Les Chambers said:
By whatever measure you choose, infant mortality rates, drug dependency, life span, education levels,whatever standard you use, Europe beats the U.S. hands down.
Not so fast. Almost every statement here, while "common knowledge", is false.
American infant mortality is actually superior to any on earth; it's all in how statistics are collected. As we obstetricians all know, our CDC reports a neonatal mortality as any live born who dies within 30 days, and an infant mortality as any liveborn who dies within a year, regardless of birth weight or gestational age. Most of the world considers mortality only within 7-10 days and has lower limits on the birthweight, which our reporting does not. We report a 22 week, non viable fetus which breathes once and cannot live as a neonatal death; England would call it a spontaneous abortion.
The vast bulk of infant mortality is due to complications of prematurity. Most prematurity, drug dependence, and reduced life span in America occurs in populations that have been removed from the free market by government subsidies and payments. Middle-class wage-earning moms rarely have cocaine addiction, nor do they often deliver at 25 weeks.
The life span in industrialized nations is subject to similar statistical legerdomain, although I do not have the data in front of me now to make the argument persuasively.
The nation with the highest degree of education is...Israel, which has more college degrees per capita than any other. Second is...the USA, where a college degree has become de rigeur for many occupations that do not seem to require one; perhaps we are over educated.
Having said all of this, I am very puzzled as to why no one realizes that the current gas crisis is economic warfare. There is no reason for a barel of oil to cost $140 or even $75; it is all opportunism. The current situation is the reverse of what Reagan and King Faisal did to the Russians in 1982-88 by artificially lowering natural gas prices, thus depriving the USSR of something like 60% of their import revenue and driving that nation to bankruptcy. Middle Eastern nations, Marxist Venezuela and our own stupid speculators are now working together to keep money pouring from our nations to theirs. We, the infidel west, are now being warred upon and slowly defeated by strictly economic methods without even realizing it.
I certainly don't want to see my kids come to adulthood in an oil-dependent world.
Robert Howe, MD.
Fellow, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
