The Blogosphere was filled today with howls of savage satisfaction at the sudden death of Ken Lay.

How can I not respond?

My wife is persuaded of Lay’s villainy, having read two of the books produced by journalists in the aftermath of Enron’s demise.

I wouldn’t read those books, but I remember reading the attack story spread across the front page of the Wall Street Journal by members of its leftwing news side, and I remember being unpersuaded that pushing the edge of the accounting practices envelope was necessarily either illegitimate or criminal.

In America, when the hound pack of the Press chases a conspicuously wealthy defendant, the prosecutor/huntsman always wins. The readily-provoked envy of the masses invariably ensures a guilty verdict. And such was Ken Lay’s unhappy fate.

The honest WSJ editorial side was skeptical of the prosecution’s case as well:

There is no doubt that Mr. Lay is guilty of bad management. He admitted Thursday that his trust in Mr. Fastow was misplaced, and there must have been other missteps. But Mr. Fastow had plenty of help in covering his tracks, both within Enron and from its outside accountants. In a criminal trial, it is not enough to say that Mr. Lay should have known. No CEO can know all that is going on in a large corporation, and the fraud at Enron was so complex that it took prosecutors more than two years to unravel.

The government’s Exhibit A will presumably be a videotape of Mr. Lay’s now-famous pep talk to employees in August 2001, telling them Enron was still “doing extremely well” and encouraging them to hold on to their stock. Many followed his advice and ended up losing much of their life savings. That aroused an understandable anger with the CEO, who was paid salary and bonuses in the millions.

But Mr. Lay was also putting his money where his mouth was. During the long slide of Enron’s share price, he continued to keep the vast majority of his personal wealth in the stock and even bought more shares, selling only when forced by margin calls. This is not consistent with the theory that he knew the company’s true situation and was out to defraud shareholders.

Mr. Lay’s co-defendant, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, claimed that he resigned from the company for personal reasons and allegedly made $89 million in profits from selling Enron stock. By all accounts Mr. Lay came back to the company to replace Mr. Skilling as CEO because of his personal connection to it. He then did what captains are supposed to do, which is go down with his ship.

I’m not sure I believe the heart attack story, but I see no reason to inquire. The young boy from Tyrone, Missouri who delivered newspapers and mowed lawns made good, made a lot of money, lived the good life, and like many a good man was brought low. If he escaped prison and degradation by his own hand, good for him.

Perhaps Ken Lay behaved in extremis as the ancient Romans did, when Fate turned on them. Thinking of Ken Lay today, I remembered the end of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian:

For there remained also, for the old earthy creature still within him, that great blessedness of physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one’s self in sleep—that, as he had always recognised, was a good thing. And it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed, in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and turned to think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little alleviating grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were praying fervently—Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! [“Depart! Depart! Christian Soul!”] In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the gray, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

Michelle Malkin has an amusing new video, focussing on those leaking leftwing newspapers, which includes a WWII Private Snafu cartoon, written by Dr. Seuss and featuring the voice of Mel Blanc.

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses, in the Weekend edition of the Journal, the unwillingness of the British government to defend its subjects against crime rising comcomitantly with its determination to prevent their defending themselves.

With Great Britain now the world’s most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It’s cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won’t tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

Using a cap pistol, as an elderly woman did to scare off a gang of youths, will bring you to court for putting someone in fear. Recently, police tried to stop David Collinson from entering his burning home to rescue his asthmatic wife. He refused to obey and, brandishing a toy pistol, dashed into the blaze. Minutes later he returned with his wife and dog and apologized to the police. Not good enough. In April Mr. Collinson was sentenced to a year in prison for being aggressive towards the officers and brandishing the toy pistol. Still, at least he won’t be sharing his cell with an arsonist or thief.

How did things come to a pass where law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals and criminals as victims? A giant step was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, making it illegal to carry any article for an offensive purpose; any item carried for self-defense was automatically an offensive weapon and the carrier is guilty until proven innocent. At the time a parliamentarian protested that “The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy.” The government countered that the public should be discouraged “from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them.”

The trouble is that society cannot and does not protect them. Yet successive governments have insisted protection be left to the professionals, meanwhile banning all sorts of weapons, from firearms to chemical sprays. They hope to add toy or replica guns to the list along with kitchen knives with points. Other legislation has limited self-defense to what seems reasonable to a court much later.

Although British governments insist upon sole responsibility for protecting individuals, for ideological and economic reasons they have adopted a lenient approach toward offenders. Because prisons are expensive and don’t reform their residents, fewer offenders are incarcerated. Those who are get sharply reduced sentences, and serve just half of these. Still, with crime rates rising, prisons are overcrowded and additional jail space will not be available anytime soon. The public learned in April that among convicts released early to ease overcrowding were violent or sex offenders serving mandatory life sentences who were freed after as little as 15 months.

And the slackening of law enforcement continues to stimulate the Labour Government’s erosion of the ancient liberties which were always England’s pride.

...a host of actions have been initiated to bring about more convictions. At the end of its 2003 session Parliament repealed the 800-year-old guarantee against double jeopardy. Now anyone acquitted of a serious crime can be retried if “new and compelling evidence” is brought forward. Parliament tinkered with the definition of “new” to make that burden easier to meet. The test for “new” in these criminal cases, Lord Neill pointed out, will be lower than “is used habitually in civil cases. In a civil case, one would have to show that the new evidence was not reasonably available on the previous occasion. There is no such requirement here.”

Parliament was so excited by the benefits of chucking the ancient prohibition that it extended the repeal of double jeopardy from murder to cases of rape, manslaughter, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and some 20 other serious crimes. For good measure it made the new act retroactive. Henceforth, no one who has been, or will be, tried and acquitted of a serious crime can feel confident he will not be tried again, and again.

To make the prosecutor’s task still easier, he is now permitted to use hearsay evidence—goodbye to confronting witnesses—to introduce a defendant’s prior record, and the number of jury trials is to be reduced. Still, the government has helped the homeowner by sponsoring a law “to prevent homeowners being sued by intruders who injure themselves while breaking in.”

It may be crass to point out that the British people, stripped of their ability to protect themselves and of other ancient rights and left to the mercy of criminals, have gotten the worst of both worlds. Still, as one citizen, referring to the new policy of letting criminals off with a caution, suggested: “Perhaps it would be easier and safer for the honest citizens of the U.K. to move into the prisons and the criminals to be let out.”

Just last week, the BBC was reporting on the success of a “knife amnesty.”

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.—Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999—six or seven years.”...

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one—except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities—job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but—imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company”—more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

Michael Barone, in the WSJ, reflects on the consequences of the habitual misuse of power of the press to delegitimize elected administrations.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother’s administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times’ disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America’s newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame’s name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ‘50s and early ‘60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America—and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

The Israeli-based purveyor of Intel-gossip Depkafile tells us that Jordanian intelligence provided the breakthrough leading to the successful targeting of Zarqawi.

(It is generally believed that Depkafile functions as a mouthpiece for Mossad, and commonly distributes rumors or even false stories, but this one serves no obvious Mossad agenda, and could possibly even be true.)

The final breakthrough in the long pursuit of the most blood-stained terrorist of them all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, came from Jordan.

The source was Ziyad Halaf al Karbouli, also known as Abu Hufeiza, one of the lowlifes Zarqawi employed to attack and rob the convoys plying Baghdad’s main supply route across the Jordanian border and murdering their Iraqi or Jordanian drivers. Foreigners riding along were taken hostage. DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals that he was picked up — not by chance, but in consequence of a well-laid Jordanian sting operation set up and executed by King Abdullah’s old unit, The Riders of Justice of Jordan’s 71st Commando Brigade – and on his orders.

Jordanian intelligence had a score to settle with Zarqawi’s highway robber-in-chief. Last September, he kidnapped a Palestinian called Khaled Da Siko, who was an important Jordanian undercover agent, assigned with penetrating Zarqawi’s following. The abduction took place in Ruthba in western Iraq. When Abu Hufeiza asked Zarqawi what to do with his captive, he was told to execute him forthwith, which he did.

From that moment, Jordanian intelligence never let up on their efforts to lay hands on the kidnapper to exact revenge.

The Riders of Justice infiltrated western Iraq at the beginning of 2006 and scoured al Qaim, Ruthba, Falujja and Ramadi for the wanted man. At some point, they realized that even if they overpowered his bodyguards and killed him, they would never make it back to Jordan past Zarqawi’s killers. It had become necessary to go for the boss, who was in any case under sentence of death in the kingdom.

In early April therefore, a decision was taken in Amman to lure Abu Hufeiza into entering the kingdom in defiance of Zarqawi’s prohibition. Double agents held out an offer of a Jordanian base for al Qaeda, plus information on ways to lay hands on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the funding channel between Jordan and Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza swallowed the bait. He was dazzled enough to picture himself handing the rich booty over to Abu Zarqawi and being promoted to his Number Two in al Qaeda’s Iraq hierarchy by his grateful master.

The moment he and his bodyguards set foot on Jordanian soil, all got up as Iraqi businessmen on a shopping trip, the trap snapped shut; they were surrounded by the Riders of Justice and hauled to Amman for questioning.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror sources report that Abu Hufeiza held nothing back from his Jordanian interrogators. He was the source of the first real lead to Zarqawi’s location to be made available to the US command and intelligence in Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza also gave away certain members of the Butcher of Baghdad’s command group. Here is a summary of the data the Jordanians extracted from him:

The name of al Qaeda chief’s chief of operations, Yassin Harabi — an Iraqi Sunni codenamed Abu Obeida. Going down the chain of command, he identified Yunas Ramlawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and Muhammad Majid, a Saudi Arabian known as Abu Hamza.

The descriptions he gave the Jordanians were good enough for identikit portraits and betrayed their hideouts, how they stayed in touch with Zarqawi and their movements.

This data haul Jordanian intelligence whipped across to Washington where analysts went to work on it and rushed their findings to American headquarters in Baghdad.

All of a sudden, the US military in Baghdad had an intelligence bonanza instead of chance identities of the odd Zarqawi adherent which was all they had to work with before. From Abu Hufeiza Jordanian intelligence had extracted the first clue to the location of the safe house near Baquba, where Zarqawi was actually in conference with his senior commanders. The next link in the chain came from a senior Zarqawi commander in Iraq, who fell into American hands and was persuaded to part with the final steps that brought two US 500-pound bombs crashing down on Zarqawi’s last address.

At first, some American officers queried these offerings as disinformation designed to trip them up. But when US commander General George W. Casey and American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad ordered the input examined and cross-referenced, it proved solid enough for direct action.

——————————-

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story which appears to be incorporating the Depkafile report:

Perhaps the most important arrest, however, say Middle East and European intelligence agents, was Jordan’s capture last month of an al Qaeda logistics and smuggling agent, Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly. Mr. Karbouly went on Jordanian television after his arrest and described murdering Jordanian truck drivers moving goods into Iraq. He also described carrying out political assassination of Moroccan and Kurdish diplomats on the orders of Mr. Zarqawi.

The Jordanians worked with agents inside Iraq to draw Mr. Karbouly across the border, Jordanian intelligence officials said last month. And the al Qaeda operative provided Jordanian interrogators with important intelligence on Mr. Zarqawi’s top aides, including his spiritual adviser, Abu Abdul-Rahman. In recent weeks, U.S. military personnel said they monitored Mr. Rahman’s movements and, ultimately, were drawn to Mr. Zarqawi’s hideout near the Iraqi city of Baqubah.

The Jordanian operation “offered a critical link” on al Qaeda’s leadership structure, said a European counterterrorism official.

The Wall Street Journal put the debate on the Death Tax (which costs more to collect than it adds to the Federal coffers).

Americans favor repealing the death tax not because they think it will help them directly. They’re more principled than that. Two-thirds of the public wants to repeal it because they think taxing a lifetime of thrift due to the accident of death is unfair, and even immoral. They also understand that the really rich won’t pay the tax anyway because they hire lawyers to avoid it.

For proof that they’re right, they need only watch the current debate. The superrich or their kin—such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett—are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that “if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure.”

Do the Kennedys or Rockefellers look any poorer from the existence of a tax first created in 1917? The real people who pay the levy are the thrifty middle class and entrepreneurs who’ve built up a modest nest egg or business and are hit by a 46% tax rate when they die. Americans want family businesses, ranches, farms and other assets to be passed from one generation to the next. Yet the U.S. has one of the highest death tax rates in the world.

But two Republican poltroons in the Senate joined the Party of Envy to defeat the repeal 57-41. A 60 vote majority was needed to end a democrat filibuster against basic decency.

Besides Mr. Baucus (D – Montana), three other Democrats voted to end debate and clear the way for a vote on repeal. They were Senator Ben E. Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas. Two Republicans, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted to block the bill.

The Wall Street Journal’s amusement feature today was about the latest Internet phenomenon in the Orient. A passenger on a Hong Kong bus took a video on his cell phone of the six minute tirade by an older man over a request by a younger fellow to lower the volume of his cell phone conversation.

His repeated “I’ve got pressure,” (in Chinese) has become a popular slogan, available on to shirts and coffee mugs.

While riding public bus 68X on the night of April 29, Elvis Ho tapped the shoulder of a passenger sitting in front of him who was talking on a cellphone. The 23-year-old Mr. Ho asked the man to lower his voice. Mr. Ho called him “uncle,” a familiar way of addressing an elder male in Cantonese.

Instead of complying, the man turned around and berated Mr. Ho for nearly six minutes, peppering his outburst with obscenities.

“I’ve got pressure, you’ve got pressure!” the older man exploded. “Why did you have to provoke me?” A nearby passenger who found the encounter interesting captured most of it on video with his own cellphone, and it was posted on the Web.

“Bus Uncle,” as the older man is now known, has since become a Hong Kong sensation. The video, including subtitled versions, has been downloaded nearly five million times from YouTube.com, a popular Web site for video clips.

Teenagers and adults here sprinkle their conversations with phrases borrowed from Bus Uncle’s rant, such as “I’ve got pressure!” and “It’s not over!” (shouted when the young man tried to end the conversation several times by saying, “It’s over”). Also, there are several insults involving mothers. Web sites peddle T-shirts with a cartoon of Bus Uncle and the famous phrases. They are also available as mobile-phone ringtones.

Fans have edited the footage into music-video versions of disco, rap and pop songs that have themselves become popular online. One video projects a slowed-down version of Bus Uncle’s voice over an image of Darth Vader. Another sets Bus Uncle audio clips to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” beginning with a title that says, “All he wanted to do…was to talk on his phone and relax from his stress…but someone HAD to tap him on the back.”

Jon Fong, the 21-year-old accountant and night-school psychology student who captured the bus incident on his Sony Ericsson cellphone, has become famous, too. Mr. Fong has told reporters that he often takes videos as a hobby, and had just planned to share this one with friends. “Next time, I’ll put myself in the frame,” he told Hong Kong’s Cable TV news.

The Internet has allowed the Bus Uncle video to join a slew of other instant amateur films in attracting a global audience. Here in Hong Kong, it has a special resonance. For many, Bus Uncle personifies the stresses of life in their city.

the video (contains obscenities – uncensored)

the video (cleaned-up subtitles)

Bus Uncle rant set to Sammi Cheng pop song

Motherload of Bus Uncle links

In the waning decades of the 19th century, Western societies experienced a wave of panic over the idea that various intoxicating substances offered pleasures so exquisite and seductive as to overcome the will and corrupt and enslave their users. One intoxicant after another became the target for prohibition efforts by ameliorist do-gooders.

All forms of prohibition make whatever is banned more desirable, and result in black markets. Black markets provide an opportunity for large profits by criminals, and typically lead to violence as rival gangsters fight over territories. The association of large profits with victimless forms of crime commonly results in the corruption of law enforcement.

Theodore Dalrymple draws on his medical experience as usual, in today’s Wall Street Journal, to debunk opiate addiction.

In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published a short book, “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” The nature of addiction to opiates has been misunderstood ever since.

De Quincey took opiates in the form of laudanum, which was tincture of opium in alcohol. He claimed that special philosophical insights and emotional states were available to opium-eaters, as they were then called, that were not available to abstainers; but he also claimed that the effort to stop taking opium involved a titanic struggle of almost superhuman misery. Thus, those who wanted to know the heights had also to plumb the depths.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted…

Why has the orthodox view swept all before it? First, the literary tradition sustains it: Works that deal with the subject continue to disregard pharmacological reality, from De Quincey and Coleridge through Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley, Bulgakov, Cocteau, Nelson Algren, Burroughs and others. Second, addicts and therapists have a vested interest in the orthodox view. Addicts want to place the responsibility for their plight elsewhere, and the orthodox view is the very raison d’être of the therapists. Finally, as a society, we are always on the lookout for a category of victims upon whom to expend our virtuous, which is to say conspicuous, compassion.

The myth of addiction has a powerful appeal to the human imagination, and is enormously useful in exculpating personal misbehavior. But a society which holds more than a million people in prison for victimless crimes is paying a terrible price in order to cling to its illusions.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Skousen notes that even Galbraith confessed recognizing the greater efficacy of freedom:

Mr. Henderson refers to one example where Galbraith changed his mind (about big business facing risk and competition). I can think of another: Which has helped the average person more—economic growth under free-market capitalism or redistribution of income via progressive taxation and the welfare state? In “The Affluent Society” (pp. 96-97), Galbraith wrote:

“Over the centuries those who have been blessed with wealth have developed many remarkably ingenious and persuasive justifications of their good fortune. The instinct of the liberal is to look at these explanations with a rather unyielding eye. Yet in this case the facts are inescapable. It is the increase in output in recent years, not the redistribution of income, which has brought the greatest material increase, the well-being of the average man. And, however suspiciously, the liberal has come to accept the fact.”

A Yale Senior Society Building

The Wall Street Journal today published a story (based on an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine) featuring just the kinds of themes illustrative of the arrogance and oppression of the ancien regime beloved by the hearts of liberal journalists.

Skull and Bones, the most prestigious of Yale’s senior societies, derives its public name from its use of that emblem, typical of the Freemasonry-inspired imagery adopted unversally by student fraternities founded in the 19th century Romantic era. Memento mori were characteristically exhibited to remind fraternity members that life is fleeting.

Skull and Bones, from the time of its foundation in 1832, has had a policy of deliberately encouraging wild rumors of its own dark secrets, influence, and power in order to enhance its prestige. One of the most popular legends, right up there with tales of guaranteed lifetime incomes, and Skull and Bones’ alleged control of governments and national economies, is the legend of the Bones collection of the skulls of famous individuals, including that of the famous Apache warrior, Geronimo.

The association of skulls with the society’s emblem supposedly makes their aquisition highly desirable to the society, so generations of enterprising and influential Yale men have spent their spare time bribing officials and excavating graveyards by moonlight in order to carry back prizes to be housed in the recesses of its High Street headquarters. The reality seems to be that the senior society does possess a human skull and pair of femurs, purchased as anatomical specimens back in the 19th century, which have been used emblematically since in annual photographs of class delegations.

A skull is a skull is a skull, and nothing has ever prevented dark hints that this particular skull is Geronimo’s, or Pancho Villa’s, or President van Buren’s. And like the legends of subsidized incomes, or the immense swimming pool supposedly in the club’s basement, the wilder the story, the more eagerly it was taken up and repeated as gossip in the college community. Bonesmen smiled behind the closed doors of their impressive clubhouse, as the hints they dropped, and the rumors they spread themselves, blossomed into wide acceptance, inspiring outsiders with awe.

The Geronimo skull legend made the news wires back about a generation ago, and in 1986 the Yale Society offered to return the supposed Geronimo relic to Indian possession, but Indian representatives were not satisfied with the skull they were offered and were unwilling to sign a receipt for its delivery.

Another account.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day—except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

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Stung by the Journal’s criticism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responded in a Letter to the Editor today, denying any partisan bias, by noting that the Times even covers major scandals involving democrats “(Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan)” (!):

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

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If the Times editorial policy is so non-partisan, responsible, and generally sans reproche as all that, I’d be curious to know why Mr. Keller found it necessary to stonewall, and refuse to answer, the timid and polite inquiries by his own pet lapdog “ombudsman” Byrom Calame, who noted that remarkable silence at the beginning of this year.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Holman Jenkins, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday pointed out the differences between models and reality, facts and theory, and the sorts of things its possible to do something about and those which it is not.

As used by the media, “global warming” refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity.

How can a reasonably diligent citizen assess this claim? Measuring average global temperature is not an easy matter. It’s a big planet, with lots of ways and places to take its temperature. Scientists, naturally, have to rely on record keepers in decades past, using different instruments, to produce what has become the conventionally accepted estimate of a one-degree rise over the past century.

But even if a change is measured, how do we know it’s manmade? Giant, mile-thick sheaths of ice have come and gone from North America in recent millennia. In our unstable and evolving planet, temperature is often either rising or falling. Who knows whether a trend is the product of human activity or natural?

The answer is nobody. All we have is hypothesis. Let’s be honest: A diligent and engaged citizen judges these matters based on the perceived credibility of public figures who affiliate themselves with one view or another. Less engaged citizens, whose views are reflected in polls showing a growing public concern about global warming, are simply registering the prevalence of media mentions of global warming.

In both cases, it may be rational to assume there wouldn’t be so much noise about global warming unless responsible individuals had validated the scientific claims. This is a rational assumption, but not necessarily a reliable one. Politicians adopt views that are popular in order to be popular. Scientists subscribe to theories that later are proved to be wrong. There are “belief” processes at work even in the community of climate researchers.

So how else might an intelligent layperson judge the matter?

Well, he could begin by evaluating the claim that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 0.028% to 0.036% without necessarily taking the measurements himself. This finding is so straightforward, it’s reasonable to assume it would have been widely debunked if unreliable.

Next, the claim that this should lead to higher temperatures because of the heat-absorbing qualities of the CO2 molecule. A reasonable person might be tempted to take this finding on faith too, for a different reason: because even ardent believers in global warming accept that this fact alone wouldn’t justify belief in manmade global warming.

That’s because all things are not equal: The climate is a vast, complex and poorly understood system. Scientists must resort to elaborate computer models to address a multiplicity of variables and feedbacks before they can plausibly suggest (choice of verb is deliberate here) that the net effect of increased carbon dioxide is the observed increase in temperature.

By now, a diligent layperson is equipped to doubt any confident assertion that manmade warming is taking place. Models are not the climate, and may not accurately reflect the workings of the climate, especially when claiming to detect changes that are small and hard to differentiate from natural changes.

Note this doesn’t make our conscientious citizen a global warming “denier.” It makes him a person who recognizes that the case isn’t proved and probably can’t be proved with current knowledge.

He’s also entitled to turn his attention now to the nonscientific factors affecting public professions of certainty about manmade global warming.

Nobody doubts, for instance, that when Bill Clinton asserts global warming is the greatest threat to mankind, he’s consulting not the science but a purported “consensus” of scientists. A layman asks himself: What can “consensus” mean if it asserts a judgment nobody is equipped to confidently make?

Likewise, a study that made news worldwide last month purported to show the death of frogs from warming. It did not show the death of frogs from manmade warming—the study contributed zero evidence one way or another on a human role in climate change. You would have thought otherwise from the media reports. Ditto Al Gore, who offers a traveling slide show (now a movie) in which he catalogs possible dire consequences of global warming in non sequitur fashion to persuade audiences that climate change is caused by human activity and would yield to human action.

Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who spent several years observing and interviewing staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, shows in a new paper that even climate modelers themselves, who appreciate better than anyone the limits of their work, nonetheless slip into unwarranted certainty in public. She quotes one: “It is easy to get caught up in it; you start to believe that what happens in your model must be what happens in the real world. And often that is not true.”

All this explains why, inevitably and unfortunately, today’s debate over global warming revolves almost exclusively around the status and motives of spokesmen for opposing viewpoints, rather than the science and its limits. Yet this is a story of progress.

Tony Blair, whose government has been a steady sounder of climate warnings, now says he recognizes the improbability of nations sacrificing their economic growth based on uncertain climate science.

He and many others also recognize that the problems associated with climate change (whether manmade or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms and droughts. Money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.

The irrationality of a tax-subsidy-created insurance system which typically gives you free (or at least low cost) health care when you are employed and prosperous, and which then shifts drastically-increased insurance costs to you as soon as you are out of work, is a nasty problem which perennially provides democrats with talking points and opportunities to try seducing the public into supporting its vision of a government-supplied free lunch.

Miraculously, this country actually had enough intelligence to reject HillaryCare once, but neither Hillary nor socialized medicine schemes are going away anytime soon. Today’s lead Journal editorial identifies the actual problems and points out precisely the correct solutions.

the President wants to fix defects in the market for health care. This is an area where he can do a great deal of good at little cost to the Treasury. And it’s high time. The inefficiencies of the current system are a drag on wage growth that’s being felt now even by the United Auto Workers union. And health care costs may partly explain why many Americans don’t feel as good as they might about the current economic expansion.

Longer term, it’s also increasingly obvious that the U.S. is approaching a tipping point where the reforms needed to preserve an innovative, market-based health system may become politically impossible. That’s because almost half of our health-care dollars are already spent by government. Do nothing and the inevitable growth of Medicare alone will lead us far down the path toward government-rationed health care a la Europe or Canada.

Even the half of our national health-care spending that remains a “private” responsibility bears little resemblance to an efficient market. That’s because the vast majority of Americans with private insurance get it from their employers, a relic of World War II when companies adapted to wage and price controls by offering insurance as a benefit to attract the best employees.

A tax exemption for employer health spending was later codified and will be worth about $126 billion this year. This enormous subsidy has created a system of overgenerous employer-provided plans that give individuals little incentive to pay attention to costs. It’s also unfair to people who aren’t lucky enough to get insurance from their employers, and therefore must pay for it with after-tax dollars.

So the first principle of reform must be to equalize the tax treatment of individually purchased and employer-provided insurance. Health Savings Accounts, which were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, are already a step in the right direction, since they mate a high-deductible insurance policy with a tax-free savings account to help pay pre-deductible expenses. Mr. Bush is usefully going further by asking for the premiums on the HSA insurance policy to be tax-free as well.

Equally important is creating a national market for individual insurance. Right now employers large enough to “self insure” can do so mostly as they see fit. But individuals and small businesses who want to buy insurance are at the mercy of state regulators where they live or operate. In overregulated states like New York and New Jersey, residents can pay 10 times as much for insurance as they would in neighboring states, and might not even be able to buy the high-deductible insurance necessary for an HSA. Individually purchased insurance also isn’t portable across state lines, contributing needless anxiety to normal life decisions like moving or switching jobs.

The Founders put the Commerce Clause in the Constitution precisely so Congress could act against internal restraints on trade such as today’s 50-state insurance market. We hope Mr. Bush endorses and fights for the bill from Representative John Shadegg of Arizona that would let individuals buy insurance from vendors in any state, no matter where they live.

The overall goal here is to move from the inefficiency and insecurity of the employer-dependent system to one where all workers have portable, individually owned insurance. A good analogy is portable 401k retirement plans, which are more appropriate to the mobile nature of the modern economy than traditional pensions. They are also more secure, as the increasing number of defined-benefit pension plans in default (United Airlines) amply demonstrates.

Achieving this won’t be easy, especially given the ideological stake that so many politicians have in a government-run system. They like the leverage of determining payment rates to hospitals and doctors, not to mention being able to take credit with voters for providing more benefits. But there is no free lunch in health care, any more than there is in any other part of the U.S. economy.

Health care is either going to be allocated by prices or by government, which in the latter case means price controls and waiting lines. Though it represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is the one industry in which the purchasers actually have no idea what anything costs. An individual market for health insurance would allow more freedom of choice while making consumers more cost conscious.

Market-based health-care reform could be a big political winner for Mr. Bush and the GOP. Americans have shown themselves averse to rationing via brute force, both in their rejection of HillaryCare and in the backlash against HMOs. And while the opponents have skillfully played on fears, consumer-driven plans—which let individuals “ration” care for themselves—have proven popular when they’ve been offered. Just last week the insurance industry announced that enrollment in HSAs had tripled in 10 months to three million people.

That’s a small part of the entire market, but an important start. Policy inertia on health care will inevitably lead to more government and Canadian or British-style waiting lists. But there’s still a chance to change course. Republicans in Congress should join Mr. Bush in seizing it.