogs are not always wrong; but this time they let the kiddies write the post and their total ignorance of DoD budgeting and procurement policies and practices is embarrassing.

At: “http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=177”

they take issue with the Bush-Cheney ads that criticize Kerry for his Defense budget voting record, and allege that the ads are not truthful because then-SecDef Cheney proposed cancelling the same projects in 1989 (FY90 Appropriation, I believe) that Kerry had tried to kill in 1984 (from the FactCheck post):

——

“Missing Context

“It is true that when Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984 he did call specifically for canceling the AH-64 Apache helicopter. What the ad lacks is the historic context: the Cold War was ending and the Apache was designed principally as a weapon to be used against Soviet tanks. And in fact, even Richard Cheney himself, who is now Vice President but who then was Secretary of Defense, also proposed canceling the Apache helicopter program five years after Kerry did. As Cheney told the House Armed Services Committee on Aug. 13, 1989:

“Cheney: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64; . . . I forced the Army to make choices. I said, “You can’t have all three. We don’t have the money for all three.” So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years.

“Two years later Cheney’s Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well. It was among 81 Pentagon programs targeted for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. “Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons,” the Boston Globe reported at the time.

“Does that make Cheney an opponent of “weapons vital to winning the war on terror?” Of course not. But by the Bush campaign’s logic, Cheney himself would be vulnerable to just such a charge, and so would Bush’s father, who was president at the time.”

———- (end of quote)

Only someone who can’t spell “FYDP”, “POM”, or “Inventory Objective” could make such silly charges.

The underlying issue is the fact that Kerry has a 20 year record of opposing military Authorizations and Appropriations. The jockeying before the final Bill is largely parliamentary. One can vote for or against most anything at one point or another, but what counts in the end is a total record, not one parliamentary vote, which is why several different votes are cited to illustrate that total record lacking concern for the US military readiness posture.

The FactCheck “analysis” reveals people who are ignorant of military procedures. To suggest that pulling one good example (body armor) out of a wildly irresponsible vote, as described by Kerry himself on “Face the Nation”, against the $66B in military support funds (out of the Supplemental total of $87B) included is somehow misleading, reveals how either partisan the writer is, or how dumb he or she is. The body armor example is totally appropriate- and Kerry effed up big time when he made that vote. It is easy to see how and why Kerry did it- it was one more short term political calculation to try and stop the Dean juggernaut and peel off a few anti-war votes himself. Now he pays a price for that in the general election- that’s life.

The comparison with Cheney is almost worse, and reveals these people as having rotten egg on their collective face.

It is because of two things: first, in 1990 the Cold War was effectively ended and Cheney was presiding over the drawdown and decommissioning of significant pieces of the force structure. Back in 1985 there was no such prospect on the horizon; we were still preparing militarily for an apparently viable USSR, and Kerry proposed shutting down the most important Army combat aviation asset right in the middle of the Cold War- if that doesn’t reveal his flawed and anti-military view, I don’t know what else would show it better, other than marching through Lafayette Park with his old V-VAW “Band of Brothers” (the real B-O-B shouldbe insulted by the terminology when associated with the Senator) and urging that all weapons be beaten into love jewelry (we don’t do plowshares any more).

Second, this example shows that the writers have no idea how the DoD appropriates funds and runs their programs, and has no interest in finding out before waxing eloquent and self-righteous on the subject.

There is a huge difference between cancelling a program in FY90 (which would be Aug 89) and FY85 when Kerry wanted to kill the Apache. By FY90, the Army had built at least 50 to 100 more Apaches (at an assumed, for lack of budget history specifics, production rate of 1 or 2 per month) than they had in 1985, so the likely revised procurement objective would be about complete at that point. Generally, the argument would be over whether to keep a warm line at a minimum sustaining rate or let the line go down and just provide spare parts. At that time there was a replacement attack helo on the drawing boards and no war on the horizon, so likely all the TDA were filled to support the revised and reduced authorized or anticipated future troop strength. Killing the program at that time would have made sense.

If you had had Cheney on record in 1985 as saying that the program should be ended, then you would have had a disingenuous twisting of fact, criticizing Kerry for proposing killing the same procurement program in the same context. But 1984/5 versus 1989/90 makes a huge difference.

The same thing applies to combat vehicles, such as the Bradleys. By 1990, the Army was consolidating multiple combat vehicle production capabilities- there were BMY in York, PA, the Army plants in Toledo and Detroit, and the FMC plant in San Jose. Eventually the BMY and FMC merged into United Defense Company, so that the readiness objective could be met to keep one warm base to build self-propelled howitzers, infantry combat vehicles, etc., with mod-refurb and spares lines in the government plants (with the usual jockeying by Congress over what is built where because of the district jobs issues).

In the case of the Bradleys, you had seven years of production runs, after Kerry first tried to kill the program, to fill the inventory.

The FactCheck discussion equates Kerry’s Cold War disarmament with the post-Cold War drawdown and treats them as the same. Time to get the grown ups into the media analysis business, because these folks are not up to it.

When Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, as much a doctrinaire conservative as there is in the gubernatorial position of any state in the union, unveiled his plan for reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada, he immediately found himself obliged by his purported friends to defend his position. Friendly, but thinly veiled, skepticism he encountered ranged from his being criticized by blog commentaries for anti-business actions, to being questioned skeptically by Hugh Hewitt (who has since backed down) to being pilloried by True Believers who seem to believe that any talking points ever faxed in by any large business anywhere must be gospel. On the other side were such commentators as Minneapolis StarTribune editorialist Lori Sturdevant, who applauded Pawlenty for a shrewd political populist gambit to drown out the cries of misery that are following his evil tax-freezing, expenditure-cutting budget. Sturdevant sees a Minnesota version of the triangulating “Sister Drug-ya” moment.

There have been millions of words written by both sides promoting their respective points of view, often espoused by some strange political bedfellows: picture Sen. Mark Dayton’s Canada bus runs departing, with Pawlenty and Rep. Gutenecht wishing the seniors Godspeed as they head North, while Democratic pundit Morton Kondracke urges the White House to hold firm and veto any legislation that enables pharmaceutical free markets to operate. At the moment we are hearing political sound-bites based on the self-interests of the various parties- but, what are the real issues to this idea? Are the battle lines as simple as to obviously brand Pawlenty as an apostate, or is he actually the real free-market conservative in this debate?

There are two distinct non-political motivations that might drive one to promote the idea of re-importing prescription drugs. First, it is obvious that one can embrace the idea simply to save money by acquiring drugs at lower foreign prices. This has a short-term effect of mitigating costs, but it does nothing about the cause of the high prices. The second approach is that of the Minnesota governor: importing drugs is a necessary means of eliminating artificial barriers, barriers that are set up and maintained by government regulators. This is not a simple case of “regulation-good, big pharma-evil”; neither is it absolution for the drug companies. And it is important that such market distortions, abetted by government, be removed before the only answer is government in the form of execrable single-payer socialization plans and the rationing that has inevitably followed wherever they have been implemented. Pawlenty is telling the free-market apologists to clean out their closets before the accumulated dreck blows up the system.

There are three major objections to prescription drug reimportation that are most often cited: 1) Safety concern- imported drugs are not manufactured in FDA-blessed facilities, so they could kill us; 2) Interference with free enterprise- bringing in prescription drugs from Canada is “importing price controls”; and 3) Reimportation would lead to a loss of drug company profits that are needed to support future development of new drugs.

There are sensible responses to each of these objections. Let’s look at them, one at a time.

First: Reimporting drugs would not be safe! The FDA won’t be able to “certify the safety” of drugs sold outside of the US :

OK, let me get this straight. They are saying that the same companies that sell safe and pure pills, made in the US, would casually change all of their production and quality processes and procedures when they sell those same drugs to Canada or Brazil? Um, for those of you who have never encountered a factory or a government regulation process, I have a secret for you: the FDA can’t certify the safety of ANY of the drugs made and sold in the US either, even at several times the foreign price. People, get real. This excuse is a con; the FDA doesn’t have labs all over the US where they test the drug production lots coming out of the pharma phactories. They do things the only practical way that they can- the drug manufacturers set up procedures that match the FDA Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) regulation, they establish process controls, and they sample the production lots. The processes are periodically inspected by outsiders to ensure that the company follows its own rules. Then the information- the data on all of this- is made available to the FDA. To believe that the safety issue is a major concern, one would have to believe that the drug manufacturers don’t care about product liability or the circling sharks of the trial lawyers bar (ATLA) who can’t wait for an easy shot at a major pharma.

The best and most enthusiastic enforcers of drug safety are not US government bureaucrats, they are the drug companies themselves. At least, that is the premise of the argument used by free market conservatives in every other area when they are not trying hard to justify protecting the current FDA-enabled monopolistic pricing power of drug companies. Imagine even that some smuggler obtained a supply of black market medication with labels that proclaimed the drugs to be The Real Thing. Whether the stuff worked as advertised OR made people sicker, who would be the most likely candidates to track down the bad guys and stop them? Good guess. If the FDA were not playing cop, you can bet the pharm that Pfizer, Merck, Bristol-Myers, and GlaxoSmithKline would have their own detectives on the beat and making citizens’ arrests at a dizzying pace.

The objection that drug safety would decline dramatically due to re-importation is simply nonsense. It is the rough equivalent of saying that a 10% cut in the city budget will lead to firing all the police and firefighters- it only happens that way if the city decisionmakers are incompetent.

Second: You’re Interfering with free enterprise by importing the price controls of foreign countries like Canada!

For those of us who believe in free markets, this is a troubling accusation; based on the universal evidence of history, we know that when we try to control prices by capping them, we only succeed in reducing the supply. That generalization doesn’t very neatly fit the pharmaceuticals’ situation, however, because the common examples deal with commodities where the per-unit variable cost margin is very tight. If there is any description that doesn’t fit prescription pharmaceuticals, it is “tight per-unit variable cost margins”. The real case is more like “a penny a pill variable cost, selling price a buck”. Not, as Seinfeld said, that there’s anything wrong with that…… However, unlike the case of natural gas, which is a standard commodity in a tight supply situation, the availability of pills is unlikely to be directly affected by any realistic price caps, not that I am suggesting that real live price caps ought to be implemented. In fact, I am arguing that the actual situation is not one of price caps, but of the rational responses of monopolists to the offers of very large, high leverage customers, to buy. Here we have monopolist sellers complaining about monopsonist buyers (think “monopolist single customers”), the rough equivalent, to quote James Bovard on another topic, of two drunks lying in the gutter, each complaining that the other is ruining the neighborhood.

Back in our first half-semester of classical theoretical microeconomics, we learned about “price discrimination”, a pricing system that is feasible only under conditions of monopoly. The fundamental principle is that any rational business enterprise will charge the particular customer highest price possible for the product. In a monopolist’s best case, there is no reason whatever to charge everyone the same amount for the same product- in fact, in the best of all possible worlds, there is a different price for each individual consumer, based on ability to pay and the degree of power wielded by the seller over that hapless captive customer. The term “price discrimination” has no moral component; it simply means that the seller will differentiate among his various customers and go to each with the highest price he can get away with charging.

We see this all the time in the real world. A common and easily recognizable example is the concession stand in the stadium or the movie theater. The market price of popcorn at home may be a quarter for a huge bowl, using Orville’s best in the old air popper. But, because the theater’s security people stand at the door to make sure that you are not smuggling in any contraband popcorn, your only alternative is for them to happily sell you an oily tub for five dollars.

The large international pharmaceutical companies have honed this art to near-perfection. The major issue faced by any seller- that is, how to prevent competitors from entering “their” market and undercutting the established prices- is solved and enforced for Big Pharma by Your Government. Our elected leaders stop all competition through a combination of patents and regulatory barriers to prop up prices, and then they vote for big spending programs to save us from the consequences of overregulation. That is not to say that patents and FDA drug regulation should be eliminated; clearly they should not, though some reform of certain abuses of drug patents is in order (i.e., one patent per basic chemical formulation), and something needs to be done to manage the costs of the clinical approval process in a safe manner.

But. The last time I heard sentiments similar to the current fear-mongering by the drug gangs was in my first job out of college working for a trucking company, right at the time that the over-the-road trucking industry was fighting against the horrors of decontrol. They had a long list of reasons why the republic would be destroyed if interstate trucking were deregulated. The real reason was that they didn’t want to lose business to individual entrepreneur, truck-owner-operators. Notice that the wordl didn’t end then, either- the trucking firms that were flexible sold most of their fleets and switched to a contract hauler model and the weak sisters fell by the wayside. The roads aren’t any worse than they were before, and goods still get moved. The trucking firms were wrong- and the airline and telecommunications industries, equally terrified of the pricing disruptions of competition, were also wrong.

Forty years ago, the sainted Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted that the biggest supporters of regulated industries are the regulators and regulated of those industries. He cited the incestuous and self-serving nature of virtually any such relationship, from the old Minnesota Railroad and Warehouse Commission to the ICC and its trucks, and the cozy way that the FCC takes care of the old guard telephone companies. What makes us think things work much differently with regard to the US Food and Drug Administration, particularly when the power of the agency rests in its ability to control the US drug market?

Kevin Hassett of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute recently bemoaned the way the TRIPS agreement messes up Big Pharma’s pricing power overseas by permitting foreign governments to violate drug patents on a humanitarian basis if they are being charged “excessive prices”. This is actually a sensible provision of any patent structure, including the US system; the US government also has “march-in rights” to exploit technologies that are improperly being withheld from the public for anti-competitive reasons. The entire basis of US patent law is that such protection from competition is provided as a means of ensuring deployment of technology, not preventing competition. As a moral issue, I don’t know anyone who would seriously propose that all of Africa be allowed to die so that Glaxo can prop up its developed country drug pricing structure. TRIPS is an attempt to balance competing interests and needs to exist, yet be administered in a balanced way. The most recent domestic example of a Big Pharma trying to play games with this was when HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson was trying to get reasonable price quotes for CIPRO in the wake of the 2001 anthrax scare, and Bayer Pharmaceuticals did their best to stick it to the US. Only a threat by Thompson to invoke the emergency powers ended the problem. (And we then did the smart consumer thing anyway- switched to generic doxycycline. Served them right.)

What actually happens in Canada, as Gov. Pawlenty observes, is not price control, but two parties, a buyer and a seller in each transaction, negotiating to get the optimal exchange based on the leverage each holds. Big customers have a lot of clout- Best Buy and WalMart tell their suppliers what products and how many units they are willing to buy- and they negotiate very hard on price- BUT THEY ARE NOT IMPLEMENTING PRICE CONTROLS- they are using their leverage as dominant customers. The seller does not have to take the deal, as Super Valu wisely illustrated a few years ago when K Mart tried to squeeze them too hard in lining up a primary supplier for their grocery shelves. Best Buy and Wal-Mart essentially dictate their purchase cost by squeezing every nickel of extra margin from the producer.

In the same way, if the dominant customer is a country, Canada (or South Lichtenstein- the specific country is not important) decides what price it is willing to pay for 100,000 units of drug X. It makes an offer to the pharma manufacturer to buy drug X from them for the price it has determined to be appropriate for its needs. The pharma determines whether it is willing to sell 100,000 units of drug X at that price, based on all relevant factors- unit variable cost of production (labor, materials, tooling, energy) and ability to protect the higher selling price of, say, two dollars per pill in other markets. If each pill costs a penny to produce and the selling price in other markets will not be driven down by accepting a Canadian or Peruvian offer of ten cents per pill, it is advantageous to take the deal. In this case, the US FDA is determined to continue to pay two dollars per pill, so Big Pharma eagerly sells cheap to Canada and most of even that selling price is profit.

But then: suppose the US started to import drug X from Canada for fifty cents per pill, Big Pharma has two choices: let it happen and see revenues drop by $1.50 per pill ($2.00 less $.50), times the total sold in the US, or stop selling to Canada at the low price. Either way, total dollar sales change. Eventually, they either bite the bullet and stop discriminating against the United States consumers, or they persuade Canada to pay more. Pawlenty and other true free-trade enthusiasts are betting that the “rest of the world” price will rise a bit and the US price will fall a bit, so that, eventually, the US pays market-established prices that are similar to those paid by everyone else rather than artificially-propped-up prices enabled by government regulation. That is not “importing price controls”, it is advancing free trade.

Which brings us to the third issue.

Third objection- Reducing US prices would lead cripple future development of new drugs. Well, would it? Rational analysis suggests that it would not affect new drug discovery R&D much at all- and the changes would merely accelerate the drug development changes that are already in progress- due to biotechnology and molecular chemical design. The largest impact would be on the approval testing process, the clinical trials where most of the expenses and risk are encountered. Those effects can be mitigated somewhat, not completely, by regulatory reform (though the risk of discovering previously unknown side effects will always be with us). But we already have “Orphan Drug” laws because the drug suppliers don’t willingly pursue less sexy or less lucrative treatments. The reason that these drug qualifications cost so much is a combination of liability and the intolerance of the US public to assuming any risk for unknown-unknowns. Bush and Frist are right to promote medical tort reform.

The fundamental claim currently shopped by the defenders of the regulatory-barriers-enabled status quo is that, without the high profit margins currently enjoyed only in the US, drug producers will be unable to create new therapies and we will all be less healthy as a consequence. If you believe that, you believe that a drug firm will voluntarily cut its own throat by eagerly emptying its pipeline of future products.

Anyone who watches television knows what Big Pharma does with large portions of its money- folks, it isn’t going to dedicated lab rats to find revolutionary treatments for rare and deadly diseases. The big bucks are spent on promotion and advertising, described in the R&D budget as “public education”, to try to persuade patients to demand that their doctors switch their antihistamine prescriptions over to the enhanced extended release Clarinex before the patent on Claritin runs out. That is, all the money not spent on Viagra commercials.

Investment goes where the money is- big markets, chronic diseases (where the patient needs to take the stuff daily for years, a la baby-boomer arthritis), and low-risk incremental variations of compounds where there is already some level of market share, brand-name identity (Bayer Low-Dose Aspirin) and barrier to competitor entry. If there is less cash available for new R&D, will the budget cuts come in finding new products or TV advertising? These sorts of decisions give gray hair to CEOs; fine- let them earn those bonuses.

The frequently-cited allegation that it costs $802 million, on average, to bring a new drug to market, is not necessarily a number that any analyst would agree with; the sample of 68 drugs was culled to massage the numbers and the R&D expense figure used was subject to some creative interpretation. We like firms to make profits in our free market, but Big Pharma’s rate of return is enormously higher than for most other industries, and that profit is AFTER writing off the R&D investment. There’s enough cash there to put some back into new drug approvals if it is necessary to do so. We don’t want to regulate drug finances, we just want them to live in the market a little bit more.

That real story is the primary reason that Big Pharma is resisting changes in the marketplace: in the same manner as every other relatively comfortable business, they hate disruption. In the world of technology investing, every history survey features story after story of “disruptive technologies”- the effects of internal combustion engines on the horseshoe and buggy whip industries, how General Electric threw the growth business plans of the whale oil producers for a collective loop, the need for IBM to adapt in major ways as mainframe computers were replaced by very low cost personal computers, the current woes of the Baby Bells as wireless telephony intrudes on their previously inviolate turf, and the anguished cries of network news organizations and old-line newspapers as the public places increasing reliance on satellite TV and internet bloggers than on ABC and the New York Times.

Big Pharma, like every large entity, wants to control its own fate and be internally integrated. They want to identify drug candidates internally, do the development in-house, control key suppliers on an exclusive basis, and so on. With other consumer products, such as with the automotive industry, outside competition (from imports) forced them to become less inbred and to open up both design ideation and subsystem manufacture to outside sources. Even the fabled creativity mills at 3M have seen the in-house research centers have to compete directly with external concepts, which are acquired by the corporation through intellectual property licensing, equity investment, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures.

The drug companies are making their first reluctant, halting steps on these uncertain paths. They have customs and processes for doing things. Several major firms, such as Schering Plough, also have their new drug pipelines drying up. But we need to speak the unspeakable: there is no reason whatsoever that today’s Big Pharma firms need to be protected so that in 2020 Pfizer and Glaxo are still dominant players, any more than back in our history we should have protected the Union Pacific railroad, Cray Research, Pan American airlines, and Northern States Power Company’s Reddy Kilowatt. Forbes magazine recently discussed the emerging elephantine issue- that the days of large blockbuster drugs and broad general drug markets are going the way of TV network broadcasting when cable and satellite came to be. “Business Week” described “Reinventing Corporate R&D” back in September 2003, and they were largeyl correct.

The emerging sciences of individual genomic characterization combined with biometric information databases will lead us to “individual designer drugs”, meaning that there will be far fewer medications that can be marketed to most everyone. The sooner Big Pharma gets over its marketing myopia, stops quivering against the reality of fundamental changes in their world, and gets on with shaping themselves to compete in the “narrow-casting” world, the better.

To believe that Big Pharma will abandon their life’s blood R&D because of marketplace changes is to believe that businesses give up completely when things are not perfect. No- they adapt, but when the market forces them to. We should stop enabling their denial. Faced with the continuous imperative to fill their product pipelines, they will eventually adapt in any way necessary to stay afloat. Reducing the margins of some products will force them to accept the fact that we will no longer tolerate them selling Allegra over-the-counter in foreign markets, while saying that US consumers are too stupid to use the product safely in the US until the magic infusion of wisdom the day after the patent expires. This sort of nonsense might impress one group of politicians, but before long the majority of Congress will join the majority in the House of Representatives in saying “Enough! We can’t cover for you any longer!”

The current revolution in drug discovery mirrors the changes in R&D in other industries. For years, a lot of drug discovery has originated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) university research system, where federal grants for basic science have been followed by drug companies licensing the discoveries to take them to market, or new spin-off businesses coming out of the universities and research institutions to exploit such inventions. Research by universities and very small business startups is accomplished at lower cost, and is often also more likely to be carried to a meaningful pursuit decision based on both financial and medical necessity criteria than if buried in the Bristol-Myers corporate structure. Suggesting that failing to feed the current corporate pharmaceutical development model as it currently operates means that beneficial new therapies will be lost is nonsense, and ignores current reality.

To be sure, there are already abuses by Big Pharma that need to be addressed- for example, if a non-profit research center utilizes proprietary material from a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a new project, the pharm routinely demands that all new discoveries tied to the use of the material in any way be given back to the firm. If they are providing the ideas and funding research, that makes sense; but if NIH is funding the research of an independently creative scientist, there should be legal provisions for equitable shares of the proceeds of the research to flow back to the researcher and his company or organization. In some cases at present, pharma companies do no more than provide non-unique research tools, not formulations or materials, and still demand ownership of all the research discoveries in exchange. That obviously has to stop. But these are manageable implementation issues, not dead ends.

Now what?

So, how do we make sure that drug innovation doesn’t die when (not “if”) the current wildly unbalanced, country-specific discriminatory pricing system inevitably collapses? Well, most importantly, we do not turn this into a government program, but we do enable the researchers receiving NIH support to work even more toward practical applications when appropriate, whether through new start companies or licensing to industry. We encourage industry to look to these new start companies to fill their product pipelines. We can retain promising new formulations in the research setting for longer periods to answer more of the safety and efficacy questions, thus reducing the cost burdens of the clinical trial stage that can only be completed by Big Pharma. We can provide tax incentives for both individuals and pharmaceutical firms to invest in the new start companies working on new drug formulations. We can strengthen the “orphan drug” laws to encourage firms to think less about marginal analgesics and more about life-threatening conditions. Perhaps most important, we can stop the ambulance chasers from chilling the risk climate, but in a way that protects customers. It works for Underwriters Lab and electricity.

The policy prescriptions are endless, and deserve debate- but to say that there is no way to protect new medication R&D other than to pay monopolistic prices only in the US suggests that the wrong people are in charge.

A lot has been written about the massive difference between the employer survey and the household survey regarding job creation; the two measures are almost 2 million jobs off. I deal a lot with new start companies, and it is obvious that these kinds of ventures are where the growth originates, and also obvious that the alleged entrepreneurial investors aren’t. If there is one thing noticeably missing from the current economic outlook it is Risk Capital.

Investors BUsiness Daily explains why, for those who can’t figure this out:

http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp?v=3/8

The new firms hire and take risks to grow. What the old firms do is buy small young ones and then cut payroll.

The amazing thing about the recent debates over intelligence issues regarding Iraq is not the differences of opinion about “what the intelligence said”- the fact is, everyone saw the same intelligence information, including John Kerry. When our new pompous JFK is quoted saying “Bush lied to lure us into war!” it is time to snicker. Once more, he is on both sides of an issue at the same time, as even the NYT is beginning to notice.

The right question is not what the CIA said regarding Saddam and his mass civilian murder weapons, it is the utter lack of any discussion about the way rational executives, such as the Harvard-MBA-trained Bush, deal with decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Tom Lifson dealt with this in detail at American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=3378), discussing how MBA candidates are trained to address risk and uncertainty rationally, depending on the relative risk tolerance of the entity involved. I went throught the same exercises in grad school, and have to address such issues almost daily now.

The puerility of the Iraq WMD sound-bite debate, prompted by the Democrat candidates and their lazy lackeys of the mainstream media, can be illustrated by two prominent examples of cost versus risk: automotive airbags, and “global warming”.

From a 2001 student paper on risk management at a major university, we read:

“During 1996 there was an amazing amount of car crashes, and those car crashes totaled up to be about 6.8 million. A third of those accidents actually resulted in serious injury or at least some type of injury and 1% ended up being fatal.” Ignore the lousy syntax and what that says about college students and ability to communicate in English (“an amazing amount of car crashes), and dissect the numbers.

Where roughly 1% of 2.3 million crashes results in a fatality, we end up with 23,000 people in the US being killed in traffic accidents each year. To determine accurately what your own probability of dying is, it would require a lot of added data, driving mileage distributions, locale information, weather data, and so on. But, for the sake of argument, let us make a few assumptions and think parametrically (in a manner that would get us thrown out of any course on probability theory and risk management, but might at least provide an order of magnitude comparison).

There were 191 million licensed drivers in the US in 2001, according to “Info Please” (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908123.html). It would be better to be able to factor in the number of cars owned by each driver, and so on, but we live with what we have. Very roughly, about 23,000 of 191 million drivers are killed each year on the road, so the simplistic probability of one particular driver being killed is .00012 (just over one in ten thousand). To mitigate that possibility, every new car manufactured in the US costs about $1,000 more to pay for inclusion of at least two airbags, and no one complains all that much. Are there cheaper ways to reduce the fatality risk? Sure- buy an SUV, take the bus, drive slower, and so on. But the airbag is the major decision we have embraced. For a fatality probability of roughly one in ten thousand, we pay an extra $1,000 for the car.

This example describes to some degree our individual tolerance of risk. But we are a collective society, and what we need to do is also look at societal risk as a total issue, since we tend to think that way; we did not grieve for the victims of 9-11 because we feared that we were next so much as we felt collectively violated by the evil perpetrated on some of our own in our own yard. Even though we may not have personally known a victim, they were mostly American, so they were our brothers.

What about the risk of terrible consequences arising from anthropogenic global warming? This is a reasonable collective measure, since we also feel it when our citizen brethren are hit by hurricanes and floods. Well, the lead author of the scientific portion of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says that the most likely worst case increase in temperature over the next century is one degree, and the best study of the costs by the Clinton Department of Energy estimated that the GDP would decline by 3%-4% per year as a result of trying to achieve Kyoto carbon dioxide reduction targets, which themselves by the most optimistic estimates could at best reduce temperature averages by a third of a degree. And the possible worst consequence of a one to three degree temperature increase in global average temps is by no means particularly problematic, as Patrick Michaels documents in The Satanic Gases. So, we have the entire left wing of US politics eager to reduce US GDP by 4% a year on the off chance that it might have a 30% effect on a remotely possible temperature increase, which is itself identified by some of the best authorities as being far less than 10% probable, the effect of which is as likely to be beneficial as negative (so call the impact 50-50), and, even if negative, still not likely to cause significant problems, maybe a 5% chance that a temp increase could lead to trouble. So we get a $400 billion cost per year, against a .0075 (3/4 of 1%) chance of a slow developing problem that might affect a very few people on our coasts if the worst case occurred and led to some areas of coastal flooding caused by melting glaciers.

Fine. We are obviously risk-averse, both collectively and individually. It is obvious from just those two examples that we are willing to pay a lot to mitigate the consequences of bad outcomes.

So. Regarding the terror threat, especially as represented by Iraq in early 2003, we had the following known threats:

1) 30 years of progressively increasing-scale terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of US citizens prior to 2001 (think Marine barracks, Khobal Towers, USS Cole, multiple airline hijackings, and so on. Probability (i.e., certainty of occurrence): 100%

2) Sept.11, 2001 murdering more than 3,000 innocents. Probability: 100%

3) Multiple fatwas issued against the Great Satan encouraging terror groups to murder US citizens at every opportunity. Probability: 100%

4) Saddam Hussein having himself reported to the UN very large stockpiles of chemical weapons. Probability: 100%

5) Saddam Hussein with a documented record of using chemical weapons against Iranians and Iraqis. Probability: 100%

6) Saddam Hussein paid off terrorists for conducting successful homicide bombings. Probability: 100%

7) Saddam Hussein offered safe asylum and medical care for international terrorists such as Abu Nidal and Al-Zarqawi. Probability: 100%

8) Saddam Hussein permitted construction and establishment of a sophisticated terrorist training facility at Salman Pak just outside Baghdad, complete with aircraft fuselage to practice hijacking techniques, and had his secret intelligence services help train new terrorists. Probability: 100%

9) Iraqi agents provided critical support and assistance for the terrorists who attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Probability: 80%

10) Thus far, despite finding multiple violations of the 17 UN resolutions ordering him to disarm, the larger WMD stockpiles that Saddam Hussein self-reported to the UN have not been located, and some credible authorities believe that those stockpiles may have been destroyed, leading to some question whether the WMD threat was as great before Operation Iraqi Freedom as had been believed. This leads to some question about the accuracy of CIA pre-war intelligence estimates and the attendant potential threat to the US. Probability: 50%

11) There is a history of cooperative relationships between Saddam Hussein and active anti-American Islamofascist terrorists, based on multiple sources and events, such as was summarized by DoD’s Douglas Feith to the Jojnt Intelligence Committee. Probability: 90% (we allow here for an amazing set of coincidences and the possibility that multiple witnesses have lied in a coordinated manner)

12) Chance that Saddam could pass WMD capabilities to active al Qaeda-type terrorists for use against US interests, including inside the US: Probablity? You choose- certainly more than 20-30%, most likely at least 50%.

If we take the lowest conditional risk probabilities identified above, we get 50% times 90% times 50%, which is 22.5% as a rough parametric risk probability of an attack on the US originating in Iraq as ruled by Saddam Hussein. That is about 25 times as great an imminent risk as is posed by the worst speculative cases associated with global warming if indeed you subscribe to that scenario, which most trained climatologists do not. (The major supporters of apocalyptic climate scenarios tend to be chemists- e.g., Clinton’s IPCC leader, Bob Watson.)

Now, these last data are somewhat overcome by the fact that the inexact science of CIA estimates usually does not cause them to err in the direction of overestimating threats; that is, variability is bilateral, causing us to underestimate at least as often as we overestimate. As Mort Zuckerman recently wrote in US News and World Report, “We underestimated the Soviet nuclear program in 1949, China’s in 1964, India’s in 1974, and Iraq’s in 1991. The list goes on: North Korea in 1994, Iraq again in 1995, India in 1998, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2002, and Iran and Libya last year.” What we see here is that most often in recent years, including with regard to Iraq within the last decade, and just a couple of months ago regarding Libya, the CIA underestimates the threat.

With that comparison of relative risk profiles and the associated costs and benefits, it is clear that any US president who pursued the Kyoto Treaty would be irrational, and any president who failed to deal effectively with Iraq would either be grossly incompetent or grossly negligent. You are left to decide which description fitted Mr. Clinton; I fear that a third category applies to Mr. Kerry and his compatriots.

Passionate about “The Passion”

I grew up in a conservative Evangelical home, and attended a Baptist church for the first decade-plus of my life where every Baptist cliche was law. No dancing, no movies (heck, imagine how corrupted I could

have gotten from “Beach Blanket Bingo”, which was the sort of thing that was running at the time), no smoking, no booze, etc. Every element of this background suggests classical fundamentalism, and that would be a correct assessment. And this is exactly the sort of group that supposedly also had problems with Jews because “they killed Jesus”, in the current set of talking points from the cacophonous tribe that opposes most everything traditional or religious, this time led by Mr. Foxman of JADL. It wasn’t till I was much older that I studied enough and learned enough and was able to separate the legalistic propaganda from what I still recognize as the reality of a crucified, then resurrected Son of God and the way that we personally interact with Him.

The trouble is that this rigid portrayal of fundamentalists as anti-Semitic simply doesn’t work. The KKK may have had ugly views, but they were slime about all sorts of people. The crusaders were frequently terrible people. There may have been problems inside the Catholic church, but I never saw them myself as a Baptist, and none of my friends, including my Catholic best friend, ever even hinted at having any issue with the Jews. All my youth I never heard about “Christ-killers” or anything else even close- I heard instead “pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee”, I heard that Jews were good at business, that there had been prejudice against them because they were God’s chosen people, and we should not behave that way ourselves.

The first time I ever heard anyone even suggest that “the Jews killed Jesus” was on an episode of the late-’70’s TV series “Soap”, spoken by the blatantly cliched character played by Mary Kay Place. I was honestly puzzled: “Huh?” And I am just as puzzled by all the heat over “The Passion of the Christ” today. Corrupt religious leaders and nasty government authoritarians killed Jesus for their own reasons. But, as Gibson suggests in the film, in reality, we all did.