If everything is killing us, why do we live so long?

From the Telegraph:

Flick through the daily papers’ news pages and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that everything is killing us. But then turn to the personal finance sections and it seems that our pension funds are skint because nobody is dying.

How can this be? Are we dropping like flies or living for ever? Such questions nag away at me, after I spotted a feature in yesterday’s Financial Times under the headline “Dangers of a good night’s sleep”.

Jeepers! Now even having a kip is a cause for concern.

Every day, it seems, new warnings of a looming health disaster emerge in Negative Britain. The scale of imperilment is truly spectacular.

Mass obesity, rampant anorexia, drug addiction, drug shortages, NHS super bugs, junk food, salt poisoning, sugar dependency, sexual diseases, sexual impotence.

Chronic stress, passive smoking, alcohol abuse, carbohydrate overload, the Atkins diet; too few vitamins, vitamin pollution, fruit deficiency, factory farming.

Insomnia, night starvation, vicious sun beds, mobile phones that fry our brains, carcinogenic wrinkle creams, E numbers and, according to Mary Creagh, MP for Wakefield, killer domestic baths with no thermostats.

…
That’s Negative Britain for you. Now, hold my hand and we’ll cross over to Positive Britain. It’s a journey of only a few inches: the gap between your ears. There you go.

You’re now in a very different place.

It’s a happy scene, where far from being wiped out by avian flu, those on the back nine of life are heading for a golden age of independent activity, well past the biblical target of three score years and 10. Grey Power is on the march.

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn British male was 56 years. By 2000, it had risen to 76 years. For women, it was even higher, 80 years. And since the turn of the millennium, life expectancy for both sexes in Positive Britain has improved further still.

Read the whole thing here.

Free Speech Doesn’t Matter at NYU

The Thought Police have come to NYU. Here is Eugene Volokh on NYU’s censorship of the the danish cartoons.

Questions for Muslims

From IDB:

What better time for CAIR and other Muslim leaders to step up, cut through the politically correct fog and provide factual answers to the questions that give so many non-Muslims pause?

Generally speaking, those questions focus on whether the Quran does indeed promote violence against non-Muslims, and how many of the terrorists’ ideas

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The Reason Why France Has Better Broadband Access Than the US–Competition

According to the WSJ:

For years, France’s telecommunications industry was a state-owned monopoly with one of the world’s most backward broadband markets. But thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.

One telecom company in particular has exploited the changes and created competition in France — a start-up called Iliad. Over 1.1 million French subscribers pay as low as

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How Dangerous is Islam?

From Eugene Volokh:

It’s Not Islamophobia When There Really Is Something To Fear:

The striking thing about the Abdul Rahman prosecution

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Chirac Doesn’t Like English

From the Times of London:

PRESIDENT CHIRAC stormed out of the first session of a European Union summit dominated by a row over French nationalism because a fellow Frenchman insisted on speaking English.

President Chirac and three of his ministers walked out of the room when Ernest-Antoine Seilli

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Jack Booted Thugs

The BBC weighs in on the senseless killing of Salvatore Culosi. Salvatore Culosi was killed by the police as they were carrying out a search warrant with a SWAT team. What was Salvatore’s alleged crime–being a sports bookie.

According to the article, “in the 1980s there were about 3,000 Swat team deployments annually across the US, but says now there are at least 40,000 per year.”

This is a scary trend.

Grim Milestone in Iraq

Check out this post by Jim Lindgren on the number of causalities in Iraq. The post itself is interesting, but also check out the first few comments and Jim

Time Shifting TV Watching

Todd Zywicki has an interesting point about TV in general at the Volokh Conspiracy. He writes, “The hardest part was being away from my Mega March Madness for the first two days of the tourney. I was on vacation visiting family for Spring Break and–horrors!–I had to watch whatever CBS put in front of me. How do people still live like that?” How do people live like that indeed?

Sports are the one thing I watch on TV in real time. Everything else I record with my ReplayTV and watch later–sometimes much later. For example, last night my girlfriend and I watched a TV show I had record last July.

The good news is that the TV studios are recognizing that people do not like to be tied down to a time slot and forced to watch commericals. As a result the TV studioes are starting to offer TV shows on iTunes and other outlets. Hopefully this will keep up. If they don’t, people will just work around the movie studios and do it themselves through PVRs aren’t file sharing. Just check out how many shows are available on Torrentspy or any other BitTorrent site these days.

The Statistics of March Madness

In 1981, the NCAA Division 1 Men