The Bethie Bee

Like many who have tried to buy sinus medicine containing decongestants recently, I was made to feel like a criminal when buying my (over-the-counter) Claritin-D. As a person with recurring sinus trouble, I know that all products containing pseudoephedrine have been behind the counter at most drug stores for months now, supposedly to curb the meth epidemic. However the interrogation I went through today was new.

First I had to go to the pharmacy counter (an inconvenience) and wait in line to buy something that is 100% legal, and used to be available without going to the counter. Then, I needed to show my drivers license for them to enter my drivers license number into their database. Since I had prescriptions filled at that pharmacy in the past, they already had my information stored, but fif they didn’t already have that information, I would have to give them “all of my information.”

The Combat Meth Act, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Jim Talent, R-Mo., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., went into effect Saturday. Customers looking for medications like Sudafed and Nyquil now will be limited to about 120 pills a day and 300 per month.

“The important thing legitimate consumers need to remember is that they will still have access to the medicine they need, but the meth cooks won’t be able to stock up,” Mr. Talent said in a statement.

(Read the full article here)

Look, normal people like me who don’t have Meth labs in our basements, but just need pseudoephedrine to be able to breathe through our noses, may still be able to get all the medicine we need. But, we shouldn’t be made to feel like criminals when buying our medicine.

Whether drugs should even be illegal is a question for another time, but law abiding citizens shouldn’t be left to feel like criminals, just because some people are making a legal product into an illegal drug.

I remember hearing a similar theory a few years ago when I was in college, and found it interesting to read about it again, in the current edition of WORLD Magazine. In his column entitled “The New Baby Boom”, Joel Belz discusses Phillip Longman’s population trend theories.

Twice now in the last two years, demographics and population expert Phillip Longman has played the part of an intellectual bomb-thrower. But if he didn’t get the full attention of thoughtful Christians with his first missile, his latest should focus our thinking for sure.

Mr. Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. He writes from neither an evangelical Christian nor a socially conservative point of view.

The first time he “played the part of an intellectual bomb-thrower” was two years ago when,

Mr. Longman argued in an article in Foreign Affairs that most experts, and most of the media elite, were getting a very important issue wrong. “Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe,” he summarized. “In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and the birth rates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries; the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it’s too late.”

Mr. Longman’s journal article was a summary of his 2004 book, The Empty Cradle: Freedom and Fertility in an Aging World. In it, he argued that the rate of population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the 1960s, and that the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today’s children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, he said, “predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract.”

Even by 2045, Mr. Longman points out, UN projections suggest that the world’s fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.

Now, Longman is discussing some of the possible implications of his theory.

In an article in the newest issue of Foreign Policy, he suggests that leaving ideology aside and focusing only on demographics, conservatives are destined to inherit the earth.

He explains further,

The statistics simply don’t lie. Mr. Longman says that “nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children”—and that such a proportion is nearly twice what it was a generation earlier. This “greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy.” The children they might have influenced, Mr. Longman says candidly, were never born.

Even “single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population.” Mr. Longman doesn’t seem to explore the impact of abortion on the demographic pattern.

Conservatives, meanwhile—typically including lots of evangelical Christians—have gone right on having babies. In doing so, they may be profoundly increasing their influence in the world at large. Nor is this impact just a fuzzy researcher’s theory. Fertility rates in the states carried in 2004 by George W. Bush are 11 percent higher, Mr. Longman says, than in states won by John Kerry. In other words, conservative dominance might be expected to continue to grow where a majority has already been established, while what he calls “progressive” political influence will probably shrink.

Overall, the Longman theory points to the “emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation.”

Something to think about…

Today is that time-honored feminist tradition of Equal Pay Day. As Carrie Lukas notes in The Feminist Complaint Festival onTownhall.com, today marks the beginning of the feminist whining season.

the real feminist complaint festival begins on Tuesday April 25th. To feminists, it’s Equal Pay Day, a pseudo-holiday when National Organization for Women and National Council of Women’s Organizations lament the disparity between men’s and women’s wages. Feminists groups claim that the first four months of the year were spent making up for last year’s gap. On April 25, women have finally earned as much as men in 2005.

Too bad the whole thing is based on a false premise. As Lukas explains,

Department of Labor data confirms that the median wage of a full-time working woman is three-quarters of that of a full-time working man, but like too many statistics, this fact ignores more than it reveals. This data doesn’t account for relevant factors such as occupation, experience and educational attainment.

Feminists may not like it, but the evidence shows that women’s choices—not discrimination—cause wage gap. Warren Farrell — a former board member of the National Organization for Women’s New York chapter — identifies 25 decisions that individuals make when choosing jobs in his book, Why Men Earn More. Women, he finds, are much more likely to make decisions that increase their quality of life, but decrease their pay.

Most people understand that many women often take time out of the workforce to care for family members, particularly young children. Even women who work full-time log fewer hours in the office on average than full-time working men. It is common sense that a worker who remains employed continually is going to make more than someone who drops out of the workforce for several years.

Working less is just one of the decisions women make that results in less take-home pay. Women also avoid dangerous jobs (more than nine in ten occupational deaths occur among men) and jobs that place them outdoors in the elements. Women are less willing than men to move for a job or travel frequently. Dr. Farrell’s book provides a roadmap for how individual women can increase their earnings, by making different choices, including working more hours in the office, assuming more risks or relocating for a job.

So before you go demanding a raise, remember that it is usually the choices women make, not an evil system that causes women to earn less on average than men.

Like most other American women, I’ll admit that I have a few knock-off designer purses. However, at the risk of sounding like a hippocrite, I’m going to write this anyway…

As a recent article from The Economist, entitled “Handbags at Dawn” explains,

court action brought in China by Louis Vuitton, a French luxury-goods firm, against Carrefour, a French retailer, highlights the continuing battle against intellectual property violation in China and elsewhere. News emerged on April 20th that Carrefour would have to pay 3m yuan ($375,000) to Louis Vuitton. That sum would only buy you an armful of luxury accessories, but it shows that China’s courts may be beginning to take the problem seriously.

I visited China about a year ago, and can tell you that the conterfeiting problem in China goes beyond handbags…one company I visited makes icing for cakes (a rather new phenomenon in China), and even they were feeling the effects of the lack of respect for intellectual property rights. Yes, in China they are counterfeiting icing…selling an inferior product in this company’s packaging.

As the article explains,

Not only do clothes, accessories, CDs and blockbuster movies fall victim to the counterfeiters’ art, but goods such as drugs, computer software, training shoes, golf clubs, cigarettes and even chewing gum are prey to fakers.

Hu Jintao, China’s president, acknowledged the severity of the problem during his current visit to America by dropping in on Bill Gates of Microsoft. Mr Hu said he was a “friend” of Microsoft and reportedly promised intensified action against software pirates in his country.

This is definitely a story to keep abreast of, not only will it have a great impact on a variety of industries suffering from Chinese counterfeiters, we can only hope that this may also reflect changes in the Chinese government.

What a fabulous real-life illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

As Marc Vander Maas reported on the Acton Institute PowerBlog:

A report from the road: I’m in Colorado Springs this week, and I noticed this note taped to the wall of the bathroom in my spartan lodgings at the local Ramada Inn:
Due to restrictions made by the City of Colorado Springs, the toilets have reduced water pressure and may not flush as well as you are accustomed to. In order to prevent the toilet from stopping up, please flush the toilet as frequently as possible while using it. Thank you!

Now I may be wrong here, but I think it’s safe to assume that the City of Colorado Springs was attempting to conserve water resources by putting these restrictions in place. The practical result of their action seems to have been to cause a local hotel to actively encourage greater water use.

Seriously, how stupid can people be? If a strange man came knocking on your door offering a free breast exam–would you let him in?

A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams, and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said on Thursday.

Apparently, one of the women became suspicious when

the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said

Gee, was that your first clue?

I know, this guy is obviously a sicko, and I really shouldn’t laugh but I just can’t help it…

I know…everytime I do this, I promise no more celebrity gossip. But then, some idiot celebrity manages to do something even even more stupid. This time (surprise surprise) it’s Britney Spears. A while back, I commented on Britney’s being caught driving with her baby on her lap (something she called a “mistake”) and was given a pass. But this time, something really needs to be done…as an article on Mirror.co.uk reports,

Six-month-old Sean smashed his head falling to the ground from his high chair. His injury emerged when Britney, 24, took him to a doctor six days later after he became groggy and tearful.

Suspicious medical officials filed a complaint to the Los Angeles child welfare department and the couple were questioned by investigators who were escorted by police.

Britney and husband Kevin Federline, 28, have been accused of poor parenting before. If found guilty of ill treatment or neglect they could receive a warning - or even lose their baby.

As if this kid wasn’t going to be emotionally messed up enough having these clowns for parents, now he needs to deal with physical injuries as well? I wonder how Britney’s going to manage to blame the paparazzi for this one.

I’ll admit that I laughed out loud when I saw a link to this story on MattMargolis.com

In a tale reminiscent of the last Wallace and Gromit movie, furious villagers in northeast England have hired armed guards to protect their beloved communal vegetable gardens from a suspected monster rabbit.

Leeks, Japanese onions, parsnips and spring carrots have all been ripped up and devoured by the mystery were-rabbit — prompting the 12 allotment holders in Felton, north of Newcastle, to hire two marksmen with air rifles and orders to shoot to kill.