| Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit Unless you are a lawyer -- or the windiest of all Shakespeare characters who delivered this bit of wisdom. Lawyers file what they call "briefs," supposedly concise statements of the issues, facts, laws and arguments as they would have a judge see them, avoiding what Lord Polonius did not, "tediousness" and "flourishes." Judges have had enough of the unbriefs put before them and want the word-count limit on briefs changed from 14,000 to what The Wall Street Journal calls "a svelte 12,500." Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals says he gets "numb" reading the tomes set before him. I once watched a lawyer argue before that distinguished jurist, opening with "I have seven points." Asked which would be the most important, he replied "All," and held to that position despite repeated requests from Judge Silberman to select one or two that were most central to his argument. He lost. Lawyers are having none of this drive for concision, which they say will come at the expense of their clients, reflecting a surprising concern for their clients' expense, if I may be permitted a pun. Or of any drive to shorten proceedings. In New York, a state that requires judges to approve mortgage foreclosures, some cases have dragged on for so long that the borrower remains in the house despite missing five years of payments. That, some lawyers are arguing, means that the statute of limitations has been exceeded, meaning payments are no longer due and foreclosure is impossible. Justice delayed is justice achieved, say lawyers for strapped homeowners. -- qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent So Seneca is thought to have advised, picked up by Ben Franklin as "He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas." Neither the Roman stoic nor the Founding Father were addressing their warnings to businessmen who seek shelter under the wings of a friendly regulator, but it might be a good idea for businessmen lying down with their regulators to keep that warning in mind. Beset by competition with Vietnamese and Chinese catfish producers, American producers persuaded Congress to move regulation of those foreigners from a rather relaxed Food and Drug Administration to what The New York Times calls "a more rigorous program at the Department of Agriculture." Which obliged, but with a set of regulations that apply to domestic as well as foreign producers, and are so detailed and onerous that the cost of compliance seems likely to drive many American firms out of business. Not to mention costly for taxpayers: the FDA inspection regime cost $700,000 per year, the new -- get this -- Office of Catfish Inspection at the Department of Agriculture has already spent $2 million and is barely up and running. "I don't think they had a clue,"a former FDA administrator told the NYT; "This is the quintessential example of be careful what you ask for," added a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute. Or just with which sorts of folks you choose to lie down. As Netflix discovered to its pain. That bane of the cable industry and dearly beloved of the "cord cutters" who want to see cable companies and their bundles of unwanted but expensive offerings consigned to the dustbin of history thought it would be a good idea to have the Federal Communications Commission regulate the cable industry as if it were an old-time telephone company. So it supported what has come to be called Obamanet, the rules issued by the supposedly independent FCC at the behest of the President. To the applause, says National Journal, of "web activists and liberals." According to Gordon Crovitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Netflix now has "lobbyist's remorse" as it finds itself ensnared in detailed regulations that are not those it envisioned, and run contrary to important parts of its business model. Perhaps the brass at Netflix forgot that the company's VP for corporate communications once said in a different context, "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers." Ah well, qui cum canibus .... -- Diet, Exercise, The Body Beautiful And Eternal Life The first two presumably guarantee the third and, some seem to believe, the fourth, or at least closer to it. So we are invited to eschew fast food to make our bodies more beautiful by making them less obese. And not only voluntarily. In 2008, Los Angeles banned new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square mile area of South Los Angeles while continuing to allow new McDonald's et al. in, how shall we say it, white sections of town. The theory was that preventing fast food stores from opening would clear the way for purveyors of what regulators deem healthy food to enter the area. The result, according to a Rand Corporation study: Obesity rates in South LA increased faster than in elsewhere in the city, rising from 63% of the population before the ban to 75% by 2011. The ban "had no meaningful effect," reported Rand economist Roland Sturm. "We never said this ordinance would be a silver bullet," said Gwen Flynn of the Community Health Councils. But the health police continue to roam: a school district in Chicago has banned brown bag lunches from home in favor of "healthier" cafeteria meals. And Michelle Obama has her own ideas about what other parents' children should eat at school, but that's for another Gleanings. And the news from the you-are-what-you-eat front is all good. Patrick Holford and Jerome Burns, in their "10 Secrets of Healthy Ageing", cite Professor Martha Morris, ScD, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's medical center in Chicago, as having reported that eating fish once a week reduces the risk of Alzheimer's for patients over 65 by 60%", presumably leaving the remaining 40% to be disposed of by Holford and Burns' other nine secrets. Best of all, we have a new diet, the Mediterranean Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, or MIND (get it?). It can halve the risk of Alzheimer's "even if not meticulously followed," says Dr. Morris, who also notes somewhat more cautiously in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "... study findings have not shown consistent evidence for one dietary factor." Still, we have MIND. Lots of vegetables, berries, and nuts, among other healthy foods, will reduce the risk of lost marbles. Winston Churchill, who lived until the ripe old age of 90 -- and he left us in the hands of lesser politicians 50 years ago, long before we had the benefit of research that would have denied him his roast beef, cigars and whiskey -- would not have signed on. "Almost all the food faddists I have ever known," said the greatest man of the 20th century (and a bit of the 19th), "nut-eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay." If diet is not the answer to a svelte, beautiful body and long life, perhaps exercise is. Or isn't, given the number of people who show up for rehab after testing the limits of their tendons, muscles, hips, knees and other parts incapable of meeting the demands placed on them. So perhaps avoid the dangers of the gym and select something new -- jumping up and down on trampolines at one of the new centers being built by a chain called Altitude. Each center will house about 150 trampolines, linked together so that customers can bounce from one to another reports The Sunday Times (London). And if that doesn't produce the sought-after body beautiful there's always the medical route. No, not plastic surgery. That's so yesterday, witness the closing of Lifestyle Lift, a 77-doctor chain of some 50 cosmetic surgery centers that spent $1 million per week on ads, one of which asked, "Do you wish you can look as young on the outside as you feel on the inside?", to which this writer's response is "Certainly not." Yes, some 128,266 face lifts were performed in the U.S. last year according to The Wall Street Journal, but that's a small part of the 15.6 million total "cosmetic procedures". The rest were "minimally invasive", such as Botox and chemical peels. By their frozen smiles shall ye know them. -- It's Hard To Be A Jew That's what my father impressed on me, even though in my old neighborhood during World War Two, when our Italian neighbors took to wearing brown shirts and all dinner talk centered on the plight of European relatives, I didn't need much impressing by him. That was then, this is now, and the threats to a Jewish way of life, while substantial, are not in a league with earlier dangers. At least here in the U.S. But two emerge. The first is a cloud no larger than a man's hand, but ominous as a closed fist. The estimable Jon Stewart, of "The Daily Show" fame, has been replaced by one Trevor Noah, a South African who includes in his repertoire jokes with an arguably anti-Semitic and certainly anti-Israel tint. The good old New York Times characterizes those attempts at humor this way (emphasis added), "As with many comedians, Mr. Noah's jokes can test the boundaries of what is permissible and what is in bad taste." Just one of your garden-variety comedians, given to anti-Semitism, which is merely in bad taste, rather than historically lethal. The problem, pointed out Jamie Weinstein, a senior editor of The Daily Caller, to NYT reporter Dave Itzkoff, is that "Many young people don't watch 'The Daily Show' just to laugh -- the watch the show to get their news. The show shapes perceptions," already being shaped by the anti-Israel academics who predominate in our universities. Which is why Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, hopes Noah "will not cross the line from legitimate satire into offensiveness with jokes calling up anti-Semitic stereotypes and misogyny ... [and that] Comedy Central will make a serious effort to ensure that 'The Daily Show' remains funny and irreverent without trafficking in bigoted jokes at the expense of Jews, other minorities and women." A less clear and present danger to Jewish life comes from the free market, of all places. The price of pastrami sandwiches has risen from $9.95 to $12.95, reports Jim Dwyer in the Old Gray Lady. And that's in the Bronx, where delis can't command the top dollar that Manhattan delis can charge. It seems that droughts and other anti-Jewish disasters have driven up the price of brisket, from which pastrami is made. If the price of Dr. Brown's cream and (kosher) Cel-ray sodas follow suit, Jews, including those who get their Dr. Brown's drinks from the ecumenical Kosher Cajun Deli in Metairie, Louisiana, might just have to consider something healthier, like tuna fish sandwiches. After all, serious students of consumer behavior know that the only way to induce real, durable change in eating habits is to deploy the price system, which can force eaters to select substitutes to replace current favorites. Hence the drive to replicate the success in reducing smoking by driving up tax-inclusive prices by imposing "fat taxes", which would hit corned beef every bit as hard as pastrami, leaving no alternative except, perhaps, the above-described MIND diet. Or we could go the regulatory route. A portion of all national brisket production could be allocated to makers of pastrami and another to corned-beef makers. With permission for the two to trade permits to acquire brisket between them, as demand fluctuates, but not to trade permits with barbecuers and other less deserving users of brisket. All to be enforced by a new Eat Pastrami Agency, probably set in the Department of Agriculture down the corridor from the Office of Catfish Inspection.
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