But then the media got involved.  Reports the Daily Mail:

However late yesterday, following media interest in Mrs Simpson’s plight, the PCT backed down and agreed to fund her treatment.

Medical director Dr David Geddes apologised to Mrs Simpson for the “distress” caused by the delay.

He said: “We have reviewed the case in the light of the additional clinical information and national guidance and, as Mrs Simpson fits the clinical criteria, we have agreed funding for her treatment.”

“All decisions are taken on individual clinical needs; we do not discriminate on the grounds of age.

“Our procedures exist to ensure fair decision-making, based on clinical evidence, for all our patients.”

 Of course.  Just an innocent mistake.

Remind me again why we should nationalize health care in America …

Japan’s largest corn processor have started buying PMB corn for human consumption, although Japan have permitted PMBs for animal feed.

63,000 tons of PMB corn arrived in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday last week and officials said that they couldn’t get hold of enough non-PMB corn because the European’s are sweeping the small supply that exists off the market.

The trouble with getting hold of non-PMB crops has hurt inside Europe too, a corner stone factory that processed food oils in my hometown in Norway shut down in 2005, and EU official’s thinks that the rice in food prices might sway the European political opposition against PMBs, we can only hope and see…

My buddy Richard North, author and former food safety inspector blogged about the EU ban on US poultry imports recently, when EU promised to deliver a “progress report” on their efforts to lift the import ban.

According to North, the EU banned US poultry imports because US poultry farmers wash the poultry in a disinfectant to eliminate pathogens such as e. coli and such. This is not allowed in the EU, so they stopped importing poultry from the US. EU’s version of the FDA has said this practice is not only safe, but desirable. EU bureaucrats however, know how angry EU poultry farmers will be if the ban is lifted, so they are dragging their feet, just like they do in every other case of import bans on agricultural products.

North says if it comes down to the safety of EU consumers and the coddling of EU food producers, EU will choose coddling any day. Gods forbid that the benevolent government should protect the consumers they repeatedly claim they protect!

-And the answer to the question in the headline? I don’t know, cause the EU has yet to lift an import ban of importance…

The problem with our political class today is that they build these amazing projects to help poor people, organizations like the UN, the Worldbank, and countless NGO’s create these projects that supposedly will help the people with the fewest options in the world. They are spending millions and millions of dollars and failing miserably.

The Grameen Foundation, with their micro loans and micro utility systems has understood that wealth is created at the individual level. If you help people get credit, so they can do the investments needed to expand their livelihood, their lives will change. Grameen got the Nobel Prize in 2007 for this insight.

Someone else who has understood this is a guy named Paul Polak. After years of being a psychologist, he found that alleviating financial troubles had a profound effect on alleviating their mental illnesses. A trip to Bangladesh inspired him to start up International Development Enterprises, a non-profit that helps adapt modern farming technologies to small rural farms and helps build micro economies and local markets.

In the last 25 years, Paul Polak has helped individuals in the poorest rural communities around the world increase their income by $200 million. No government-to-government program can claim such a success. Polak wrote about his work and his method in a book called Out of Poverty, that was published recently, and you can also learn more about his work by listening to the NPR interview with him.

Of course, as Doug Bandow noted earlier today, eating animals can also save endangered species by giving people an incentive to harvest them rather than destroying their habitat or exterminating them.  People owning animals helps ensure their survival, too: that’s part of why there are a heck of a lot more chickens than passenger pigeons (a now extinct species which were once as numerous in America as chickens are today), and far more cattle than buffalo.

Eating locally, touted as good for the environment, often isn’t: one study found it was better for the environment for English people to eat lamb that was imported from New Zealand rather than raised in England.  And culinary prejudices often keep people from eating local foods that truly do tax the environment less, like cicadas, which are very tasty when microwaved for just a short time, but which few people eat despite the fact that they can easily be collected in large quantities when they periodically emerge from the earth.  (In the Washington, D.C. suburbs, they come out in huge numbers once every 17 years).

A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” 

In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing.  Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”

By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment.  Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit.  But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.

Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA).  Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds.  And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies.  So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one.  That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.