Dear Reader,

I know what you’re thinking: “If I hide the body here, will anyone be able to find it before the monsoon season?”

Oh, wait. That’s not you. That’s somebody else altogether. Sorry.

Anyway, perhaps what you’re saying is: You know what’s been missing from the G-File? Long and extensive discussion of buggery. Well, I’d get your back on that except, alas, Will Saletan has got that beat covered, and I can’t possibly compete with his penetrating insights and in-depth coverage. (“Talk about new lows in muckraking!” – The Couch.)

But if you’ve been saying “What the G-File needs is more demography!” then this is your lucky day. No, wait! Before you blow your brains out in anticipatory boredom: My aim is not to Saletanize you with numbers for their own sake.

A new report was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week. It provides the best proof to date of the Hispanic Paradox – which until this morning I had never heard of either, and would have guessed had something to do with how Latinos are incapable of tampering with the space-time continuum in Star Trek. But it turns out that, despite the fact that American Hispanics are poorer and more obese and disproportionately lack access to health care compared with whites and blacks, they nonetheless live longer.

According to the AP, “A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months. Life expectancy for a white person is about 78, and just shy of 73 for a black person.”

But wait a second. According to just about everybody who supported Obamacare, one of the main reasons we desperately needed to Saletanize the economy and our personal liberties was to improve life expectancy. Heck, Michael Bloomberg once said on Meet the Press that the very purpose of government is to extend life expectancy. If only the Founders knew that, they would have ditched the Federalist Papers and written a manual on how to put everyone on a respirator.

One of the beauties of the G-File is that I don’t have to run through all the quotes from Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid – not to mention Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and the whole gang – about how central improving life expectancy was to the whole rationale for Obamacare. You can just take my word for it.

And yet it turns out that one of the populations most obviously in “need” of socialized medicine, according to the Democrats – Hispanics – is already outliving people with greater access to health care. To quote Ralph Wiggum, that’s unpossible!

Except it’s entirely natural. No, I don’t know why Hispanics have better life expectancy than whites. I could offer some guesses about diet, family life, the benefits of physical labor, or simply genetics, but they would all be guesses. (One theory mentioned in one of the stories is that Hispanic immigrants tend to be disproportionately healthy compared with their home populations.) The simple fact is life expectancy varies for a lot of reasons, and access to health care is at best one factor among many. In fact, some estimate that if you simply exclude the Americans who die from car crashes and homicide, America has the best life expectancy in the West.

Back when the Obamacare debate was still raging, Britain’s life expectancy was 79.4 years, America’s was 78.2 and Cuba’s 78.3. Cuba and Britain have socialized medicine, America not so much. Does anyone think these tiny discrepancies will be solved by the individual mandate and the ability to keep kids on their parents’ plans until they’re 26? Is it worth trillions to move that number ever-so-slightly? Meanwhile, Asian-American women have a life expectancy of 87 years (in Bergen County, N.J., it’s 91 years – again, for Asian-American women). In fact, Asian-American women live three years longer than women in Japan – the country with the best life expectancy. At the same time, Indians in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy, even though they’ve had access to the Indian Health Service for decades.

By all means, investigate the Hispanic Paradox, but don’t call it a paradox. It’s just another one of the many fascinating faces of human diversity.

Tom Lowers His Sights

America’s most influential booster of tyranny has finally stopped celebrating the genius and enlightenment of the authoritarian Chinese. This week, he’s celebrating the enlightened authoritarianism of Singapore!

I should say in fairness that I’m not entirely unsympathetic to his basic position, at least in this regard: I’d rather Congress spend a bunch of money on basic research than spend nearly $200 million on signs that say “This boondoggle brought to you by the stimulus.” I’m paraphrasing.

Commentary Rises

I know I’ve said it before, but I really love cheese curds. But that’s not important right now. If you haven’t been paying attention, Commentary is rapidly becoming a really great magazine (again). I don’t want to overly disparage the pre-John Podhoretz days, because it had some great stuff back then, too. But it was, on the whole, easily ignored in the magazine pile. That’s really changing, and fast, since J-Pod took over. To the dismay of no small number of naysayers, he’s turned Commentary into one of those magazines you’re excited to see in the mail again. Sort of like Juggs, but with more stuff about Israel.

One of the secrets of successful magazines is that you always need one must-read article (more than one is better, but you need one to get the reader engaged). That’s what made Tina Brown’s New Yorker so good, and Michael Kelly’s New Republic and Atlantic great. John seems to understand that, too. Which is why he’s lucked out with Andy Ferguson’s Pressman column, which has rapidly become essential reading every month.

Great Moments in Typo History

Some of us remember from the Electric Company’s Letterman how important a single letter can be.

But in case you whippersnappers needed reminding, Debby passed this along:

Correction: This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men

– Actual correction posted to a blog on the Washington D.C.-centric TBD news website.

Tune In to C-Span

Last week, I was the old man on a panel of young conservatives at Georgetown to promote PBR. It’s going to be on C-Span 2 this weekend. Some of you will enjoy it for the earnest conservative banter. And some of you will enjoy it for the incredibly awkward – nay, bizarre – interaction between Todd Seavey and NR’s own Helen Rittelmeyer. Todd decided that this would be the perfect time and place to vent some anger at his ex-girlfriend. It was . . . strange. Judge for yourself:

[BLOCK]Saturday, October 16th at 8pm (ET)

Sunday, October 17th at 9:30am (ET)

Sunday, October 17th at 10pm (ET) [BLOCK]

Applebaum v. Goldberg It sounds like a lawsuit between the owners of two delis, but in case you missed it, we’ve been going round and round on her silly column from the other day. You can find all the links here.

Just for the record, a bunch of readers and a few commenters seem to think I am now an anti-elitist; I’m not. Never have been, never will be.

I’m anti-snobbery, anti-government meddling, anti-government condescension, anti-all number of things. But I’m not anti-elitist per se. I just don’t like much of what passes for the current elite.

Okay, I gots to go. But I wanted to say sorry for all the number-wonkery, but some of you have been veering toward floccinaucinihilipilification in your attitudes toward the G-File.