This article cracks me up. Airbus has unveiled its new superjumbo jet, capable of carrying 840 people. That is a pretty impressive achievement. According to the article the Europeans are pretty stocked about having a bigger plane than Boeing.

For the countries which backed the 10.7-billion-euro (14-billion-dollar) development cost, the plane stood as a prominent symbol of European cooperation.

“Good old Europe has made this possible,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told a packed hall in Airbus’s headquarters in Toulouse, southwest France.

That was a barely-veiled barb recalling the US dismissal of France, Germany and other EU states in 2003 as “Old Europe” because of their opposition to the war on Iraq.

Noel Forgeard, the French head of Airbus, made similar hints in his presentation of the A380 during a spectacle featuring computer graphics, atmospheric theme music and swirling colours.

“The European states — so easily accused of weakness — backed this fantastic challenge 35 years ago and have believed in the A380,” he said.

The hubris on display was reinforced by recent figures showing that, for the second year running, Airbus has outsold Boeing and now holds some 57 percent of the world market for passenger aircraft.

I can understand that the Europeans are justifiably happy about their new plane, but thinking they have outdone America because they have subsidized the building of a great airplane is a hollow victory. It is also possible that Boeing could not afford to make such a large plane because Airbus is subsidized and does not need to worry about being as profitable as Boeing. There likely is only room for one plane this size in the market, and Boeing couldn’t afford to lose billions on the development cost of such as plane, but Airbus could, and so Airbus built the plane and Boeing could afford to take the risk. It is possible that Airbus has properly taken account of the financial risks involved in the making of such of a plane.

The sad truth about “good old Europe” as Gerhard Schroeder called it is that its economy isn’t not as robust and doesn’t grow as quickly as the United States. It’s a nice little victory to build a big, cool plane, but that doesn’t help the average European have more economic prosperity. And because Airbus is subsidized, it is quite possible this plane will cost good old Europe.

Gregg Easterbrook is bent out of shape because people like more horsepower in their cards. As he explains in this article about the North American Automotive Show:

The big “more” of the auto show is more horsepower. Eighteen models on display at the show boasted 500 horsepower or more. And these aren’t race cars, but rather models intended for the street. Five-hundred horsepower is not only obscene but antisocial: Such power is useful only for drag-racing, cutting off other drivers, and speeds well beyond 100 miles per hour. The other day I was motoring down the wonderfully named Democracy Boulevard in Montgomery County, Maryland, doing 50 miles per hour in a 35 zone. A middle-aged woman yakking on her cell phone blew past me at perhaps 75 miles per hour in a shiny new BMW 545i, which has 330 horsepower. Driving 75 miles per hour on a suburban street with pedestrian crosswalks and bus stops is socially irresponsible. But in a high-horsepower car, all you need to do is tap the throttle pedal for an instant and you’re at 75. The more horsepower, the easier it is to drive like a maniac.

I agree that 75 in a 35 is irresponsible. But that doesn’t mean that more horsepower is bad just because it makes it easier to be irresponsible. Following Easterbrook’s logic we should reduce the horsepower in cars because that would be more socially responsible. I don’t agree. People should be ticketed for bad driving behavior, we shouldn’t follow Easterbrook’s argument and lower horsepower just because some people break the law.

I drive a car with 255 horses. It is much more fun to drive than my previous car, which had 180 horses. I don’t drive recklessly, but I have to admit that some of that is a function of being 30 and not 18. I’m shocked at the good gas mileage my car gets. I took a road trip over the weekend to eat barbecue in North Carolina, and my car got 32.6 miles to the gallon. It is impressive for a car that has 255 horses to to get that kind of gas mileage.

The ACLU’s website proudly proclaims:

It is probably no accident that freedom of speech is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

According to the AP:

Swiss authorities are bringing the city’s public conveniences up to scratch – at a cost of $13 million for just 35 new toilets, Swiss daily Le Matin reported Tuesday.

Each sparking new facility is designed by a different architect at a cost of $313,000 – about the same as a 1-bedroom, city center apartment.

Three of the toilets have already been installed. “Inside they are functional and equipped to a high sanitary standard,” the city council said on its Web site. “On the outside, each public toilet is different and adapted to its surroundings.”

Patrons will be charged 50 centimes (US$0.42; euro0.32) for each visit to a self-cleaning toilet, which is accompanied by music.

Every once in a while, Nicolas Kristoff of the NY Times sees through the harmful rheterotic of the left and writes a brilliant article. This time, he advocates the use of DDT to stop malaria.

If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia – not to mention other poor countries in Africa – there’s one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives.

It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.

I’m thrilled that we’re pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the relief effort, but the tsunami was only a blip in third-world mortality. Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did, and in the long war between humans and mosquitoes it looks as if mosquitoes are winning.

One reason is that the U.S. and other rich countries are siding with the mosquitoes against the world’s poor – by opposing the use of DDT.

“It’s a colossal tragedy,” says Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical public health at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “And it’s embroiled in environmental politics and incompetent bureaucracies.”

In the 1950′s, 60′s and early 70′s, DDT was used to reduce malaria around the world, even eliminating it in places like Taiwan. But then the growing recognition of the harm DDT can cause in the environment – threatening the extinction of the bald eagle, for example – led DDT to be banned in the West and stigmatized worldwide. Ever since, malaria has been on the rise.

The poor countries that were able to keep malaria in check tend to be the same few that continued to use DDT, like Ecuador. Similarly, in Mexico, malaria rose and fell with the use of DDT. South Africa brought back DDT in 2000, after a switch to other pesticides had led to a surge in malaria, and now the disease is under control again. The evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.

But most Western aid agencies will not pay for anti-malarial programs that use DDT, and that pretty much ensures that DDT won’t be used. Instead, the U.N. and Western donors encourage use of insecticide-treated bed nets and medicine to cure malaria.

Bed nets and medicines are critical tools in fighting malaria, but they’re not enough. The existing anti-malaria strategy is an underfinanced failure, with malaria probably killing 2 million or 3 million people each year.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the U.N. :

If the issue is helping suffering people, why did the United Nations crowd – led by Clare Short, the former head of U.N. international development – scream bloody murder when it was announced that India, Japan, Australia and the United States would coordinate aid efforts? Short declared that any efforts to help the suffering tsunami victims outside U.N. authority would “undermine” the world body.

So much for pragmatism. Who cares who helps the needy, and under what flag, as long as it gets done?

As it happens, the United Nations’ most ardent supporters are anything but pragmatists. They hope passionately that the organization might become what Tennyson called the “Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.” Or they hope with equal fervor that it may serve as an idealistic alternative to American hegemony. Or they wish for both. And that’s where I start having problems.

I don’t have any objection to the United Nations’ technocratic functions. As a practical matter, if it makes sense to have a central clearinghouse to organize the building of water treatment plants in the Third World, OK, fine. Most of us agree that helping victims of natural disasters, inoculating children, feeding the starving and so forth are good things – just as we all agree it’s a good thing for our garbage to be collected.

But it is a huge intellectual leap to go from saying garbage should be collected to saying that the government should collect it. Similarly, you need to demonstrate that the United Nations’ noble efforts cannot be carried out by someone else.

More to the point, it’s an even grosser intellectual stolen base to claim or suggest that because the United Nations does good things in Somalia or Sri Lanka that we should assume its political motives are just as pure. The Nazis were brilliant at delivering social services. Hamas’ “political wing” builds hospitals and inoculates babies, but that doesn’t make it any less of a terrorist organization.

Now, the United Nations isn’t a hotbed of Nazis and terrorists, by any stretch. But it’s not a democratic, representative body either. Absolute power resides in the Security Council, whose core members originally included two brutal totalitarian regimes, China and the Soviet Union – both of which remain (in altered form) authoritarian regimes to varying degrees. Meanwhile, the larger General Assembly is chockablock with kleptocratic lickspittles working on orders from their dictatorial paymasters in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

This is why I find it so infuriating when people talk about how the “nations of the world” voted on this or that in some U.N. resolution. No they didn’t. Some nations voted through their representatives, other nations had one criminal cabal or another vote in their name. And if you believe – as so many opponents of the Iraq war did – that barbaric dictators are legitimate rulers because international law says so, then international law upholds the logic of the Fuehrer.

Link via Discarded Lies.

I haven’t know what to think about Michael Crichton’s new book State of Fear. I’ve read reviews, but they were written by people who were ideologically predisposed to like the book. According to this interview in the Times, his take on global warming and environmentalists looks right on:

As befits one of the world

William Safire has an interesting article today about Job and the Tsunami. In response to people who ask why God would let something like the Tsunami happen, he responds by reminding them about the story of Job. Safire, who has written a book about Job called “The First Dissident” summarizes the lesson of Job for today as this:

(1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way “deserved” a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.

(2) Questioning God’s inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.

(3) Humanity’s obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire’s cynicism.

There are a couple other reasons that God allows suffering. First, the purpose of life is to learn, and we can’t learn if everything is easy and there is no adversity. Second, there is adversity so that we can have the opportunity to do good. As it says in John 9:1-3

1 AND as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

Christ then healed the man’s blindness. This further reinforces that life isn’t easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. The point is to learn, and learning isn

Read this fisking of Paul Krugman by Vodkapundit. It is the best fisking of Krugman ever. Here’s a sample:

Paul Krugman:
I’ve been thinking of writing a political novel. It will be a bad novel because there won’t be any nuance: the villains won’t just espouse an ideology I disagree with – they’ll be hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels.

Later, we’ll hold a contest to see who can tell between a Paul Krugman novel and the column he writes for the New York Times. Meanwhile

The French media is ticked off that the United States is playing such a large role in the tsumani relief efforts. The French media might be sinking to a new low. Here’s what Belgravia Dispatach has to say:

Note the staggering sarcasm. We are doing recon over Aceh, not really to help (wink wink) but to perhaps prepare another oppressive, anti-Muslim adventure we’ve got up our sleeve. Absurd and insulting. Memo to Le Monde and their ilk: Get over yourselves. You are a middle power, lucky to have a U.N. Security Council seat still, and with little resources to mount the kind of operations the U.S. is currently pursuing in places like Indonesia.

Rather than commend the U.S., if just for a moment in the midst of this immense tragedy, Le Monde’s journalists and cartoonists prefer to insinuate that the U.S. has nefarious motives in Indonesia, or make crude fun of the difficulties in Iraq having ‘prepared’ us for Indonesia’s blight. Such sad fare isn’t just wrong, tasteless, petty and rancidly provincial. It speaks of a society, like contemporary Germany, that’s ails and needs scapegoats. It’s not politically correct to look internally for them anymore. So everyone loves to beat up that favorite bogeyman–the U.S.–out of a mixture of incomprehension, envy, fascination, stupidity and crude stereotyping. It’s sad really.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I love many things about France. And we cooperate with them in places like Haiti, Afghanistan (though their contribution there is rather paltry), critical intelligence sharing on terror. But France has become a society in desperate need of fresh thinking, different directions, new horizons. Sarkozy would help–though there is no easy panacea. After all, this kind of myopic, obnoxiously self-interested news treatment of this massive tragedy speaks volumes, doesn’t it?