Two stories that will get zero attention in the American mass media.

First, Cuban Doctors sent overseas to promote that country’s enlightened system of socialist healthcare are defecting in droves to the US. From the Lancet:

Growing numbers of Cuban doctors sent overseas to work are defecting to the USA, following a change in US immigration policy. Critics say the policy is immoral because it takes medical professionals away from some of the world’s poorest nations. Michael Ceaser reports.

Andres—a 36-year-old Cuban physician—decided to get out even before he had got fully in. When Cuban medical authorities tapped him for a medical mission in Venezuela, he did not see an opportunity to help the poor of an allied nation, but rather an opportunity to make his way to the USA. “I didn’t arrive in Venezuela to work; I arrived and deserted right away”, he said while waiting for his US visa in Bogota, Colombia.

And a related story:

Two Cuban boxers who defected during the games signed five-year contracts to fight for a cable television outlet in Germany. Guillermo Rigondeaux, a bantamweight who won gold at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, and Erislandy Lara, an amateur welterweight world champion, signed with Arena TV.

Most people in Cuba live as slaves. This gives American Leftists a natural affinity to the Cuban dictatorship. Leftists form the core of the Democratic party, the party against which the anti-slavery Republican party was founded. This core belief in fixed social class, ideally with an enslaved underclass, remains the cornerstone of their ideology today.

(Lifted in its entirety from P&S)

OOPS!   You know all that talk the last few years from pessimists on both the left and the right about the supposed “negative savings rate” in the US? About how we’re spending more than we’re earning, become a nation of indebted global beggars? Turns out it was all just a data error. On Friday the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a major revision of the last three years of national accounts data, and it turns out that US individuals earned, cumulatively, about $185 billion more than had been previously reported (equivalent to the entire annual GDP of Norway, oil and all). That’s enough to turn the savings rate positive. So all that talk, all that hand-wringing — it was just a data error. Poof! Any retractions forthcoming? Don’t count on it. The end of the world crowd is too busy worrying about sub-prime mortgages.

The UN is predicting a “Summer of Peace” in South Lebanon. From AFP:

“I think that for the people of the south, this summer will be a summer of peace. And we will be taking care of the problem of terrorist attacks,” Graziano told An-Nahar.

“I am sure we are strong enough and that we are in control of the Blue Line,” the UN-demarcated border between Israel and Lebanon, he said. “At the moment, I don’t see any intention” between the two sides for renewed fighting.

Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that the Syrian invasion of Lebanon is already underway:

As of this minute, Syria occupies at least 177 square miles of Lebanese soil. That you are now reading about it for the first time is as much a scandal as the occupation itself…

…It would, of course, be nice to see the Arab world protest this case of illegal occupation, given its passions about the subject. It would also be nice to see the media report this story as sedulously as it has the controversy of the Shebaa Farms. Don’t hold your breath on either score. In the meantime, the only countries in a position to help Lebanon are France and the U.S. They could strike a useful blow by closing their embassies in Damascus until such time as Damascus opens an embassy–with all that it implies–in Beirut.

And last week the president of Iran was in Syria promising Israel a “hot summer”:

…Following a surprise meeting with Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in Damascus, Ahmadinejad said that it was going to be a “hot” summer in the Middle East.

“We hope that the hot weather of this summer will coincide with similar victories for the region’s peoples, and with consequent defeat for the region’s enemies,” Ahmadinejad added, in an apparent reference to Israel.

And an effective civil war is brewing in Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon:

Lebanese troops have pounded the few remaining compounds of militants inside a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, as fighting entered its eighth week.

From the London Times:

What on earth is going on with our weather? Three months’ worth of rain fell in a few places last week, Britain is drowning under floods of biblical proportions and nothing like it has been seen since Noah got his sea legs. In a wave of hysteria, the cry goes out for millions of sandbags, better drains and more flood defences. And fingers of blame are pointing at global warming.

But a simple fact has been overlooked: Britain is a wet country. Yes, it comes as a shock. Over the past few years we’ve become so used to years of scorching, Mediterranean-like summers, when hosepipe bans were the norm, vines were bursting with vintage grapes and water diviners were doing big business. But the truth is that our summers are supposed to be wet: it’s our climate…

…Of course, British summers weren’t always as wet as this year’s, but some were certainly worse. 1912 was the wettest and dullest summer on record, far ahead of this summer’s downpours…Even that deluge is overshadowed by the 11 inches of rain that fell in less than a day on Dorset in July 1955 – about half of London’s yearly average rainfall. The longest nonstop rainfall record in the UK was more than 58 hours in London during June 1903, in a summer when there was an epidemic of lung disease in farmworkers caused by mouldy hay and grain…

…It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it’s global warming.

But climate change was supposed to be making our summers drier, not wetter. Leaving that aside, even if we accept that the recent downpours are a sign of global warming, then a single wet summer hardly adds up to any particular trend. No, it’s far more plausible to explain this latest wet spell as a natural blip in the climate.

Human tendency or not, educated people don’t blame others for bad weather. Its both incredible and embarrassing that one of our main political parties makes assigning such blame one of its main platforms.

From this morning’s WSJ:

The destruction of mangrove swamps and the pollution of natural waterways with waste from shrimp ponds has long drawn the ire of environmentalists, but in the past two years, Rubicon Resources LLC, a Los Angeles-based supplier of farmed shrimp to Wal-Mart, has bought and upgraded roughly 150 Thai shrimp farms. Among Rubicon’s changes: increasing the testing and documentation of what is in its ponds, planting mangrove elsewhere to make up for the trees destroyed by its farms and standardizing treatment of the water discharged from its ponds.

Rubicon is pushing to meet a year-end deadline that all phases of shrimp production adhere to environmental and social standards backed by Wal-Mart, Red Lobster operator Darden Restaurants Inc. and other big buyers. The U.S.-based industry group that drafted the standards, the Global Aquaculture Alliance, plans to unveil similar guidelines this year for farming of tilapia and catfish, with standards for salmon following later. Wal-Mart pledges to endorse those, too, and to require compliance from its suppliers…

…Roughly half of the seafood consumed globally is already farm-raised, and as that expands, Wal-Mart and others are seeking to reduce the environmental problems it often leaves in its wake…

…The changes afoot in the Thai shrimp ponds reflect the world-spanning, industry-rattling reach of Wal-Mart’s push for environmental sustainability. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer has prodded its suppliers to cut their packaging and pare their reliance on nonrenewable fuels. It has relentlessly promoted long-lasting but slow-selling compact-fluorescent light bulbs. It is the world’s largest buyer of organic cotton, purchasing more than 10 million pounds a year. And it has pledged to eventually buy its wild-caught fish only from fisheries certified as environmentally sustainable….

…Farmers must replace any mangroves cleared for their ponds by planting three times as many of the trees elsewhere. Applying antibiotics to the shrimp is prohibited because the drugs can seep out of the ponds and weaken the immune systems of wild species. The farms must pay workers the prevailing local wage….”We have buffer canals, water-treatment processes, mangrove conservation, and [we] take care of public canals around our farms,” says Chana Tanglertpanya, president of Rubicon’s aquaculture division in Thailand. “We also make good relations with the local villagers.”

Why is WMT, the quintessential evil capitalist multi-national doing this? Maybe they’re not so evil after all. Maybe they’re just doing it for the good press (though they’d be naive to count on it).

Regardless, with this program WMT will do more to help the environment in Thailand than probably all environmental activist groups combined.

From IBD:

China’s booming economy has made it the world’s biggest polluter. So why is it exempt from Kyoto, and why are the greenies so silent? Should we stop buying Chinese goods to fight global warming?…

…China’s emissions of carbon dioxide have exceeded those of the United States at least two years ahead of most international estimates, according to a report issued last week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. CO2 emissions, it says, rose an astounding 9% in 2006. China produces 12% of the world’s CO2 and 25% of its mercury pollution.

In contrast, the Energy Information Administration announced that the big, bad USA’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels fell 1.3% in 2006, while our booming economy grew 3.3%. We are using energy more efficiently and reducing emissions without Kyoto. Energy use per unit of GDP fell 4.2 % last year, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell 4.5%.

Greenies are “silent” on China for an obvious reason. Its the same reason human rights activists are more worried about violations in Israel or the US than they are about real abuses in China, North Korea, or Iran.

Many of these people, and most of the loudest among them, don’t really care about the environment (or human rights or whatever). Their real gripe is with individual freedom, capitalism, and thus the US. If we solved every major environmental problem tomorrow they wouldn’t miss a beat - they would just move on to whine about something else.

China gets a pass because its already authoritarian and anti-capitalist - thus the Greenies see no need for environmental regulations. The real goal, establishing complete state control, has been achieved there.

Strange that people allegedly concerned with the environment so are so sympathetic to the types of governments that harm the environment. Compare North and South Korea, East and West Germany, the Bryansk pipeline and the Alaskan Pipeline, the Songhua river and the Hudson. Free people take care of their environment, authoritarian governments don’t.

From City Journal:

In a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.

What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off their welfare payments, too.

A decade after Murray, I suggested that, though welfare was part of the answer, the real explanation was larger. It was cultural, not economic. Begun by the elites, vast changes reshaped mainstream attitudes in the 1960s. Sex became fine outside marriage, and illegitimacy lost its stigma. Drugs were cool; social authority and tradition weren’t. America was deemed a racist, unjust society that victimized and impoverished blacks, who could rarely better their condition and who therefore deserved generous welfare benefits as reparations for past and present oppression. If blacks committed crime, the system that drove them to it, out of poverty or as an act of protest, was at fault: we shouldn’t blame the victim, as the saying went—meaning the poor criminal, not his prey. Since people shape their actions according to the ideas and beliefs they hold, when these new attitudes reached the inner cities, what could result but an epidemic of social dysfunction?

Goes on to talk about the Duke Rape Case and rap lyrics. Read the whole thing.

From Der Spiegel:

Tiny Brain No Problem for French Tax Official

Something that many people secretly believed has been confirmed: You don’t actually need a brain to work in a tax office. A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head — yet lives a completely normal life.

Wonder what we’d find if we started scanning people in the IRS.

From the Washington Times:

Congressional Democrats today failed to include a provision in homeland security legislation that would protect the public from being sued for reporting suspicious behavior that may lead to a terrorist attack, according to House Republican leaders…

…Mr. King and Rep. Steve Pearce, New Mexico Republican, sponsored the provision after a group of Muslim imams filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against US Airways and unknown “John Doe” passengers. The imams were removed from US Airways Flight 300 on Nov. 20 after fellow passengers on the Minneapolis-to-Phoenix flight complained about the imams’ suspicious behavior.

…On March 27, the House approved the “John Doe” amendment on a 304-121 vote.

“Democrats are trying to find any technical excuse to keep immunity out of the language of the bill to protect citizens, who in good faith, report suspicious activity to police or law enforcement,” Mr. King said. “I don’t see how you can have a homeland security bill without protecting people who come forward to report suspicious activity.”…

…Florida Rep. Adam Putnam, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said failure to enact the provision will hold “the threat of endless litigation over the heads of the American people.”

“Democrats are discouraging citizens from reporting suspicious behavior. And that, simply, leaves America vulnerable to terrorist attacks,” Mr. Putnam said.

Of course, “the threat of endless litigation over the heads of the American people” is exactly what many Dems want. Such an environment gives tremendous power to lawyers, bureaucrats, and the government. That’s why the Dems are consistently the party in favor or more regulation, opaque regulations, arbitrary enforcement.

The risk of people not coming forward with real information on terrorist activities is serious. For example, many states have had to pass Good Samaritan laws to protect innocent people trying to help a stranger in a medial emergency from a lawsuit. Without such protection, if you touch someone having a heart attack and that person dies, you may face civil liability. This is why the Red Cross offers legal indemnification to anyone who has been certified in their class - much harder to intimidate the Red Cross into a legal settlement than it is a private citizen.

I never really understood that airport Imam lawsuit anyway. If you tell the police something factual, and they decide to question someone based in part on what you said, and that ends up causing that person to miss their flight, how are you liable. Isn’t it the police who made the active decision.

The suit never got anywhere. But the threat of litigation can be as serious as the threat of prosecution. Name in the papers, forced court appearances, fishing-expedition subpoenas designed to intimidate and violate your privacy, legal expenses, &c. In the process you may be brought up on contempt of court or perjury charges, even if there was no original crime.

And you can be sure CAIR and the like will be happy to file suits on anyones behalf if it means an opportunity to teach the American people a lesson about who really runs things - special interests.

Graphic from MM

Separately, also from the Washington Times:

Senate Democrats last night beat back a Republican attempt to attach an anti-Fairness Doctrine bill as an amendment to education legislation.

The doctrine, a former requirement that broadcasters present opposing points of view on political issues, was scrapped in 1987 by the Federal Communications Commission, which said the policy restricted journalistic freedom. The bill by Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, would prevent the FCC from reinstating the doctrine.

“We live in an age of satellite radio, of broadband, of blogs, of Internet, of cable TV, of broadcast TV. There is no limitation on the ability of anyone from any political persuasion to get their ideas set forth,” Mr. Coleman argued in support of the Broadcaster Freedom Act of 2007. “The public in the end will choose what to listen to.”

By a vote of 49-48, senators voted not to consider Mr. Coleman’s amendment after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, raised a point of order. Senate rules require 60 votes to waive a point of order.

Its particularly disappointing that this was a near party-line vote. Only one Dem, the generally moderate Evan Bayh (D-IN) crossed the lines. That means every other Dem thinks its a good idea to have the Federal Government monitoring and regulating political speech by the press.

One week ago Rasmussen reported a poll in which Americans believe broadcast news has a liberal bias by a margin of 2:1. But you can be certain Dems have no intention of applying the Fairness Doctrine to CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, NPR, and their ilk. Rather, they want to run small radio stations that broadcast shows like Rush Limbaugh out of business. These stations would be obliged to run left wing talk radio shows for an equal amount of time. Unfortunately, there isn’t much market for such broadcasting on talk radio (witness the fall of AirAmerica). Thus, these stations would be forced to run effectively ad-free half the time.

Here’s a good VDH column on the subject.

From today’s Washington Post: 

Former South African president Nelson Mandela plans to announce on Wednesday the creation of “the Elders,” a group composed mostly of retired global leaders that will seek to tackle urgent world problems unfettered by the politics of any one nation, officials with the group said.

It will have about a dozen members, including former president Jimmy Carter, former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Among the organizers of the effort have been rock star Peter Gabriel and British airline mogul Richard Branson, who has used meetings at his Caribbean getaway, Necker Island, as an incubator for creation of the group.

Branson? And while Carter was at least elected, Annan was just a career bureaucrat. Too bad Saddam and Mao can’t join. Also too bad Castro won’t ever ‘retire’.