British medical journal The Lancet strikes out against the Pope, in more ways than one

By Seth Richardson

Last week The Lancet, a British medical journal, attacked Pope Benedict XVI for stating that HIV/AIDS in Africa “cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms: on the contrary, they increase it.” In an editorial reply, the Lancet accused the Pope of putting Catholic ideology above the suffering of AIDS victims.

“Whether the Pope’s error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. … When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.”

The problem with The Lancet’s statement is that Pope Benedict is right, and they are wrong. The Pope did not make a false scientific statement. It is a scientific fact that a combined program of chastity, abstinence, monogamy, and condom availability has succeeded in reducing AIDS rates in Uganda dramatically. All the religion bashing on earth will not change the fact that the Pope was speaking the truth, and that he is supported by science.

The Lancet’s editorial excoriation was long on abuse and short on fact. The Lancet wrote, “But, by saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue.
…
UNAIDS, the UN Population Fund, and WHO released an updated position statement on HIV prevention and condoms, which said that ‘the male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV’.”

This statement is technically true but deliberately deceptive, and is thus a distortion on the part of The Lancet and the WHO. It is true that the condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV. But technology is not the only, or even axiomatically the best way to reduce HIV transmission, which is what Pope Benedict understands. Behavioral modification, combined with technology is demonstrably the best way to reduce HIV transmission.

Although condoms are presently the best technology available, that’s not saying much, because it merely means that science doesn’t have any better technological solutions than a method of birth control that was superseded by chemistry more than 30 years ago, and which eclipses the effectiveness of condoms for preventing pregnancy. Unfortunately, no better technological solution is available for HIV/AIDS. But that’s not the Pope’s fault, now is it?

Factually, condoms are not entirely effective at preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS either, as is demonstrated by the 24 percent AIDS rates in Botswana. Condoms have a known failure rate of about 15 percent even under ideal conditions with an educated user fully committed to proper condom use one-hundred percent of the time. But condom use in Africa very rarely takes place under ideal conditions and condoms are often used improperly or not at all for a variety of reasons.

And then there’s the debacle of the WHO and other NGO’s supplying condoms that African men don’t like to use. Why? Because the standard condom is too small to fit many African penises. Also, cultural (read: behavioral) issues with sex and sex organs in Africa reduce condom usage. Then there’s reduced pleasure, unavailability at outlet points, cost, and other technical and social issues that reduce the effectiveness of condom-only programs, according to the International Conference on AIDS.

The fiction that the WHO and The Lancet wish to maintain, that condoms are the best hope for Africa, is exactly that, a fiction. Some speculate that it’s a conspiracy-based agenda driven by condom manufacturers and corrupt influences within the WHO and NGO’s, but that’s unlikely, though not impossible, because there is a lot of money involved in providing condoms to Africa, and money always corrupts.

The objection to the Pope’s statement indicates a significant anti-religious bias within the WHO and NGOs, as well as at The Lancet editorial board, which makes a point of attacking the Catholic church’s ethical stance by saying “‘Whether the Pope’s error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. But the comment still stands and the Vatican’s attempts to tweak the Pope’s words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward. When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record.”

But that’s exactly what the Vatican’s head of media, Father Federico Lombari tried to do, as The Lancet itself says: “On the Holy See’s website, the Vatican’s head of media, Father Federico Lombari, quoted the Pope as having said that there was a “risk that condoms…might increase the problem”.”

This is a factually true statement, and is, as the Lancet calls for, a correction, not that the Pope needed to correct the factually true statement he originally made. It is true that the problem of HIV and AIDS cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms alone, and that condom programs alone create a risk of exacerbating the situation. But the dogmatic “condoms are the best hope” contingent, which includes the WHO and The Lancet, will brook no criticism and will accept no evidence to the contrary, and certainly not from the Pope.

It is true that failing to address sexual behavior in Africa will increase the incidence of HIV transmission and AIDS despite condom usage by allowing an increase in the number of sexual encounters between infected and non-infected sexual partners outside of monogamous relationships. Pope Benedict was correct, merely supplying condoms does in fact constitute a risk of increasing the rates of AIDS over rates that could be achieved through societal sexual behavior modification combined with condom use, as has been demonstrated conclusively in Uganda.

© 2009 Altnews

Encouraging patronage of downtown merchants is more important than parking revenues

By Seth Richardson

Cities exist to facilitate commerce. Commerce does not exist to facilitate cities. This is worth remembering when contemplating any policy that inhibits patronage of downtown businesses.

Reports that the Downtown Partnership and the City Council are contemplating extending parking meter hours from 8 a.m. through 10 p.m. have raised the hackles of downtown business people, and rightfully so. Doing so will very likely impact downtown visits and harm the economic vitality of downtown.

The common fiction used to justify parking meters in the first place is that it is a way to encourage parking space turnover, which enhances patronage at businesses. So far so good, but like any slippery slope, parking meters have morphed from time clocks to revenue generators. In the good old days, the city posted a sign saying parking was limited to one hour, and a meter maid walked around chalking tires and writing citations for over-limit parking. As technology advanced, the parking meter came into being. Originally designed as a method of accounting for the time someone parked in a space, they cost a penny and you got the full legal amount of time for that space.

But very quickly the bean-counters at the budget department discovered that a lot of pennies add up, and if you up the rate, you can generate some real money. Last year the Colorado Springs Parking System received about $2.5 million in parking meter revenue alone.

Unlike most cities, where parking revenues go into the general fund, Colorado Springs turned the parking system an enterprise back in the 1970s, which means that it is self-supporting and funded by user fees rather than taxes. This allows the system to continue to improve parking so long as they can collect the revenue to do so, which is an entirely reasonable proposition. But it does depend on people coming downtown and using the parking system.

This system has advantages, but it also has disadvantages. The primary disadvantage is that user fees, while an attractive notion from the anti-tax perspective, can drive customers away from downtown to places where the extra expense and hassle of feeding a meter aren’t a consideration. That’s why malls don’t charge for parking. They don’t want to do anything to inhibit customer visits.

The Parking System needs to take a page from the private sector in this regard. Get the customer in the door, no matter what, because if they don’t come through the door, nobody makes a dime. If you have to recover the costs of access, then for pity’s sake recover them at the back end, don’t dissuade the customer from showing up in the first place. Charging for parking is like standing at the door of the shop and demanding a dollar to enter the store. Customers simply won’t put up with it, nor should they.

It costs about $244 in annual operating costs per on-street space, and those spaces are the highest revenue generators, generating about $1090 per space, or more than five times the operating expense. These meters are the cash cows for the Parking System, and comprise more than half of the $4.6 million in parking revenue collected. Off-street parking, which is mostly longer term, costs about $354 per space and generate about $756 each.

We have to distinguish between transient customer parking and long-term employee parking however, because there is a significant difference in use and utility. While user fees for employees don’t directly impact sales, user fees for consumers do. Raise the on-street and short-term parking rates too much and people will go elsewhere. This is a simple fact of human behavior. In this tight economy, anything that discourages people from patronizing downtown businesses must be eliminated.

If the intent is to facilitate patronage at downtown businesses by providing short-term parking, thereby increasing commerce and city tax revenues, which it should be, then it seems reasonable to provide those spaces at a subsidized price, to attract and encourage visitors and patrons to downtown. The revenue generation equation seems to be upside down at the moment. Let’s flip it on its head and make the long-term off-street parking significantly more expensive, and the short-term transient parking, both on and off-street, essentially free.

The justification for this shift is that decreases in patronage have a far greater effect on the economic viability of downtown than do increased costs for employee parking. The loss of a single ten-dollar sale because a customer doesn’t want to pay exorbitant parking fees far outweighs the loss of a dollar’s worth of parking revenue that can be made up by charging employees more. Moreover, increasing long-term parking rates will encourage downtown employees to leave their cars at home and take the bus to work, which will reduce traffic congestion downtown, making it even more inviting to consumers.

I suggest that on-street metered parking return to the paradigm of the past. You park, put in any coin from a penny to a quarter, whatever’s convenient for you depending on what you have in your pocket or purse, and you get the maximum allowable time for the space. The money you spend is merely to start the clock that meters your stay, not charge you rent for parking on a public street that you’ve already paid for through taxes.

If you overstay your time, you get a rather expensive ticket, which is what actually encourages parking space turnover, not the cost of feeding the meter. Off-street short-term parking of slightly longer duration should be paid for by the hour, as these spaces are more costly to obtain and maintain, but the costs should not be greater than they are now. Off-street long-term daily parking rates for employees should be raised to cover the loss of revenue from on-street and short-term customer parking.

Certainly employees will howl at this prospect, but it’s more reasonable that they pay some additional costs at the back end for the convenience of parking downtown, close to their workplace in return for more economic vitality at the front end for the businesses that provide them with jobs. And employers can always offer to subsidize the parking costs of their employees as a benefit if they can afford to do so.

On the other hand, if the businesses they work for fail because the downtown experience becomes uncompetitive and unpleasant for consumers, they won’t have a job at all.

The choice seems pretty obvious to me.

© 2009 Altnews

Obama and Clinton lied about gun control, and now they have the perfect excuse to proceed

By Seth Richardson

You would have thought that the Democrats would have learned their lesson about the politically toxic subject of gun control after the election disasters of 1994, when Democrats lost control of the Congress, and Al Gore’s loss in 2000. But gun-banning leftist ideology never rests, and the desire to disarm Americans is unabated.

President Obama solemnly promised us that our guns were safe during the campaign, V.P. Joe Biden downplayed his culpability in the gun control debacle of 2000, and even Hillary Clinton tried to make herself out as a shotgun-loving defender of the 2nd Amendment. But they are all unapologetic, bald-faced liars. Like most politicians, and all gun-ban advocates, the only time they aren’t lying is when they are dead and buried, and even then their shades haunt us.

Of course any rational, freedom-loving American knows this, and gun owners know it best of all, which explains why last weekend’s Tanner Gun Show in Denver was so packed to the gills that they had to turn people away for fire safety reasons. Patriotic, law-abiding Americans know what’s coming, and they are stockpiling firearms and ammunition at a record pace. And you should join them.

Secretary of State Clinton just finished up appeasing Mexico on her trip south of the border, saying that Americans are responsible for Mexico’s violence problem on the border because of our “insatiable demand” for drugs and our lax gun control laws that allow cartels to be armed with guns smuggled from the U.S. This will soon become the justification for new “assault weapon” bans and other gun control efforts by the Obama administration, which is composed of a rogue’s gallery of notorious anti-gun zealots who have been pushing this agenda for more than 20 years now.

In her remarks with the Mexican Foreign Secretary in Mexico City on March 25th, Clinton said that “[the drug cartels] are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States to Mexico.” “Obviously,” Clinton said, “I am someone who supported the assault weapons ban which was passed in 1994, but it was passed with an expiration date and it expired ten years later. I, as a senator, supported measures to try to reinstate it. Politically, that is a very big hurdle in our Congress. But there may be some approaches that could be acceptable, and we are exploring those. Certainly, the export of assault weapons and illegal weapons is something that has grave consequences for Mexico. And we’re going to look at whatever is possible that we can do ourselves within the Administration, and we will explore with Congress other steps to take.”

Interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on Fox News’ “On the Record” on Thursday, March 27th, Clinton said, “The guns that are sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled and shipped across our border and arm these terrible drug-dealing criminals so that they can outgun these poor police officers along the border and elsewhere in Mexico. If we want to have them in our country, fine. That’s-you know, that’s for us to decide. But the Mexican police and people have decided they don’t want them in their country, and we’re facilitating by our inability to stop the illegal sale and smuggling of these guns. I remember 15 years ago, the reason the assault weapons ban was passed is because police chiefs in America begged for it. They said, I’m sending my guys out onto the street, they’re being outgunned. The criminals, the gang members, they have automatic weapons, military assault rifles. Get them off the street. Give our guys a fighting chance.”

The only problem is that Clinton was lying in 1994, and she continues to perpetrate the lie today. The truth is that most of the “automatic weapons, military assault rifles” Clinton complained about in 1994 simply didn’t exist, and the ones used by the drug cartels are smuggled into Mexico from places like Cuba, China and Russia through Central America. Many are Mexican military arms stolen from the Mexican government by highly trained Mexican anti-narcotics soldiers who have defected to the cartels and now call themselves “Los Zetas.”

The guns being used by the cartels are primarily fully automatic military assault rifles, RPG rocket launchers, hand grenades and other strictly military arms that are simply not available on the civilian U.S. market. Cartel hit men do use pistols, and many of those are obtained in the U.S. through straw-man purchases, but it’s nearly impossible for a gun dealer to detect a sophisticated straw-man purchasing effort by dedicated cartel members, although gun dealers and the BATFE are working to find ways to do so.

While it is true that some 90 percent of firearms seized in Mexico and submitted for tracing to the BATFE have been traced back to domestic sources, the anti-gun left, including the liberal mainstream media, have been hysterically mischaracterizing exactly what the BATFE information really means. On March 25th, Newsweek online reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball ignorantly repeated the lie by saying, “As much as 90 percent of the assault weapons and other guns used by Mexican drug cartels are coming from the United States…” The list of liberal media outlets trumpeting the lie is literally endless.

But why is it a lie? First, it’s important to recognize that the vast majority of confiscated guns that the BATFE has access to for tracing are handguns, shotguns and ordinary rifles, including some semi-automatic civilian look-alike versions of fully-automatic military rifles like the M-16 and M-4, all of which are perfectly legal to own here (for now). And most of the arms traced by the BATFE are of the type used by petty Mexican criminals, not cartel drug lords. The cartel drug lords want, have and use actual military equipment, not civilian counterparts. They are fighting a real war against real military personnel, and the drug cartels have plenty of money to obtain the best military armaments they can find. They don’t need U.S. lookalikes.

But the most egregious lie perpetrated by Clinton and the anti-gun left is the conflation of the BATFE trace results with the overall presence of guns in Mexico. The “90 percent come from the U.S.” statistic is deliberately used in a deceptive manner to try to inflate the actual number of guns flowing from the U.S. to Mexico. The truth of the matter is that BATFE has only traced a relatively small number of recovered guns, of which some 90 percent have their origin in the U.S. The BATFE declines to release the current actual number of guns they have traced. But in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in February 2007, BATFE Assistant Director William Hoover testified that in 2007 only about 1,547 guns were submitted by Mexico for tracing by the BATFE. That’s a drop in the bucket, particularly when compared to the tens of thousands of tons of drugs smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico each year. How is securing Mexico’s border against gun smuggling more of a problem for us than securing our border against drug smuggling and terrorists? It’s not, but for Clinton and Obama and the gun banners, it’s a prime opportunity to forward the anti-gun agenda without as much risk of a Democrat backlash in the upcoming congressional elections.

Mexico and the U.S. have signed an agreement to give Mexico access to the BATFE’s eTrace system, which will allow Mexican border Governors to easily submit serial numbers for tracing. This initiative, signed in August of 2008 under the Bush administration, along with Mexico’s cooperation in BATFE’s “Operation Gunrunner” should help reduce the number of guns smuggled into Mexico. But Mexico still refuses to submit the serial numbers of ALL crime guns recovered, and even the eTrace system cannot track a gun not submitted because it would embarrass Mexico, or which didn’t originate in the U.S., so we still have no way of knowing how many guns in the hands of cartel members are actually from the U.S. and how many are from other sources, because we don’t know how many guns the cartels have. Mexico is refusing to cooperate with BATFE requests to supply serial numbers on all confiscated firearms, most likely because Mexico has vested interests in perpetrating the fraud. The first reason is to save face and conceal the vulnerability of Mexico’s border controls to military munitions from Central America. Another reason is money from the U.S.

Because of the violence on the border, the U.S. has promised 80 million dollars in aid to Mexico to acquire and operate Blackhawk helicopters, and the Merida Initiative, a joint agreement with Mexico and other Latin American countries approved by Congress in 2008, has been funded to the tune of $1.5 billion. It is not in Mexico’s economic or security interests to allow the U.S. or the world to find out that many of the arms being used against its own military came from its own military and are being wielded by former members of its own military. It is also not in Mexico’s best interests to be forced to admit that the smuggling of military arms and equipment from Central America and Cuba, among other sources, is rampant and uncontrolled on Mexico’s southern, eastern and western borders.

The import of the lie perpetrated by Clinton is that she, and others, are attempting to deliberately inflate the alleged number of guns use by the drug cartels and then imply that the vast majority of them come from the U.S. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that southbound border security is Mexico’s problem, not ours, this is quite simply a patent and inexcusable lie that will be used by the lying, gun-banning Obama administration to justify restricting American’s gun rights.

UPDATE: Fox News reports that BATFE spokesperson confirms that only 17 percent of all guns seized by Mexican authorities originate in the U.S. See the report here.

© 2009 Altnews

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Kids motorcycles deemed too dangerous to sell, but not because kids fall off them

By Seth Richardson

Even when Congress tries to get the lead out, it still manages to screw things up wholesale. While Congress fiddles to an audience outraged at AIG’s excess, the economy is burning to the ground, and the billion dollars or so of now-contraband children’s goods moldering in warehouses as a result of the well-intentioned but ill-considered and economically devastating new anti-lead law isn’t helping things.

Intended to protect infants and toddlers from unknowing ingestion of lead from the paint on their toys, the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act, enacted by Congress in 2008, has resulted in all sorts of unintended consequences that have been bouncing about the country like the Superball of old. Every time we turn around, some new idiocy emerges from this poorly written legislation.

The law took full effect on February 10, 2009, stranding upwards of a billion dollars worth of goods already on shelves and in transit. One egregious example of an unintended consequence of the law that bans all but the minutest amounts of “accessible lead” in products intended for use by children 12 years of age and under, is that youth-sized motorcycles and ATVs are now contraband, and can’t be legally sold, even the used ones that have been in use for years. Evidently Congress thought that young motorcycle enthusiasts like to gnaw on their motor vehicles rather than ride on them.

The truth is that Congress didn’t think much at all. It pandered to the anti-lead vocal minority of activists who insist that children are going to all grow up to be brain-damaged idiots if we don’t get the lead out. Of course this extremism fails to explain how their parents grew up smart enough to send men to the moon, what with being raised around all that horrible lead in their homes—remember the days of lead soldiers? Kids eating lead-laden paint chips from tenement walls and mouthing deliberately or negligently contaminated toys from China are one thing, and the CPSC already has authority to deal with these problems. But kids bicycles, baseball bats, and motorcycles are something else entirely. Unfortunately, the law doesn’t allow any common sense or discretion on the part of the CPSC.

But some people are fed up with the idiocy, and are justifiably beginning to rebel. On March 19th, 70s motorcycle trials champion and legend Malcolm Smith deliberately violated federal law by selling youth motorcycles and ATVs at his store in Riverside, Calif. Sixty-eight year-old Smith, a champion Six Day Trials motorcycle event and six-time Baja 1000 winner in the motorcycle class, decided that civil disobedience was the only alternative to the oppressive and economically devastating requirements of the new law.

Smith defiantly sold three contraband motorbikes that day, risking a $100,000 federal fine for each sale. This is not an empty threat either. The CPSIA has provisions that allow state Attorneys General to file complaints and take action under the law, and anti-lead advocacy groups and rapacious lawyers are already to be found shopping for cooperative AGs.

In a March 20, 2009 response to an inquiry by Rep. John Dingell (D), one of the biggest congressional boosters of the CPSIA, CPSC Commissioner Thomas H. Moore complained to Dingell that the CPSC is “an agency that only has two Commissioners who do not view the Act in the same light and who do not always agree on the Act’s meaning.” Moore wants a third Commissioner appointed, who would be the Chairman, and being able to break deadlocks would thereby allow the CPSC to exercise the new powers and enforcement tools granted to it by the CPSIA, presumably without the pesky interference of a Republican. “Until then,” Moore says, “any legislative “fixes” are premature. Only the Commission should recommend what, if any, changes should be made to the CPSIA and no assumptions should be made that there are no other solutions than legislative ones until all three Commissioners have a voice in the matter.”

Moore’s position reflects a schism in the CPSC that has been widening since the commission gained massive new powers under the CPSIA. There’s been a battle going on between Moore, a Democrat, and Commissioner and Acting Chairman Nancy Nord, a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the Senate in 2005 to serve the remainder of former Republican Chairman Hal Stratton’s term expiring in 2012. Stratton resigned in July 2006, leaving the commission with only two members. Political gamesmanship in Congress has alternately kept the commission from making decisions due to a lack of a quorum and provided temporary two-commissioner operations.

Moore is intent on getting a third commissioner appointed by Obama, which will give Democrats control of the CPSC. Republican leadership of the CPSC, which Democrats feel favors business over safety, was one of the reasons the CPSIA was passed with stringent deadlines and little discretionary authority over the lead-in-toys problem.

In response to Dingell’s request, Acting Chairman Nord had her staff prepare a response to a number of questions and issues facing the CPSC. The gist of the report is that the CPSC has inadequate staff and money to achieve the benchmarks and deadlines set by Congress. The deadlines do not give either the CPSC or manufacturers any wiggle-room. They are hard deadlines and if the CPSC has not been able to come up with the various standards and approvals for testing labs, manufacturers will be faced with having to stop production and halt sales of any product that has not met the rigorous testing standards.

“CPSC staff does not have data on the total value of impacted inventories, lost sales, disposal costs, and other costs likely to be incurred by small manufacturers because of the CPSIA; however, information of an anecdotal nature, that has not been verified by CPSC staff, puts the impact in the billons of dollars range. For example, the Motorcycle Industry Council reported in a February 26, 2009, press release that the new lead rules would result in an annual impact of $1 billion on their industry.
…
The CPSIA provides too little implementation discretion for the agency,” says the report.

Nord’s staff made three recommendations:

“Limit the applicability of new requirements to products manufactured after the effective date, except in circumstances where the Commission decides that exposure to a product presents a health and safety risk to children.”

“Lower the age limit used in the definition of children’s products to better reflect exposure and give the CPSC discretion to set a higher age for certain materials or classes of products that pose a risk to older children or to younger ones in the same household.”

“Allow the CPSC to address certification, tracking labels and other issues on a product class or other logical basis, using risk-assessment methodologies to establish need, priorities and a phase-in schedule.”

Nord appears to have taken a very reasonable position in her recommendations to fix a poorly thought-out, overbroad and largely unnecessary law. Moore, on the other hand, is playing partisan political games while a billion dollars worth of consumer goods hangs in limbo, waiting for Congress to turn its attention away from pillorying AIG executives and back to the business of governing the country.

© 2009 Altnews

International conglomerate banking has come near to destroying this nation, don’t let it happen again

By Seth Richardson

Here’s something people need to understand: Wall Street is not the economy. We are the economy. If Wall Street crashes to the ground, and every international investment bank on the planet disappears in a cloud of smoldering debris, the economy, which is comprised of the innovation, ingenuity and work ethic of the people of this proud nation, will still exist, and can recover from any blow, if we have faith in our ability to do so, and if we have the resolve to ensure such a thing will never happen again.

The worst thing that’s happening to us is our submission to fear-mongering. Between the main-stream media, Congress, President Obama and the clamoring of businesses “too big to fail,” we are bombarded with bad news and pronouncements about “the economy” and what’s wrong with it. Automakers and investment bankers, insurance agencies and mortgage finance companies wail at the door, insisting that they are vital to the nation and cannot be allowed to fail.

Poppycock and balderdash. Horse apples.

Any business that claims that it is “too big to fail” must, for the good of the nation, not just be allowed to fail, it must be systematically deconstructed and never allowed to return. The idea that our economy is dependent upon the continued existence of any particular business is anathema to the foundations of our nation, which is built on individual liberty, private property, and individual accomplishment.

Any business that claims to be “too big to fail” ought to be dismantled just for saying so. One option is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which says that, “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony.”

Who can deny that Citibank, which holds such an important position in our economy that its failure can destroy the economic future of millions of people and stall our economic engine, is not enough of a monopoly to be prohibited? Isn’t AIG and the credit default swap industry sufficiently monopolistic that prudence dictates they be deconstructed? I say yes.

But since government was complicit in getting us into this pickle, it would be imprudent to allow government to try to fix it, because it has been proven untrustworthy and incompetent to properly regulate the financial industry. The better, free-market method is for we, the People, to simply refuse to do business with any concern that claims it’s “too big to fail.”

This will take discipline, but we can reclaim our economy from arrogant corporations that think they are owed existence. They exist at our whim and caprice, and it’s time for us to exercise our true power and punish them for their arrogance and cupidity.

So, close your Citibank accounts tomorrow and open new ones at your local independent bank. Take your bailout money and bail out. Support the local banks who didn’t mismanage your money and didn’t get greedy and invest in risky real estate derivatives.

Local banks are doing fine, for the most part. They’ve been prudent with their investments and they have money to lend. Deposit your money and they will have more money to lend. And get to know your local banker, who will be far more appreciative and helpful to you than some faceless drone in an office two thousand miles away who doesn’t care if you made a mistake in addition that caused you to bounce a check.

Think globally. Think about how your mortgage is probably owned by a company on the other side of the Atlantic, and is managed by more faceless drones who couldn’t care less about your well-being. Think about how the securitization of mortgages in your community, which were sold to a bank in Britain, and which were lumped together with thousands of other mortgages and marketed internationally, has lead us to the worst economic conditions since 1930. Think about how the world depends on the American economy, but sucks our capital and our resources away without a care.

Then bank locally. Refinance your mortgage at your local bank, where the banker knows you and cares about you and how you’re doing. Keep your money in your community, don’t send it to Europe. And tell your banker that you want your money to remain in your community, and not be invested internationally, and that you want your mortgage to remain in his hands, not be sold down the river. And tell him that you will only do business with his bank so long as it remains locally owned and operated. If your bank gets sold to some international banking group, take your money out and find another, and tell the international bankers why you are leaving.

As a people, as a nation, we need to take responsibility for ensuring that our economy is never again placed in the hands of companies “too big to fail.” The place to start is with your next paycheck.

© 2009 Altnews

Academic fraud Ward Churchill beset by poultry

By Seth Richardson

There’s a delicious irony in the title of ex-CU professor Ward Churchill’s odious essay, “Some people push back: On the justice of roosting chickens” as the final act in his desperate shadow-puppet play goes before a jury in Denver District Court. It seems that the taxpayers have pushed back, and Churchill’s chickens are about to roost, and justly so.

Found guilty of academic fraud by not one, but several juries of his peers, he was booted out of the university, where he had been comfortably ensconced and gainfully employed by the state of Colorado under a tenure system that protected his expression of odious and reprehensible ideas.

Now he’s getting his day in court, again, because he thinks it was unfair of people to actually scrutinize his academic work or voice their personal opinions about his published statements and character. After disparaging the victims of 9/11, evidently he expected people to accept what he said without comment, and he ignored the possibility that his entire academic career might be brought into question by the people who paid his salary. Big mistake.

The halls of academia are rife with ideological absolutists, mostly on the left, and the entire system is set up to provide academic freedom and make it very difficult to dismiss tenured professors for espousing politically unpopular opinions. But the protections of tenure are not a license for academic fraud. If a professor is going to be ideologically biased, he’s at least got to be honest and academically rigorous in his efforts. No university ought to be required to tolerate a physics professor who knowingly falsifies the results of an experiment. Nor is the state required to employ a professor who knowingly plagiarizes the work of others or misstates documented facts. And that, not his odious essay, is why Churchill was fired. It is true that he probably would have sailed along for many more years, comfortably obscure and under the radar, if he’d been more circumspect. But his ego got the better of him. And Ward Churchill is nothing if not an overblown egoist.

Churchill’s radicalism had been permeating the halls of CU for quite some time, and anybody who knew anything about him, or had ever read his work, was well aware of his predilections, and no few people have wished for a way to send him packing. It’s just that it’s very, very difficult to get academics to investigate other academics. CU is hardly an exception in that regard. Indeed, academic tenure infests every level of education, and while it does often protect academic freedom, it also keeps incompetent and flatly dangerous educators sucking at the public teat in every level of the system, from first grade to PhD. In this case, Churchill got a full measure of due process strictly according to the rules. CU was scrupulous in its investigation and tenure hearings, which Churchill lost at every turn.

But now, as the chickens come home to roost, the best he or his lawyer can do is mount a “but for” defense. “But for” a public outcry at his reprehensible comparison of the victims of 9/11 to Nazi Adolph Eichmann, “but for” former Governor Bill Owens calling for CU to fire Churchill, his attorney David Lane claims, nobody would have noticed the fraud and Churchill would still be purveying his ideology to callow and credulous students unchallenged. Therefore, because the tenure system and First Amendment protected Churchill’s expressions, he claims that CU had no authority to review Churchill’s academic record. Churchill cannot dispute the facts of his fraud, which have been carefully reviewed by his peers, so he’s attacking the messenger.

What neither Lane nor Churchill seem to be able to comprehend is that the First Amendment may protect Churchill’s right to say something odious and evil, but it also protects the right of everyone else to publicly pillory and revile him for doing so. And if you make of yourself a public figure, then everything you’ve ever said or done is fair game for review and criticism.

There’s a metaphor that applies to Churchill’s case: Way back in the dawning days of gunpowder, barrels were filled with black powder and long fuses were wrapped around the barrel. A handle was attached to an axle so the barrel could be pushed, with the fuse unwinding behind the operator. The lucky individual chosen to operate this device, known as a “petard”, would run like hell towards the gate of the castle, pushing the petard before him. As he approached the gate, his more-fortunate compatriots would light the fuse behind him, trying to time the burn of the fuse with the approach speed to the gate, in order to set off the explosives after placement, but before opposing forces could respond to put out the fuse.

Fuse technology however was not very sophisticated, so sometimes the fuse would burn too fast, causing the petard to explode before the operator delivered it to the gate and escaped. In such instances, as his body parts went flying about, his compatriots would say that he’d been “hoist on his own petard.”

The contemporary meaning of “hoist on his own petard,” as applied to Churchill, is that when thought-bomb throwing radicals decide to say something controversial, knowing it will outrage their opponents, it behooves them to first make sure the fuse doesn’t lead back to an academic time-bomb in their past.

Why should we care about an obscure professor’s employment dispute? Because it’s cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars to rid themselves of an incompetent and dishonest educator, and for that amount of money, we’re entitled to celebrate the end of this sordid affair. But then again, I’m counting my chickens before they’ve hatched, and it’s possible I’ll be dining on the black bird, because civil juries are notoriously unpredictable. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Author’s note: The original version of this column was rightfully pointed out to be nothing more than an invective-filled screed using some apt and amusing (in a scatological sense) metaphors that at least one reader found offensive. After review and reflection, I must agree, and I offer my apology to those who may have read it before I withdrew it for revision. I have said that I am responsible for my words, and I appreciate the input of readers when I step over the line of good taste and reasoned argument. The beauty of this new media, unlike print journalism, is that corrections can be made, and I’ll do so whenever it’s appropriate.

© 2009 Altnews

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Inquisitive store clerks imperil your personal security and privacy

By Seth Richardson

The close we creep to socialism, the more information the government needs in order to keep us under its thumb. Denying the government and everybody else access to this information impedes tyranny and fosters liberty. It’s time to take your privacy back, because it’s in more jeopardy now than it’s ever been.

Witness Obama’s dangerous steps towards computerization of private medical records. In his speech to the nation on January 8, 2009, he said, “To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized. This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs – it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system.”

A laudable objective perhaps, but it’s a proposal so rife with potential for fraud, mismanagement and genuine harm that it simply must be resisted.

Have you ever been braced for name, address, phone number, date of birth, or social security number by some nosy shop clerk? Who hasn’t? What’s your reflexive reaction to such demands? Do you just obey and provide the information requested, or do you consider the ramifications of doing so versus the benefits you seek to obtain and then make a reasoned choice? Usually, we just capitulate because we’ve been trained to be open and honest, and we rarely ever see the harm in giving out such information.

But, have you ever wondered why you get so much junk mail? It’s because you answer intrusive questions for personal information from shop clerks and on-line businesses. Your personal information has enormous economic value, and even small businesses sell their customer data to “data aggregators,” who take in and collate this information and resell it to other commercial interests, and more frighteningly, to the government.

And junk mail is hardly the only, or most serious danger out there. Identity theft, assault and burglary can all be related to the imprudent release of private information. Does the guy at the car wash who cleans your expensive car have access to your home address either through the company computer or your registration? If so, it’s simple for him to pass along that information, along with the VIN number of your car, which he noted down as he cleaned the dash, which allows a car thief to identify the key necessary to steal your car.

We need to take a page from the Russian playbook here. Do you know what you get when you start asking a Russian for personal data? Stone-faced silence and sometimes outright hostility. Occasionally you might get some information, but it’s almost certain to be false. Russians have a long history of dealing with intrusive, oppressive bureaucracy and nosy government agents, and they’ve learned a lesson we here in the U.S. have forgotten; they’ve learned to keep their mouths shut when the government comes asking for information. It’s a right we’ve abdicated in the interests of commercial convenience.

It’s time for us to seize our privacy again, and start giving inquisitive store clerks and customer service personnel the gimlet eye and our stony silence, and to make no apology for either refusing their requests or chastising them for asking in the first place.

Start with small steps. When you take your car in to the quick-lube for an oil change, pay cash and decline to give them any information at all, even your name. When you call the credit card, cable or satellite company to resolve some issue, and they ask you to confirm your phone number, politely refuse, and be firm, because they will try to pry it out of you. If they get uppity, tell them that if they persist, you’ll cancel your account and find another provider. This usually shuts them up. But whatever you do, don’t give them the correct information. There’s nothing in the law that says you are not allowed to lie to a nosy store clerk. Do so, and be proud that you’ve defeated an attempt to invade your privacy.

And when it comes to your doctor, you should have a sit-down conversation with your medical provider and amend whatever contract you have with them and make it clear, in writing, that they do NOT have your permission to release your medical records to anyone without prior written approval from you. Include your insurance carrier in this declaration as well. Send them a letter, by certified mail, return receipt requested, stating clearly that your medical records are private, and are not to be shared with anyone, under any circumstances, particularly the government, without your permission. Might not work, but it can’t hurt.

And the first and most important thing you can do to begin securing your privacy is to never, ever, under any circumstances, give any merchant your physical home address. Using a post office box provides significant security at the cost of some minor inconvenience and cost. You don’t have to worry about your mail being stolen, people won’t know where you actually live by looking at your address, and you can let mail accumulate without worry if you go on vacation.

And if anyone ever asks you for your social security number, ask them if they have legal authority to compel you to give it to them. If they claim they do, then demand that they cite the federal statute that authorizes them to do so. If they don’t, or can’t cite the law, then carefully evaluate whether you really need to do business with that firm.

Sometimes it’s unavoidable, like when you ask for a loan from a bank or credit union, but in almost every other case, the only reason they want your SSN is so that they can run a credit check, and people run credit checks these days for the most preposterous reasons. If you run into this, and you can get along without the service, then tell them why you’re walking out and do so. Your SSN is the single most dangerous piece of information you have when it comes to your economic security. Guard it like you guard the passbook to your savings account or your cash.

When it comes to intrusive personal questions, just say no.

For more information on how to protect your privacy, go to http://www.howtobeinvisible.com

© 2009 Altnews

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Compulsory religious education plan threatens religious freedom

By Seth Richardson

Daniel Dennett is a noted atheist author and speaker who is touting a new curriculum for school children among the secular faithful. Dennett wants to “inoculate” your children against “toxic forms of religion” through compulsory religious education. Here’s what Dennett has to say, in his own words:

“This [religious education] would be compulsory. And my idea is that it would cover history, creed, rituals, music, symbols, ethical commands and prohibitions. That’s it. Just raw, tested, non-controversial facts that everybody can agree to about the world’s religions and that should be a curriculum that starts in grade school goes into middle school and high school. Now, I believe as strongly as anybody in the principle freedom of religion, so notice that this in no way violates freedom of religion. As long as you teach your children this curriculum you can teach them anything else you want. Anything else you want provided it doesn’t disable them from further informing themselves. So it honors the principle of freedom of religion.”

But Dennett’s plan does nothing of the sort. It pays lip-service only to the principle of freedom of religion, and entirely ignores the Establishment clause of the Constitution. In his plan, government is authorized to both compel education that disparages individual religious beliefs and to monitor and prohibit the teaching of any religious belief that “disables [children] from further informing themselves”, even in one’s own home or church.

Dennett wants government to be the arbiter of politically-correct religious belief in order to gradually strangle religion and extirpate it from society. His propagandizing of youth by presenting supposedly “neutral” information is actually presenting it in a manner that suggests that no one belief system is any more truthful or rational than the next, and his intent in doing so is to “get rid of the toxic stuff.” This intention alone is sufficient to destroy the constitutionality of his plan under the test established by the Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, (403 US 602), in 1971.

The Lemon test establishes three prongs that must be considered regarding any statute, regulation, rule or program established by government, including public schools, that implicates religion.

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;

Second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion;

Third, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.

Dennett’s plan fails all three prongs of the Lemon test and is therefore unconstitutional.

Dennett says, “All religions have toxic versions. That is, there are anti-social fanatical elements in every major religion, in Hinduism and Islam and the various kinds of Christianity and so forth. … All toxic versions depend on the enforced ignorance of the young. It’s only by keeping your young people ignorant of other religions that you can preserve this. So my, my sort of public health measures say just don’t permit that enforced ignorance to go on. By informing the young we inoculate them against toxic forms of religion.”

Under the Lemon test, this is not a secular legislative purpose. It is a purposeful attempt to prohibit the teaching of, and to disparage the understanding of religion. Aside from not being a secular legislative purpose, it also violates the third prong of the Lemon test because it requires excessive government entanglement in religion because it requires that government examine all religions to determine which of them, or which components of them are to be deemed “toxic” by the government and are thus proscribed teachings.

But Dennett tries to justify his attempt at unconstitutional atheistic indoctrination by saying “A religion that can survive under this sort of free information deserves to survive, it’s a benign form of religion, let it flourish. A religion that can’t survive without the enforced ignorance of the young deserves to go extinct.”

But this analysis, when made by government, or when forced upon students by public school employees, violates all three prongs of the Lemon test. Just as it is not within the legitimate power of government to decide what form of religion is benign and what form is toxic, neither is it within its power to compel students to listen to government-created propaganda that disparages all religions equally, and it is also powerless to dictate what may and may not be taught one’s own children in the home or church.

When teachers suggest that all competing religions are equally true, they are in fact suggesting that any one religion that holds itself out as the “One True Faith” is lying about it, and the inference to be drawn is that atheism is the only true belief. This is disallowed because it favors atheism over all religions. But the adherents of every religion believe that their religion is true, and this is a belief that they have a constitutionally protected right to hold, and it is one that government is constitutionally forbidden to disparage under the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.

Dennett may be a notable atheist and author, but he’s a lousy lawyer. Fortunately for religious parents and students, his plan fails utterly when tested against constitutional law and precedent, so it’s unlikely to succeed. But it’s important to know it’s being proposed, so that when secularists try to sneak it in under the radar, as they will, people will know what the true agenda is.

©2009 Altnews

Science is closing in on the genetic basis for religious belief

By Seth Richardson

Atheists have long been unable to resolve the conundrum of why religion is so ubiquitous and so persistent in human society. They are befuddled by what they see as rank illogic and unreasoning belief in what they call “woo”, which they loosely define as “ludicrous beliefs” or “extraordinary beliefs for which it is felt there is insufficient extraordinary evidence, and people who hold those beliefs.”

It’s a pejorative term that atheists use when dismissing the supernatural claims of religion. Atheists are true believers in the sanctity of science, accepting nothing on faith, and demanding critically robust and falsifiable evidence for just about everything, particularly theistic claims. They are rigorously logical thinkers who have great difficulty comprehending how anyone could possibly believe in, much less worship, an invisible “sky fairy” called God. If you doubt the persistence of their befuddlement, just go to this well-known atheist forum and review any of the many threads in which atheists and religionists tear each other’s hair out, with atheists insisting (more or less politely) that religionists are deluded boobs or mentally defective, and religionists insisting that atheists “just don’t get it.”

And just it may be that atheists don’t get it because they are physically incapable of doing so. In fact, it’s beginning to look like it may be the atheists who are defective, not the religionists.

It’s an undisputed fact that some 85 percent of the population of the planet holds some sort of religious belief. Nobody really understands why, but science is beginning to examine why this social behavior exists and persists over millennia. One cannot see such ubiquitous behavior without asking why people continue to believe in God.

In a November, 2001 edition of the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Dr. Michael Persinger published a study called “The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences” in which he revealed that by manipulating magnetic fields around the brain, a “‘sensed presence’ or sentient being” was experienced by many test subjects. “[W]e found that when we applied specific complex magnetic fields over the right hemisphere, most normal people who were not aware of the purpose of the experiment experienced a “sensed presence” or sentient being. Many individuals felt the presence interact with their thinking and “move in space” as they “focused their thoughts” on it.” Persinger writes. Persinger goes on to point out that paranormal experiences have been shown to be correlated to geomagnetic events, and that the magnetic fluxes involved are very subtle.

Some time later, the BBC’s Horizon program arranged for Cambridge professor and arch-atheist Richard Dawkins to meet with Persinger. Dawkins allowed Persinger to perform his magnetic-field test. Dawkins, the BBC reported, found that the magnetic fields affected his breathing and his limbs, but says “he did not find god.” Why Dawkins did not experience the “God moment” is anyone’s guess, but science seems to be converging on a hypothesis.

A recent University of Toronto Department of Psychology study, “Neural Markers of Religious Conviction” by researchers Michael Inzlicht, Ian McGregor, Jacob B. Hirsh and Kyle Nash demonstrated significant differences in how religious believers and non-believers performed during standardized stress tests. The authors wrote, “These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one’s environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error.” The researchers suggest that religion provides a method for people to reduce the stress and uncertainty of life and a way to focus on stress-reducing thoughts while suppressing inconsistent thought patterns, which helps to reduce judgmental errors.

These two studies, along with others, add weight to the proposition that there is a biological, and perhaps an evolutionary basis for religious belief. If this proposition is true, it would help answer the atheist’s conundrum. We may be genetically programmed for religious belief because religion offers significant species-wide survival benefits, like reduced stress and reduced decision-making errors, among the many other social and individual benefits religion has offered mankind over the millennia.

If religious belief helps people cope with the stresses of life, which it clearly does, and if the capacity to experience paranormal or “sensed presences” exists to a greater degree in religionists that in atheists, as suggested by the Dawkins experience, perhaps it is not the religionists who suffer from some mental incapacity manifested in their belief in God, perhaps it is atheists who are lacking the “God gene” that allows people to believe in that which they do not see, feel, hear, touch or taste. Whether or not God exists, it’s apparent that belief in God is good for humankind.

Does this mean that atheists are the next wave of evolutionary advancement for humankind, or are they a Darwinian dead-end that will fade away over time? Or, could atheists and religionists evolve into entirely different species deep in the future?

© 2009 Altnews

Lump-sum lifetime property tax payoff is a win-win proposition

By Seth Richardson

In these uncertain economic times, with the value of a dollar being decimated by President Obama’s minting of money by the truckload, most people are hunkering down and trying to figure out how to survive the onslaught of socialism that’s coming.

One of the biggest fears of homeowners, particularly the elderly and retired, is the potential for losing our homes to the tax man. Property taxes are a necessary evil, but the consequence of failing to pay your property tax is disproportionate to the government’s need. The idea that your home can be taken from you at the muzzle of a gun by government thugs because you can’t pay your taxes is an evil, pernicious holdover from feudal days when the King owned everything and you lived on his land by his sufferance, and only if you could pay your taxes.

People on fixed incomes who have spent a lifetime working and saving and paying their mortgages responsibly are always under the threat of seizure of their homes by the government if they find themselves unable to pay their property taxes. This fear is real, and it keeps all of us from being truly free and truly kings of our own castles. We don’t really own our property, we rent it from the government, and that’s wrong. There should be a way to truly exercise the constitutional right to own, use and enjoy private property free from the threat of government seizure.

Landowners should be allowed to pay off their lifetime individual property tax liability in one lump sum if they are able to do so.

Just think of the freedom one can experience knowing that your home is truly yours, and that you are beholden to no one. You will be free to spend the rest of your life in your home and know that if you fall on hard times, you can never be ejected from your home merely because you failed to pay your taxes. You might have to live by candlelight, and haul water in a bucket, but you’ll always have a roof over your head.

It works like this: You file an application with the appropriate taxing agency requesting an assessment of your property’s current value and your predicted remaining life span, which is taken from a standard actuarial table used by life insurance companies. The government then calculates the total tax payable over your predicted lifetime at the current mill levy and presents you with the bill, which you can pay in a lump sum or in a few installments.

Once the bill is paid in full, the taxing authority appropriately marks your record as tax-exempt until your death. When you die, and your property passes to your heirs, the exemption is removed and the new owners have to pay taxes again. For couples, the exemption lasts till the remaining spouse dies.

This is a win-win situation for both the homeowner and the government. The homeowner gains the security and comfort of actually owning his property without obligation to anyone, and the government gains an immediate infusion of tax money that it can use to fund infrastructure improvements and repairs. Or, if the government is wise, it will invest the money and thus be able to recognize a much greater gain in tax revenues overall through compound interest than it would by collecting the taxes year by year. The only thing the government gives up is the ability to raise the mill levy on that property in the future, but this potential loss is completely offset by having the future taxes in hand for investment.

For the homeowner, not only does he receive the intangible benefits of truly being free, but he also locks in the mill levy rate, thus saving himself some money in the future.

For retired people on fixed incomes who own their homes outright, it may be impossible to come up with a large lump-sum payment, but this is where the “reverse mortgage” industry comes into play.

In a reverse mortgage, the mortgage “buyer” is the bank, and the mortgage “holder” is the homeowner. The bank pays the homeowner a negotiated fixed amount on a regular basis as a way of extracting equity from the home to meet the needs of the homeowner while still allowing the homeowner to live in the home. When the owner dies, the bank pays the balance to the heirs and takes possession of the house.

By using a reverse mortgage, the homeowner can make the lump sum property tax payment and live in freedom and security until his death. And those with sufficient savings and pensions can also enjoy tax freedom by investing in their security and in their community with a lump sum tax payment.

©2009 Altnews

Riley Mers and her dog Rock’O show us how it’s done

By Seth Richardson

Eight-year-old Riley Mers and her peanut-sniffing service dog Rock’O hit the big time March 2nd with an appearance on the ABC evening news. As reported by The Gazette’s Brian Newsome in the February 16th edition, Riley can breath easier now that her Portuguese water dog is on the job. Rock’O’s nose is Riley’s protector, keeping her safe from accidental exposure to peanuts, something that could easily kill her.

Severe peanut allergies are serious business for sufferers because peanuts are a ubiquitous food in America. We should not minimize the danger to people like Riley who genuinely have a deadly anaphylactic reaction to peanut. But neither should we go into a peanut panic merely because there are unfortunate people like Riley in the world.

Too often, the reaction to sometimes dubious claims about peanut and other food allergies are blown far out of proportion by individuals and groups who may have ulterior motives, or may simply be misguided. No few school districts have simply banned peanuts from the schools entirely in order to favor a single student who claims a peanut allergy, or just to avoid all potential liability.

This might seem like a reasonable reaction, one of those “do it for the children” moments, but things are not quite as simple as they might appear. The fact is that the number of people who die from allergic food reactions each year is incredibly small, and keeping peanuts away from your kids may be doing more harm than good.

The numbers of people who have any kind of food allergy, and most of the time such reactions are mild to severe, but very rarely fatal, is subject to much speculation. Dr. Darshak Sanghavi reported in the Boston Globe in January, 2006 that a researcher at the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) said that while about a quarter of parents believe their child has a food allergy, in reality only about 4 percent actually do. The Archives of Internal Medicine reported in 2004 that the chance of an average person of suffering from food-induced anaphylaxis is 4 per 100,000 per year, about the same number of people who die from lightning strikes.

And it seems as if the problem is getting worse. Between 1997 and 2002, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology reported that rates of peanut allergies among children had doubled, from 0.4 percent of the population to 0.8 percent, although the data was not verified by tests. In another 2003 study from the Mount Sinai Department of Pediatrics, researchers conducted a telephone survey to determine the prevalence of self-reported peanut allergies among the general population as a follow-up to a 1997 study. The study, which surveyed more than 13,000 individuals, concluded that between 1997 and 2002, the reported rate increased from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 0.8 percent in 2002.

The FAAN is an advocacy group for food allergy sufferers that works hard to educate people about food allergies, but appears to have a tendency to overstate the actual risks. The most-often heard claim is “100 to 200” people per year die of food allergies. But Meredith Broussard, a journalist in Philadelphia, in her December, 2008 article in the Huffington Post says that the CDC reported only 11 deaths from all food allergies in 2005, and Dr. Rahul K. Parikh, in a February, 2009 column at Salon.com wrote that deaths by food allergy reported by the CDC for 2004 was 14, and that between 1994 and 1999, only 33 such deaths were reported.

But here’s the real twist. Another study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by the King’s College, London in November 2008 compared peanut allergies in Jewish children in the UK and in Israel. Results indicated that children in the UK, where Jewish children virtually never get peanuts, are almost ten times more likely to develop peanut allergy than Jewish children in Israel, where peanuts are a common food even for infants 8 to 14 months old. The study asks the question whether the early introduction of peanut during infancy, rather than avoiding peanuts, will prevent the development of peanut allergy. This study seems to militate for exposing kids to peanuts quite early in life, rather than removing peanuts from society.

So, it seems as though all the peanut panic is a bit over-blown. For people like Riley, it’s a very big deal, but for most of us it’s a non-issue, and the precautions that Riley’s parents are taking are the appropriate and reasonable response to a severe, life-threatening peanut allergy. It’s a perfect solution for Riley and for her classmates that doesn’t deprive them of a favorite food and doesn’t put Riley at unreasonable risk.

After all, school isn’t the only place one finds peanuts, and protecting yourself if you have a food allergy is no different from protecting yourself if you have casual sex or you like to walk downtown at night carrying large sums of money and jewelry. It’s up to you to protect yourself, it’s not up to society to forego peanut butter, or anything else, in order to protect you.

Parents, if you think your child has a peanut allergy, then get them tested so you’ll know for sure. If you kids don’t, then by all means feed them peanut butter, and start early, so that they won’t develop one later.

And let’s all support Angel Service Dogs so that kids who are really at risk can afford to live their lives free of the fear of a life-threatening illness.

© 2009 Altnews