Month: February 2002

Farm Subsidies, Tariffs and Lifesavers

TechCentralStation.Com’s Ryan H. Sanger takes down George W. Bush for his recent statements linking farm subsidies, of all things, to the 9/11 terrorists attacks.

Sanger reports that at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting in Denver, Bush told the cattlemen that, “It’s in our national security interests that we be able to feed ourselves . . . This nation has got to eat.”
As Sanger notes, given the relatively high levels of obesity in the United States, no one seems in danger of going hungry anytime soon. The truly bizarre thing about U.S. agricultural policy, however, is that it encourages low prices for some commodities while encouraging high prices for others.

On the artificially low price side, Sanger correctly notes that the problem with farm subsidies is that they create an excess of supply which makes farming unprofitable — at which point farmers turn into beggars at the government trough demanding one handout after another.

But the other side of the coin is that the United States uses tariffs and other devices to artificially raise the price of some agricultural commodities. A prime example of this is sugar — tariffs on sugar imports are set at such a high level that sugar in the United States costs up to twice as much as it does elsewhere.

The people who make Lifesavers understand that reality. Until a few months ago the major North American plant producing Lifesavers was located in Holland, Michigan — just a couple hours from where I live. But the high sugar costs in the United States finally took their toll, and the company announced it would close the plant and move to Canada where sugar producers don’t have the same influence. Sugar costs about half as much as it does in the United States, even after the exchange rate is accounted for.

Ah yes, thank goodness those tariffs are there protecting American jobs.

Source:

Beast of burden. Ryan H. Sager, TechCentralStation.Com, February 20, 2002.

Giving a 419 Con Man a Taste of His Own Medicine

If you’re like me, you get 5 or 6 of these “419” scam letters in which the con man tries to convince the mark that he has access to gold or other valuables from Nigeria which require a third party to move them out of country.

Buddy Weiserman strung along one of these scam artists for a couple of months and ?posted voice mails, emails and even a description of how he conned the conman into flapping his arms and legs like a chicken at Independence Square in Ghana. Hilarious.

Let Mike Tyson Fight Already

The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already.

The NOW e-mail complained that Tyson was being investigated for sexual assault by Las Vegas prosecutors. Fine, then lets see police arrest and/or indict him, but until then Tyson has just as much right as anybody to pursue his career and applying political criteria to decide whether or not to allow him to fight is obscene.

As George Getz puts it in a Libertarian Party press release on the Tyson controversy,

If Tyson is willing to fight; if an opponent is willing to step into the ring with him; if the bout is sanctioned by professional boxing organizations; and if fans are willing to pay money to see the fight — then no meddlesome government bureaucrat should have the power to veto it.

Exactly. I was trying to figure out what NOW was thinking with its idiotic e-mail. You’d think a group of feminists would be the last people in the world wanting to blacklist someone from working at his profession simply because he is unpopular or has a criminal record. As Getz said in the LP press release, “We don’t need Soviet-style economic commissars deciding who can work, and where they can work, and under what conditions they can work.”

Boxing commissions should be required by law to render fight decisions based solely on objective criteria as Getz outlines, not based on who NOW or other groups like or dislike. Let Tyson fight already.

Addendum: After this was written, Las Vegas announced, in fact, that it did not have enough evidence to pursue sexual assault charges against Tyson.

Source:

Let Mike Tyson box in Washington: It’s a matter of economic freedom. Libertarian Party, Press Release, February 21, 2002.

Google’s AdWords Select Rocks My World

A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my own site — less than 1 percent.

Now, though, Google has followed that up with an excellent cost-per-click advertising system called AdWords Select. This lets people place text ads by keywords, but only pay on a cost-per-click basis.

Currently, for example, I have textads running on about 100 different search words. I’m paying $.05 per clickthrough and can limit the total amount per day per ad (so if I set a $1 limit, after the 20th click-through of the day, the ad will no longer be served until the next day).

Clickthrough rate is still about in the 1 percent range or so, but this is still a bargain basement promotion method (in fact, I’m less interested in clickthroughs than having my shortened URL appear on Google searches for topics like “animal rights” or “peta.”)

This is an incredible — and cheap — promotional tool.

Glenn Sacks on Bogus V-Day Statistics

Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,

1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.

This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.

As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).

Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.

So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.

But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,

Ensler, whose popular play “The Vagina Monologues” is the primary financial and public relations force behind V-Day, says that, for women, “Afghanistan is everywhere.” Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women, Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.

The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?

Source:

Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.

Upcoming Abortion/Breast Cancer Trial in North Carolina

Women’s eNews recently reported about an upcoming trial in Fargo, North Dakota, in which a judge will be asked to weight the claims and counterclaims about whether or not abortion contributes to increased risk of breast cancer. Not only are anti-abortion advocates relying on junk science, but they’re own claims are deceptive. Rather than urge women not to have abortions, their advice would be more accurate if they said: have a child before you are 22 or face increased risk of breast cancer. Lets look at the epidemiological evidence before moving on to the biology of abortion, pregnancy and breast cancer.

Anti-abortion advocates always cite the same weak epidemiological data. There are quite a few studies showing that women who have induced abortions have increases risk of breast cancer anywhere from 20 to 30 percent higher than women who do not have induced abortions. The proper reaction to such studies is — big deal.

Those are very low increased risk levels for epidemiological studies — they are so low that it is difficult for even well-designed studies to accurately measure such low levels of risk.

This problem is compounded by the fact that most of these studies suffer from a number of flaws. The most obvious of these, which Womens’ eNews does an excellent job of explaining, is recall bias. Women’s who have breast cancer are far more likely to tell researchers that they had an abortion than are women who do not have breast cancer. A Swedish study, for example, found that women with breast cancer were 50 percent more likely to report having had an abortion than were women without breast cancer. Women’s eNews quotes Lancet Oncology editorial as saying that, “healthy control women have been more reluctant to report on a controversial, emotionally charged subject such as induced abortion, than have patients with breast cancer.”

Of course, a major study involving 1.5 million Danish women that relied on medical records rather than women’s recall. The results? No increased risk of breast cancer at all for women who had abortions compared to women who did not.

The claim that abortion increases risk of breast cancer is nonsense. Sort of. An interesting possibility is that some women may in fact increase their risk of breast cancer if they do something that is increasingly common in the Western world — delay the age at which they have their first child.

A recent study of 100,000 French women, for example, found that women who gave birth to their first child in their 30s were 63 percent more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women who gave birth to their first child by the age of 22. The study also found that women who started having periods the earliest also had a higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who began having periods the latest.

Why should the age at which women have their first child or begin menstruating have anything to do with breast cancer? Dr. Steven Austad offers an excellent summary of the link in his book, Why We Age,

Simply put, estrogen and progesterone increase the risk of breast cancer because they cause the cells lining the milk ducts in the breast to divide prolifically during the latter part of the menstrual cycle, when the body is preparing for pregnancy. When no pregnancy occurs, these newly formed cells die, returning the breast to its original condition. During the next cycle, there is another round of cell division and cell death if no pregnancy occurs.

And of course, the more this cycle occurs, the higher the risk of a mutation that might later develop into breast cancer. But once a woman gives birth, this cycle stops — the cells become permanently differentiated and the monthly division/death process comes to a halt.

So women who want to really reduce their risk of breast cancer should have a child as soon as possible after menstruating. Or if you want to do even better than that, go for a hysterectomy — studies have found that young women who have been forced to have hysterectomies for one reason or another have much lower rates of cancer than do healthy women. This applies to men as well — studies of men who have been sterilized find that they have far lower rates of cancer than men who have not.

If there is any increased risk of breast cancer attendant with abortion, it almost certainly is due to the women using abortion to delay the age at which they first give birth. Women who are on birth control or celibate will also experience the same risk, though this writer has to wonder if abortion activists are prepared to warn all childless women that they are endangering their lives. Would they require the Roman Catholic Church to inform childless women who want to become nuns that they are imperiling their health? Somehow I suspect now.

Sources:

Cancer risks for older mothers. The BBC, February 13, 2002.

Judge to Rule on Abortion, Breast Cancer Link. Margaret A. Woodbury, Women’s eNews, February 17, 2002.

Why we age. Steven N. Austad, 1997.