Move to the suburbs, live longer . . .

. . . is the web site head, but hard-copy afficionados find “Does where you live affect how long you live?”   Either way, the story has a lot to live down for the half-way alert reader.  The lede is no help: Jim Ritter has “Harvard researchers . . . reporting huge and growing gaps in life expectancies throughout the United States.  “Asian-American females in Bergen County, N.J.” and “Native American males in six South Dakota counties” are the long and short of it.  Are we supposed to think that all things being equal, Bergen County  is more salubrious than S. Dakota’s Six?
 
Counties “start the best” and “just keep getting better,” says one of the Harvard-ites.  What is a county anyway?  Have you ever met one?  Ah, but in the 6th graf, we find males and females — you’ve met them, I’m sure — average 72 in expectancy in Cook County (males), which once was considered pretty good, even by some of us who by that measure are on borrowed time.  Heck, it’s been borrowed since Day One: This night do they require thy soul of thee, said God in Luke, calling the man a fool who didn’t know that, and if God thinks he’s a fool, so do I. 
 
But 72 and a few months is lowest in Chi area, DuPage County females are tops at 81.5.  Move that sick guy to DuPage and give him an operation: it will add years.  How can we not do that?  Finally, in the 8th graf (of 13), we get to some sort of honest to God cause and effect:
Life expectancy gaps are due in large part to varying death rates [ah-hah] in young and middle-age adults from cancer and chronic diseases of the heart, lungs and liver, [researcher] Murray said.
 
The disparities are due in part to inequitable health care. For example, 47 million people in the United States — nearly 16 percent — don’t have health insurance.  [Moving to DuPage or Bergen won’t get you more, I don’t think.  You have to buy it.]
 
But the main reasons for the gaps are related to risk factors for premature death. In order of importance, these risk factors are smoking, alcohol abuse, obesity, high blood pressure, cholesterol, low fruit and vegetable consumption and physical inactivity, Murray said.
Wait a minute.  If I live in Cook but don’t smoke or drink or get fat or have high b.p and cholesterol and eat lots of fruit and vegetables and exercise a lot, I might live as long as the woman of whatever ethnicity in Wheaton or the Asian woman in Bergen?  Very good.  I feel better already.
 
As for Native Americans, it’s not South Dakota that’s the problem, but “diabetes and alcohol-related deaths from traffic accidents and cirrhosis of the liver [that] account for much of the low life expectancies” among them.  This is good news for Native American men in the Six Counties who do not have to move to increase their expectancies.
 
O.K., enough already.  You get my sarcastic point.  Won’t matter anyhow, because the story had to be sold, and to announce as news that if you live right, you live longer would merit no headline at all, because it wouldn’t be news at all, which may be news to Harvard researchers plugging away at their task but should not be to S-T editors and headline writers.  Did I say it’s on page three, by the way, or that “Move to the suburbs, live longer” is a page one reefer head?  I didn’t?  Well now I did.

Case of the shocked mugger

S-T ran an AP story the other day about a 57-year-old wheelchair-rider in Harlem who nailed the aggressor.  Wondering how often handgun ownership leads to such an admirable conclusion, vs. the times we read more about when guns shoot people by accident, I found a blog that keeps track of self-defending use, “Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog: Where Clayton Cramer and Pete Drum keep track of civilians using guns in self-defense.”  In it I found another version of the Harlem self-defense story from Newsday that has the woman on a “motorized scooter” and offers considerably more detail than S-T/AP had:
Margaret Johnson, a 57-year-old licensed gun owner, was looking to fire her weapon, but it was supposed to be at a firing range, police said.

She left her home with plans to go to the range. Instead, she was confronted from behind by Deron Johnson, no relation, police said.

 
……………………..
 
The suspect [perp?] has nine previous arrests, police said. State records show he served eight years in prison for a drug conviction and was released in February 2003.
One of life’s losers ran athwart one of its winners.

Barzun to Bagehot to Butler

“It is absolutely the whole business of a moral agent to conform” oneself to “conscience,” i.e., to act in accordance with “the constitution of man,” says 18th-century Christianity defender Bishop Joseph Butler, per Walter Bagehot in one of his many magazine reviews in mid-19th century, contained in his Collected Works.  Bagehot (say “badge-it”) has been a wonderful find for me, for which I’m indebted to the also-wonderful French-American scholar Jacques Barzun, who held forth at Columbia U. for many years and wrote From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, published in 2000.  Barzun is still alive and receiving awards at 98!  He once observed, “He who wants to understand America better learn baseball.”  Understanding the White Sox is another matter.

Minimum Wage Socialism

Cato has the big-box business down nicely here.  As soon as you have government setting wages, you have that old-time socialism, (though only) part-ownership of means of production.  That is, he who decides wages is making an owner’s decision.  It goes for big stores in Chi — thank you, Mayordaley II — and for big and little ones throughout the land.

Morning after

The morning-after pill case can keep rolling.  Springfield-based U.S. Judge Jeanne Scott refused to throw it out, per an AP story, “Federal Judge Rejects Dismissal,” etc. that Chi Trib helpfully has on its web site but that appears not to have run in hard copy.  That’s a pity, since it’s a hot issue in some circles.

In the suit seven pharmacists challenge Gov Blago’s edict that they have to sell the pill, to which they object on religious grounds, claiming violation of religious freedom.  Five of the seven lost their jobs at Walgreen stores when they refused to sign a promise to sell it.

The opinion’s a 28–pager.  The state defendants said the ruling had nothing to do with religious belief but was solely to provide contraception to all.

Library speaker 9/9/06 part of big Muslim doings

OP’s Committee for Just Peace in Palestine speaker asked if Zionism is racism, compared Israel-Palestine today to apartheid-era South Africa — “It’s much worse,” he said.  He’s Farid Esack, a Muslim theologian and author of Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression; On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today; and An Introduction to the Qur’an.

He had spoken two days earlier at Dominican U. ($10 a head) in a “dialogue series.”  DU says he’s been active in “the Call of Islam,” which as a message is said by the Muslim American Society to include this:

The Muslim regards himself as commanded by God to call all humans to a life of submission to Him, to Islam as a present participial act (42:15). His life goal is that of bringing the whole of humankind to a life in which Islam, the religion of God, with its theology and Shari’a, its ethics and institutions, is the religion of all humans.

He’s currently at Harvard Divinity, having just done a three–year stint at Xavier U., Cincinnati (where this blogger taught briefly in the late 60s).  Coming up at Dominican is a lecture 9/21 on “theological challenges and opportunities of Muslim-Catholic dialogue,” a lecture 10/30 on “Transforming the Self [sic], Transforming Society” an open meeting 11/8 of Chicago-based “Catholic-Muslim Dialogue.”

To Esack’s credit, he does not turn up in search of the Anti-CAIR or Front Page web sites, each of which has sensitive antennae when it comes to Islamism.  He does turn up in an Amazon-posted rave review of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, by Omid Safi, to which he contributed “an essay that takes the document ‘Progressive Islam – A Definition and Declaration’ as its point of departure.” In the essay he

is very critical of the views expressed by many liberal Muslims, whom he accuses of suffering from the same myopia as their fundamentalist adversaries: presenting themselves as ‘authentic’ interpreters of Islam and canonizing certain statements in the sacred scriptures without regard for the context. He is equally dismayed by liberal Muslims’ failure to challenge that other form of fundamentalism: that US interests represent the axis around which the earth rotates. [Italics added]

Uh-oh.

Old dogs learn poorly

The Instapundit man, Glenn Reynolds, and Twin Cities’ James Lilek both note that if Clinton et al. reacted poorly to Islamic threat, so did most people; so give them slack.  What’s happened since 9/11 is what separates men and women from boys and girls is this line of reasoning.  But, says Power Line,

there is a huge problem with this magnanimous approach. The Democrats are, today, trying to dismantle our efforts to fight the terrorists. They are trying to block the NSA from intercepting terrorists’ communications; they are trying to force our armed forces to treat captured terrorists with the same deference they would accord to a member of our own services; and they are trying to block the confirmation of John Bolton as U.N Ambassador so that he can be replaced with someone who will offer meaningless platitudes instead of aggressive advocacy of American interests.

What the Democrats are trying to do is return to the hunker-down and hope for the best days of the Clinton administration. They are trying to sell the American people on the absurd proposition that the terrorist threat we face today is mostly George Bush’s fault, and that if we only abandon his tough approach to national security, everything will be fine.

That is why I think it is critically important that the American people not be deceived about how we got to the pass we arrived at on September 11, 2001; and that is why, I think, the Democrats are so hysterical about The Path to 9/11.

They give every appearance, in other words, of being up to their old tricks.