Anthill Art

Who thinks of this stuff? The guy who made the video apparently got the idea of pouring molten aluminum down a fire ant nest, letting it harden, and washing away the surrounding dirt. The result is actually an interesting piece of casting sculpture, though not so much if you're a fire ant, I guess, or fond of them.

The Millenium Begins in 2030

Ray Kurzweil is a pretty amazing thinker. He's a well-known futurist and inventor who's convinced that we're poised on the cusp of an incredible knowledge explosion, one that will produce almost unimaginable technological advances. He calls this explosion a singularity.

A recent article at CNN summarizes some of what Kurzweil is predicting:

[He] predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. He says this will lead to a technological singularity in the year 2045, a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans' ability to comprehend it.

Irreversibly transformed, people will augment their minds and bodies with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil predicts machine intelligence will be infinite times more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards, Kurzweil says, intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe.

I'm not sold on that last part, but here are some predictions I hope come true and some I don't think I want to come true although I'm not sure I can say exactly why:

• Kurzweil says we'll soon be able to program ourselves away from disease and aging.
• He also believes we'll be able to satisfy all our energy needs by solar power by 2030.
• We'll also be printing a significant amount of the goods we use and wear, as well as replacement organs for our bodies.
• Work and play will become a fully immersive experience by the 2030s. By this I take it that he means we'll be able in three decades' time to create 3-D virtual environments in which we will be able to function as if we were in the real environment.

Kurzweil is not without his critics, but if he's even close to being right the world fifty years from now will be even more different from the present world than the present world is from the world of the Middle Ages.

Why Is Our Government Doing This to Us?

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, recently posted on his own very personal experience with Obamacare. He writes this:

In August 2013 I became very sick with what I thought was a cold. After a few days I lost vision in my left eye and I checked into the hospital. I soon found out that what I thought was a summer cold was actually Strep bacteria poisoning my blood stream. The bacteria blinded my left eye, ate a hole through my heart, caused five strokes on both sides of my brain and forced the removal of my prosthetic left knee.

Dr. Lee was the surgeon assigned to perform open heart surgery. What was originally scheduled to last four hours ended up lasting twelve. My heart was severely damaged. Dr. Lee later told me the surgery was one of the most difficult of his career. He also said I only had a few days to live without the surgery.

Thanks to the excellent insurance I carried I was able to receive life-saving medical treatment at St. Louis University.

This week I found out I am going to lose my insurance. The company that carried me is leaving the Missouri market. I will have to find something else.

I am one of the millions who will be looking for new insurance. God willing, I will be able to keep my doctors at St. Louis University. I trust them. They saved my life. Please pray for me and the millions of working Americans who are going through this same ordeal.

Why is our government doing this to us?

Perhaps someone might ask the President this question, if they can get him to stop acting like a high school kid on a field trip long enough to take the question seriously.

Minimum Wage

The minimum wage is back in the news, mostly, one supposes because Mr. Obama and the Democrats are desperate to get people talking about anything other than the Affordable Care Act.

The President gave a speech last week in which he devoted considerable space to the minimum wage, once again insisting that it be raised from $7.25 to $10.00 an hour. He failed, however, to make a persuasive case that this would benefit either the nation as a whole or the people it's ostensibly supposed to help most, the working poor.

Zachary Karabel at The Atlantic shares some thoughts:

In Obama’s speech, he stated that... “We all know the arguments that have been used against a higher minimum wage. Some say it actually hurts low-wage workers — businesses will be less likely to hire them. But there’s no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs, and research shows it raises incomes for low-wage workers and boosts short-term economic growth.”

Well, I'm no economist but there are at least three things to be said about the President's claims: First, the evidence that it actually hurts low-wage workers is simply common sense. You can't raise the employer's cost of doing business without the employer economizing where he can. If it costs more to pay a marginally-needed employee then that individual is less likely to get hired, and marginally-needed employees already on the payroll are more likely to get laid off.

The reason why people are paid a minimum wage is because they're doing work anyone can do. Their work requires no particular talent or skill, and there's no shortage of people out there who can do the job, and will do, it for whatever the employer is willing to pay. It's typical big government intrusiveness to force employers to pay people more than what they're worth to the employer. If employees want to get paid more they should do what they can to increase their value to their employers.

Moreover, many, perhaps most, people working for minimum wage are young people who are only looking for some discretionary cash. If anyone is trying to support a family on a minimum wage they're almost certainly having their income augmented with food stamps, medicaid, earned income tax credits, reduced lunches, and other forms of assistance.

Mr. Obama also complained in his speech about accelerating income inequality in the United States, but aside from the fact that politicians never seem to explain exactly why this is bad (it's only bad if the people at the bottom are seeing their incomes decline or stagnate in absolute terms, but if that's the case the problem isn't inequality, it's income stagnation), it would be helpful if we were given some information about what's causing this.

For instance, what's the impact of the increasing number of single parent families on income disparity? Could one reason that some people are moving ahead and others are lagging behind, as Charles Murray argues in his book Coming Apart, be that those moving ahead are getting an education, not having children until they're married, staying married once they have children, avoiding drugs and alcohol, exhibiting a good work ethic, and in general making the kinds of decisions necessary to advance up the socio-economic scale, whereas those who are falling behind are practicing none or few of the requisite disciplines?

If so, I don't see how raising the minimum wage is going to help reverse the trend toward greater inequality. The only thing that'll do that is to reverse the forces that are tearing families apart in our culture.

Karabel reinforces the point with a couple of interesting statistics:

Nearly 20 states have a higher minimum wage than the federal rate. That means that the federal law has little effect in wide swaths of the country. What’s more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 5 percent of all workers are paid at or less than the current minimum wage. Thus, increasing it will make precious little difference in most people’s lives.

Even an increase to $10, which is what Obama and others have proposed, would leave a family of two that depends on it with less than a living wage....The proposed increase would only marginally improve the lives of minimum wage earners.

Karabel tries to be even-handed and present both sides of the debate, but he struggles to come up with a convincing rejoinder to the objection I raised above that employers will reduce workers if they have to pay more for them:

The oft-repeated warning that businesses will hire fewer workers or reduce wages is also unclear. Yes, businesses have already begun to cut hours in order to avoid paying workers various benefits, including healthcare. Under a higher minimum wage, a significant number of companies would likely trim payrolls in order to maintain profits.

Yet such actions are both short-sighted and inimical to collective prosperity. They are short-sighted because you can’t build a vibrant service- and consumer-oriented society with fewer and fewer people earning enough income to pay for the goods and services they need and want. They are inimical to collective prosperity because a dynamic society depends on a compact, often unwritten, that the proverbial deck will not be so unevenly stacked.

He doesn't say that companies won't trim payrolls, because he knows they will, he just argues that for the good of the whole they shouldn't. This is hopelessly idealistic and naive. The fact is that most employers, especially small businesspersons, are so busy trying to make enough income to stay out of the red that they have little inclination to worry about whether hiring one or two more workers would be good for the "collective prosperity" of the nation a decade down the road.

There really are no good arguments for requiring employers to pay unskilled workers more than what they're worth to the employer, which is why calls to raise the minimum wage are usually couched in emotional appeals to do something for the underprivileged regardless of the effectiveness of what is done. If we really want to help the underprivileged, however, the best thing we can do for them is teach them the value of family, church, and school. It would take time to change the culture, but it's the surest road out of the underclass.

MSNBC

This is a bit "inside the beltway," perhaps, but those readers who may be familiar with the exotic cast of characters who come and go on MSNBC, and the nature of the programming they do there, will find a piece by Charlie Cooke at NRO pretty interesting. If you're not familiar with MSNBC, especially their evening line-up, you might find Cooke's column sufficient reason not to become more familiar with it.

Suffice it to say that I can think of no other news talk medium that has had to suspend or fire more people for reasons having to do with hate speech, vile tastelessness, and lack of professionalism than has MSNBC. The parade of miscreants in the last few years includes, but is not limited to, Don Imus, Keith Olbermann, David Schuster, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell, Howard Finemann, and most recently Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir.

The network also features Chris Matthews who, if obsequiousness toward the President were a crime, would be serving a life sentence. It also provides a showcase for race-hustlers like Al Sharpton who never should have been hired at all after his egregious role in the infamous Tawana Brawley case and his other incitements which led to various acts of violence in New York in the eighties and nineties.

There are others at MSNBC who stun the viewer not with a lack of decorum or courtesy but with sheer vapidity. Melissa Harris-Perry comes to mind as does Mika Brzezinski.

I know, I know. Some will say, "But look at FOX news!" Yes, FOX subjects viewers to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, but these are merely insufferably rude, pompous narcissists, and there are, thank goodness, only two of them. O'Reilly and Hannity are simply not in the same league as people like Bashir, Schultz, or Olbermann whose hatred and dehumanization of those, particularly women, whose politics they oppose transcends the insufferable and reaches all the way to repugnant and despicable.

Anyway, if you've ever watched MSNBC, and maybe if you haven't, you'll want to read Cooke's piece.

Xmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Advent season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, but perhaps their discomfiture is misplaced, as R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.

The idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom. There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting, but I suspect nevertheless that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid saying Christmas and have no idea what the etymology of the word is.

Mendacity and Incompetence

Thomas Edsall, a liberal columnist writing at the New York Times, is dismayed at the mendacity and incompetence of which this administration has shown itself capable. The incompetence is dismaying to Edsall because it discredits Democrats and confirms the central theses of conservative objections to big government:

The chaos surrounding efforts to activate HealthCare.gov reinforces a key conservative meme: that whatever the test is, government will fail it. Insofar as voters experience their interaction with government as frustrating and unreliable, the brunt of political damage will hit Democrats, both as the party of government and as the party of Obamacare.

Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.

But the rollout isn't the only aspect of this that's discrediting liberalism. Wait until older Americans realize that their health care costs are going up because the Democrats raided Medicare in order to help fund Obamacare. When this begins to sink in the Democrats, who rammed the legislation through congress without a single Republican vote, will all be running for the tall grass. Here's Edsall:

In addition, the Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority. Over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare.

Finally, the mendacity of the President, who emphatically assured the American people on dozens of occasions that if they liked their coverage they could keep their coverage and that if they liked their doctor they could keep their doctor, is outraging average folks all across the nation:

Jennifer Harris, a self-employed lawyer in Fullerton, Calif., was notified that Health Net Inc. has cancelled her $98-a-month policy, and the cheapest plan she can find that meets Obamacare requirements cost $238 a month....Harris told The Los Angeles Times, “It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else.”

Well, it may not seem right, but this is the entire raison d'etre of liberalism. It's the vision that animates liberals in everything they do. It's why candidate Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the nation. Were people in the middle-class so naive as to think he was talking only about taking the wealth from the very rich?

Edsall adds this:

In the same Los Angeles Times story, Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester, Calif., who faces a 65 percent increase in health coverage costs, said: “All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it."

"I’m infuriated because I was lied to,” Cavallaro added.

So, what is the Obama administration's response to this upwelling anger? It is to essentially call Americans a bunch of suckers. For example, one of the designers of Obamacare, Zeke Emanuel, went on the Sunday talk shows yesterday and tried to persuade viewers that what the President meant when he assured us we could keep our coverage and our doctors was that we could keep them if we were willing to pay more for them.

Of course, that's not what the President said, nor is it what he wanted people to understand him to mean. If he had actually told people what Emanuel said he did, or if he had told people that millions of them would lose the insurance plans they had rather than assuring them that they'd be able to keep their plans if they wished, or if he had told Americans that their premiums were going to double or triple rather than telling them that their premiums would go down by $2500, he never would have been elected.

Mr. Obama deliberately misled the American people in order to win office and continued to mislead us in order to get Obamacare passed. I don't know how else to plausibly interpret his words.

Are there no honest men and women left in the Democrat party who are willing to step forward and just admit that Americans were explicitly, intentionally deceived about Obamacare and that our leaders have abjectly failed the people they were sworn to serve and deserve to be thrown out on their ear?

Your Lying Eyes

Who's up for a good optical illusion? The Blaze put us on to this one:

The two parts of the object in the image are actually the same color and brightness. You can demonstrate this by placing your finger over the seam that joins them.

The whole weirdness of it is explained here, but good luck trying to understand it.

Maybe part of the explanation is that our eyes assess the object's background as they view the object. An object viewed against a bright background appears darker than does the same object viewed against a darker background.

Which Way Does the Hockey Stick Point?

The earth is getting warmer, right? That's what's been inculcated into our gullible little brains by scientists, politicians, and a host of other commentators over the last fifteen years or so. We've been shown "hockey stick" graphs that depict global temperatures shooting into the stratosphere in the coming decades unless we heed the call to drastically curtail our carbon emissions.

President Obama has apparently imbibed Al Gore's apocalyptic prophecies of rising sea levels, desertification of agricultural lands, horrific storms, massive population displacements, drowning polar bears, and other really bad stuff, and is demanding that the coal industry be shut down and that something be done immediately about cow flatulence.

But the grim tidings have apparently failed to impress some German scientists, a pair of whom have just released a report that declares that, so far from the earth getting warmer, it's actually entering a cooling phase that'll last until the next century. Here's the lede:

Better start investing in some warm clothes because German scientists are predicting that the Earth will cool over the next century.

German scientists found that two naturally occurring cycles will combine to lower global temperatures during the 21st century, eventually dropping to levels corresponding with the “little ice age” of 1870.

“Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the ‘little ice age’ of 1870,” write German scientists Horst-Joachim Luedecke and Carl-Otto Weiss of the European Institute for Climate and Energy.

Researchers used historical temperature data and data from cave stalagmites to show a 200-year solar cycle, called the de Vries cycle.

They also factored into their work a well-established 65-year Atlantic and Pacific Ocean oscillation cycle. Global warming that has occurred since 1870 can be attributed almost entirely to both these factors, the scientists argue.

According to the scientists, the oft-cited “stagnation” in rising global temperatures over the last 15 years is due to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean oscillation cycle, which lasts about 65 years. Ocean oscillation is past its “maximum,” leading to small decreases in global temperature.

The de Vries solar cycle is currently at its “maximum,” explaining why temperatures have risen since 1870, but leveled off after 1998. However, this means that as solar activity starts to decrease, global temperatures will follow.

“Through [the de Vries solar cycle's] influence the temperature will decrease until 2100 to a value like the one of the last ‘Little Ice Age’ 1870,” the scientists wrote.

Now maybe these guys are no more reputable than the geneticist who last summer delivered himself of the theory that the human species is, in fact, the spawn of a mysterious union of a pig and a chimp. The fact that the BBC carried the German report, however, suggests that these guys aren't just a couple of prankster grad students.

So, anyway. Is the planet warming or is it cooling? How can Al Gore and his fellow lefties claim to be so sure about what's happening to the earth's climate when contradictory scientific opinions litter the landscape? And how can the president, who, like most politicians, is doubtlessly scientifically nescient, undertake to destroy an entire industry when there's no compelling or conclusive evidence that atmospheric carbon is having anything more than a minor effect on global temperatures?

Read the entire article at the link, especially if you've been persuaded by the global warming alarmists that we're on the brink of an imminent global heating catastrophe. One side or the other in this debate has to be wrong and somebody's going to wind up with egg on their faces. The only question is whether the egg will be fried or frozen.

Is it All an Accident?

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. The mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60. All the matter that's visible to us, all 25 billion galaxies and everything else we can see with our telescopes has an estimated mass of about 10^60 grams. This means that if the mass density at the beginning of the universe deviated from its actual value by as much as the mass of a dime deviates from the total mass of the visible universe, the universe would not have formed.

Add to that the fact that, although we don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, we do know that its value is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^60 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^120.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are set. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe, we should imagine dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values. If any one of them was off by a single notch a life-supporting universe would not exist.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe, against all odds, does exist? Some of them assume that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds - for which there's virtually no evidence - and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many modern thinkers choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to accept that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are remarkable.

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

One of the world's great men passed into history today. Nelson Mandela died at the age of 95. Perhaps many who read this will know little of Mandela because his public life was largely over by the late nineties. Yet his life is one which everyone should familiarize themselves with because his amazing story and evolution as a man and a leader is truly exceptional.

This is not to say he was perfect, but for a man who spent one third of his life in prison, his lack of bitterness and vindictiveness is nothing short of saintly. Upon his release from prison he entered politics becoming the first black president of his country in 1994. He presided over the abolition of apartheid, and his graciousness toward his enemies and those who committed terrible crimes under apartheid led him to establish the committee of Truth and Reconciliation which extended legal absolution to those who repented of their abuses and crimes under the old regime. This was, as far as I know, an unprecedented move and was a truly remarkable act of grace, forgiveness, and healing.

CNN has an excellent retrospective of his life. Here are some excerpts:

Despite chronic political violence before the vote that put him in office in 1994, South Africa avoided a full-fledged civil war in its transition from apartheid to multiparty democracy. The peace was due in large part to the leadership and vision of Mandela and de Klerk.

"We were expected by the world to self-destruct in the bloodiest civil war along racial grounds," Mandela said during a 2004 celebration to mark a decade of democracy in South Africa.

"Not only did we avert such racial conflagration, we created amongst ourselves one of the most exemplary and progressive nonracial and nonsexist democratic orders in the contemporary world."

Mandela represented a new breed of African liberation leaders, breaking from others of his era such as Robert Mugabe by serving one term.

South Africa's fight for reconciliation was epitomized at the 1995 rugby World Cup Final in Johannesburg, when it played heavily favored New Zealand.

As the dominant sport of white Afrikaners, rugby was reviled by blacks in South Africa. They often cheered for rivals playing their national team.

Mandela's deft use of the national team to heal South Africa was captured in director Clint Eastwood's 2009 feature film "Invictus," starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the white South African captain of the rugby team.

Before the real-life game, Mandela walked onto the pitch, wearing a green-and-gold South African jersey bearing Pienaar's number on the back.

"I will never forget the goosebumps that stood on my arms when he walked out onto the pitch before the game started," said Rory Steyn, his bodyguard for most of his presidency.

"That crowd, which was almost exclusively white ... started to chant his name. That one act of putting on a No. 6 jersey did more than any other statement in bringing white South Africans and Afrikaners on side with new South Africa."

Millenials to Mr. Obama: The Love Is Gone

Ron Fournier a liberal supporter of the President who writes for National Journal has some bad news for the President and his party. It seems that young Americans are growing increasingly disenchanted with our political leadership in general and Mr. Obama and the Democrats in particular. Fournier writes:

Young Americans are turning against Barack Obama and Obamacare, according to a new survey of millennials, people between the ages of 18 and 29 who are vital to the fortunes of the president and his signature health care law.

The most startling finding of Harvard University's Institute of Politics: A majority of Americans under age 25--the youngest millennials--would favor throwing Obama out of office.

The survey, part of a unique 13-year study of the attitudes of young adults, finds that America's rising generation is worried about its future, disillusioned with the U.S. political system, strongly opposed to the government's domestic surveillance apparatus, and drifting away from both major parties. "Young Americans hold the president, Congress and the federal government in less esteem almost by the day, and the level of engagement they are having in politics are also on the decline," reads the IOP's analysis of its poll. "Millennials are losing touch with government and its programs because they believe government is losing touch with them."

The results blow a gaping hole in the belief among many Democrats that Obama's two elections signaled a durable grip on the youth vote.

Indeed, millennials are not so hot on their president.

Obama's approval rating among young Americans is just 41 percent, down 11 points from a year ago, and now tracking with all adults. While 55 percent said they voted for Obama in 2012, only 46 percent said they would do so again.

When asked if they would want to recall various elected officials, 45 percent of millennials said they would oust their member of Congress; 52 percent replied "all members of Congress" should go; and 47 percent said they would recall Obama. The recall-Obama figure was even higher among the youngest millennials, ages 18 to 24, at 52 percent.

While there is no provision for a public recall of U.S. presidents, the poll question revealed just how far Obama has fallen in the eyes of young Americans.

IOP director Trey Grayson called the results a "sea change" attributable to the generation's outsized and unmet expectations for Obama, as well as their concerns about the economy, Obamacare and government surveillance.

Doubtless the President's minions are working assiduously to come up with a strategy to win back the wayward hearts of the millenials, and one possible "solution" is waiting like a ripe peach to be plucked. It's been suggested that Mr. Obama may simply forgive college student loan debt. This would, of course, delight hundreds of thousands of students who are weighted down with enormous debt and pessimistic about ever getting a decent job in the present economy. On the other hand, it would probably infuriate just as many who struggled to pay their college bills without having to go too deeply into debt only to see their fellow students awarded with what amounts to a free education from the government for no reason other than that the President believes he can buy their political loyalty.

Anyway, Mr. Obama hasn't done it yet and may not ever do it, so I don't want to fault him for something he hasn't done. There's enough that he has done for which he can justly be held to account without getting prematurely outraged over things he only might do.

Saint Nicholas/ Santa Claus

As we approach the Christmas season I thought it might be worthwhile to rerun a post from last December on the origin of the legend of Santa Claus and why Santa is referred to as St. Nick: Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus (a transliteration of "Saint Nicholas") and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan.

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they refused to renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some perhaps apocryphal traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

The Loftus Dilemma

One objection to Divine Command ethics (ethics in which right and wrong are grounded in the will of a deity) is articulated by atheist John Loftus. It is that God is essentially a moral hypocrite because he commands us to do something that he himself doesn't do. Loftus bases his argument on the Euthyphro Dilemma which, for those unfamiliar with it, I comment upon here. He writes:

No amount of ownership, no amount of knowledge, can ethically justify passing by a man beaten and robbed by the roadside. If we are to act based on God's character then we should all be Good Samaritans. God should be a Good Samaritan.

No amount of ownership, no amount of knowledge, can ethically justify watching a man slowly roast to death in a house fire.

No amount of ownership, no amount of knowledge, can ethically justify eating popcorn while watching as a woman is beaten, gang raped, and then left for dead.

In fact, since the ethical standard is the perfect character of God (per modified divine command theories) and this God has omniscience and omnipotence, then God is even MORE obligated to alleviate suffering. For while we may not have the power or knowledge to intervene when we see intense suffering, God is not limited like us. The more that a person has the knowledge and the ability (or power) to alleviate suffering, then the more that person is morally obligated to help by intervening.

We may not know that someone is suffering, so we are not morally obligated to help because we are ignorant about it.

We may know someone is suffering but we lack to ability or power to help.

We may not have the financial resources to help a man beaten and robbed by the roadside. We may not have the ability to save a man who is burning in a house fire. We may not have the physical strength to save a woman who is being beaten and gang raped. It's true we should act based on our knowledge by doing what we can. But since God is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent there is no excuse for him. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it....

If God can justify letting us suffer in this life by compensating us in the next life, then that ethical principle allows us to do the same thing (per modified divine command theories). We can knowingly allow people to suffer even though we could help them, so long as we compensate them afterward for our inaction. That same ethical principle would allow someone to sit by and do nothing while others abduct and abuse a woman, and then compensate her with a million dollars afterward. Does the compensation justify the deed? No. Compensating someone for abuse does not justify the abuse. Abuse is still abuse. To see this just ask if such a woman would prefer to skip the abuse and just receive the million dollars. Her answer would be an unequivocal yes.

Why can God violate these ethical principles that we are obligated to obey, if morality is based on his character? If he's our ethical standard and acts like an inattentive and inactive monster, then why can't we act like him? If we cannot act like him, because it would be unethical for us to do so, then God's character is no longer the basis for morality. Which is it?

There are a couple of things to be said about this argument. First, it strikes me as a very odd case for an atheist to make because it essentially brands God a hypocrite for failing to incessantly override the laws of nature and human free will. I say this is odd because one of the arguments that skeptics invoke against the credibility of miracles is that a genuine miracle would amount to a suspension of the laws of nature and that it would be repugnant of a deity to override those laws since it would throw science into chaos and confusion. Nothing would be predictable. What seems to be an inviolable law of nature today could well be nothing of the sort tomorrow if God were to be constantly intervening into the affairs of the world.

So, many skeptics argue, if there were a God he wouldn't be the sort of deity which would create a world and then feel the need to constantly tweak what's going on in it.

Very well, but then to turn around, as Loftus does, and call God a moral hypocrite for refraining from miraculously intervening hundreds, thousands, of times every second to alleviate the suffering occurring around the world seems a bit unreasonable. According to skeptics like Loftus God is malicious if he does perform miracles and hypocritical if he doesn't.

The second reason why this is an odd argument for Loftus to make is that he claims that we have a moral obligation to help those who suffer if we can. I agree with him about this, but I don't see why he should think that such an obligation exists. After all, on atheism what could possibly be the source of moral obligation? What is it that imposes such duties? Where does the notion that we have a duty to help the suffering come from, and what does it matter whether we fulfill this duty or ignore it? Loftus might reply that people who ignore such duties are reprehensible, but all he can possibly mean by that is that he doesn't like them, to which the appropriate response is, so what? How does his not liking someone make that person morally wrong? Even if 99% of the people don't like someone who chooses to withhold help from someone who's suffering, how does that make that person wrong? Is morality a matter of what's popular?

Perhaps God desires nothing more than to end human suffering. Perhaps he's perfectly capable of ending it, but has a good reason for not doing so. Loftus might scoff at such a suggestion and ask what could possibly be a good reason for not eliminating the suffering of a child? If he does respond in that fashion, though, all the theist need do is remind him that his fellow atheists have supplied the reason: Ever since the 18th century they've been arguing, as I noted above, that it would be disastrous for God to intervene in the normal cause and effect course of physical events. It'd be the end of science, they've been telling us, even if he only intervened occasionally. If so, how much more disastrous would it be for God to intervene as often as would be needed to alleviate instances of human (and animal) suffering in the world?

I think there are other plausible reasons why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God might permit suffering, but Loftus' fellow atheists seem to have pulled the rug out from under his argument so anything else I might add would just be piling on.

Let Death Have Its Day?

Ethicist Daniel Callahan, now in his eighties, reflects on the wisdom of extending the lives of the elderly in a column at the New York Times. Callahan believes that extending their lives would create more problems than it's worth and that it might be best to just let people of a certain age die rather than provide them with expensive surgeries and other care that give them a few more years of life. Here are some excerpts from his column:

Consider how dire the cost projections for Medicare already are. In 2010 more than 40 million Americans were over 65. In 2030 there will be slightly more than 72 million, and in 2050 more than 83 million. The Congressional Budget Office has projected a rise of Medicare expenditures to 5.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2038 from 3.5 percent today, a burden often declared unsustainable.

Modern medicine is very good at keeping elderly people with chronic diseases expensively alive. At 83, I’m a good example. I’m on oxygen at night for emphysema, and three years ago I needed a seven-hour emergency heart operation to save my life. Just 10 percent of the population — mainly the elderly — consumes about 80 percent of health care expenditures, primarily on expensive chronic illnesses and end-of-life costs. Historically, the longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs. Can we possibly afford to live even longer — much less radically longer?

What’s more, an important and liberating part of modern life has been upward social and economic mobility. The old retire from work and their place is taken by the young. A society where the aged stay in place for many more years would surely throw that fruitful passing of the generations into chaos....One likelihood, even in just a few years, is that older people who stay longer in the work force, as many are now forced to do, will close out opportunities for younger workers coming in.

We may properly hope that scientific advances help ensure, with ever greater reliability, that young people manage to become old people. We are not, however, obliged to help the old become indefinitely older. Indeed, our duty may be just the reverse: to let death have its day.

I wonder how long it will take, once we begin denying certain life-prolonging procedures to the elderly, before we also start denying them to the mentally incompetent, and how long after that it will be before we begin to hear calls for actively terminating those whose lives are no longer "useful" to society.

Exit question: How does a society immersed in relativism, pragmatism, egoism, and nihilism, muster the ethical resources to resist such calls?

Darwinism and Consciousness

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent talks about how reflecting on the phenomenon of human consciousness as a high school student led him to doubt the Darwinian story:

I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the beginning of my doubts about Darwin…

Years later, when I related the story to Walter ReMine, he explained to me consciousness poses a serious problem for evolution.

He said something to the effect, “Say an animal has to flee a predator — all it has to do is run away. Why does it have to evolve consciousness in order to flee predators?” Mechanically speaking the animal can be programmed to flee or even hunt without having to be self-aware. Why does it have to evolve consciousness to do anything for survival?

Why would selection favor the evolution of consciousness? How does selection select for the pre-cursors of consciousness? I don’t think it can. Ergo, consciousness didn’t evolve, or it’s just a maladaptation, or an illusion — or maybe it is created by God. Materialists can say consciousness is an illusion all they want, but once upon a time, when my arm was broken in a hang gliding crash, I felt real pain. It would have been nice if consciousness were an illusion back then, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, at some point in our embryonic development consciousness arises, but how does a particular configuration of material stuff generate it? Dead people have the same configuration of matter in their brains (unless they suffered a head injury) that they had before dying and yet before death they were conscious and after death they are not. Why? What's missing after death?

How does a physical process like electrochemical reactions in the brain produce a belief, or a doubt, or understanding? How do atoms whirling about in our neuronal matrix give rise to our sense that the distant past is different from the recent past? How do chemical reactions translate a pattern of ink on paper into a meaning or a firing of synapses translate electrical pulses into the sensation of red?

Consciousness is an incredibly intriguing phenomenon and not only is there no explanation of it in a materialist ontology, there's also no explanation for how it could ever have evolved through purely random physical, material processes.

Cordova has more at the link.

Shameless Exploitation of Black Friday

As one who has in the past expressed dismay at the glorification of consumerist excess on Black Friday and the crass commercialization of the Christmas holiday, I confess to a twinge of guilt as I post the following exhortation. Even so, I'll get over it.

A recurring theme throughout our eight years here at Viewpoint is that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning in life and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd. It's an existential dead-end because unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

My novel, In the Absence of God, lays out this argument in the form of a story set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

I mention it today for three reasons:

First, because I think the book would make an excellent Christmas gift for someone you know who is 1. college-educated, 2. a reader, and 3. wrestling with some of life's biggest questions.

Second, because, according to many who have already read it, it's a good read (see below).

Third, because all the proceeds from the book go to charity.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him - as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in his class - to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his worldview raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways that none of them could have foreseen on the first day of classes.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

Here's a sample of the very gratifying praise the book has received from readers:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down. Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has, I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God.

I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot. The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview. I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism. This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it.

One quote in particular stuck with me as I finished the book, "For so much of his life Weyland simply took for granted that atheism made so much more sense, was so much more reasonable, so much more intelligent, than theism, but he could no longer think that. He'd never again be able to think his rejection of God, if that was the choice he ultimately made, was because atheism was so much more appealing or satisfying. What appeal is there in a worldview that has no answer to life's most important questions?" This describes where my mind was before reading this book. Thank you for writing it and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

I hope you'll consider In the Absence of God this Christmas season either for yourself or as a gift for someone else. It's available, in both paperback and e-book, from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and also from my favorite bookseller Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

A Thanksgiving Proclamation

I wish all our readers a very meaningful Thanksgiving. I can think of no better way to observe the day on VP than to repeat our annual post of the Thanksgiving proclamation of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived:

THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION OF 1789 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be - That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks - for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation - for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war - for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed - for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions - to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually - to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed - to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord - To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us - and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

No doubt those who like to believe that this country was not founded by religious men nor upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions would rather Washington had never written such a proclamation, but there it is.

I encourage each of us to take time this day to follow our first president's advice and reflect upon all that we have to be grateful for, and reflect, too, upon the nature of our relationship to the God from whom all our blessings flow.

I also urge us to take a moment to pray for those of our acquaintances who find themselves grieving a loss or suffering pain, to pray that God may hold them especially close to His bosom and give them consolation and comfort.

Finally, we should keep in mind those who languish in poverty, either physical, psychological, or spiritual and ask that God reveal how we ourselves might bring them some measure of relief.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving, one filled with the spirit of gratitude and service.

The Sticking Point on Immigration Reform

President Obama is talking a lot lately about immigration reform, although it's not clear what sorts of reform he has in mind. Nevertheless, most Democrats and a lot of Republicans favor an amnesty of illegal aliens with an eventual path to citizenship for immigrants who are here unlawfully. I used to favor a form of amnesty that would allow those who are here in violation of the nation's laws to remain here legally but with no path to citizenship, although there would be one for their children who were brought here by their parents.

I outlined my position on this in a column in the local paper which can be found here if anyone should care to read it. The kind of amnesty I supported at the time was contingent, however, on a secured border that would prevent any further uncontrolled influx of immigrants. I no longer support even this modest form of amnesty for the simple reason that President Obama has shown repeatedly that, despite the oath he swore to uphold the laws of the nation, he will not enforce any law he doesn't like, and, since he has also demonstrated an aversion to stricter border security, he cannot be trusted to enforce any provision in any law or reform that requires it.

A lot of people agree with the President that tighter border security is somehow uncompassionate and unworthy of a great nation. The tacit assumption is that we should let anyone in who wants to live here. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I believe the reason why Republicans make this argument is that they want a large pool of cheap labor and the reason Democrats make it is because they want a large pool of likely Democrat voters. Neither of them really seems to care about the impact open borders would have on the character and economic well-being of the country.

Whatever may be the case, I recall that a couple of years ago Robert Sarver, the owner of the Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team, castigated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer because she signed a border security measure that empowered the state to do what Washington was refusing to do which was to close the border between her state and Mexico. I wrote the following on VP at the time:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is taking a lot of heat for the apparent crime of exercising common sense on a political issue. The issue, of course, is illegal immigration, and Gov. Brewer is insisting, contra the wishes of the Obama administration, that the law against it be enforced.

This defiance of liberal political correctness is too much for most of her ideological opponents to bear, and consequently the left has encircled Brewer, tomahawks aloft, whooping and grunting in the characteristic fashion of primitives about to sacrifice a prisoner of war. One of Gov. Brewer's antagonists is Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver who, in his criticisms of Brewer, has demonstrated that running a basketball team does not require the same intellectual skills as running a state.

In response to Sarver's criticism of the Arizona law Governor Brewer issued this statement:

"What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected. Furthermore, what if Suns' ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?"

This is, of course, a good analogy to what is happening along our southern border. The same logic may be applied in other cases, too. Why is there a fence around the White House and what would happen to someone who tried to climb it? Why do most people, including most liberals, lock the doors of their homes? What would they do if they came home and found an intruder sitting at their kitchen table availing himself of refrigerator, toilet and television? What if the intruder insisted not only on staying but on bringing his family to enjoy the benefits and screamed in protest if the homeowner objected? How are these situations any different than what's happening on our southern border?

Questions like these, of course, never get answered by those who oppose the Arizona law because even they can see where the answers lead. Instead, people like Sarver try, in effect, to convince us that, even though he would never dream of doing so himself, other owners should allow the less fortunate into their arenas without tickets and that it's just unAmerican and churlish to deny them the opportunity to see a game.

As Governor Brewer's rejoinder suggests, many of the arguments against the Arizona law are either stupid or hypocritical. Or both.

There can be no meaningful immigration reform unless we stop the traffic on our southern border, and we'll never do that as long as President Obama can decide whether or not he will enforce whatever provisions are promulgated by Congress. Thus, as long as Mr. Obama remains in office it's very difficult to trust him to follow the law, and thus it's very difficult to support any effort to resolve the problem of what to do with illegal aliens.

The Sgt. Schultz President

In a recent column on the unraveling of Mr. Obama's presidency, George Will quotes a passage from a book on the life of President Obama. He writes:

The place to begin understanding the unraveling of his presidency is page 274 of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.” The author, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, quotes Valerie Jarrett, perhaps Obama’s closest and longest-serving adviser, on her hero’s amazingness:

“He knows exactly how smart he is. ... I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ... He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.”

I don't wish to sound churlish, but I really have my doubts that Mr. Obama is the intellectual titan Ms Jarrett portrays him as. I mean, where's the evidence? The President refuses, for example, to release his college records, which should certainly give us pause. After all, if Mr. Obama was a student of stellar intellect wouldn't his records show that, and wouldn't it be to his advantage to let the public know it? As it is we have no way to tell how well he performed in the classroom which would give us at least some indication of how smart a man he really is.

Moreover, most brilliant men and women are voracious readers, consuming books and articles on a wide range of topics, but there's no evidence that Mr. Obama reads much of anything. Indeed, we're told that he spends most of his "down" time watching ESPN, shooting hoops, and playing golf, none of which strike one as the sorts of activities a man of surpassing intellect would spend a lot of time engaged in, but the very sort of activities that ordinary people enjoy all the time.

Then there are Mr. Obama's various malapropisms that would have had President Bush's critics rolling on the floor in hysterics had he had the misfortune to utter them. It seems reasonable to think that even someone of modest intellectual gifts and education would know that Marine corps is not pronounced Marine corpse and that there are actually only fifty states in the union, not fifty seven, as Mr. Obama once alleged.

Finally, there are all the troubling matters about which President Obama was, according to himself and his spokespeople, completely in the dark. He didn't know about Fast and Furious, or the IRS's abuse of its power to suppress political opponents, or the NSA wire-tapping scandal, or the real reason why our consulate in Benghazi was attacked. Nor was he aware that the Obamacare website was nowhere near ready for launch. In fact, for a man of such extraordinary mental luminosity he seems to be stunningly uncurious about the most important things going on in his administration.

Like Sergeant Schultz in the 1960s Hogan's Heroes television series Mr. Obama sees nothing and knows nothing about what's going on all around him.

Ms. Jarrett can assure us that Mr. Obama floats far above the rest of us mere mortals, deigning to descend from Mt. Olympus only because duty requires it of him, but I wish someone would ask her to supply us with just a little bit of evidence that it's true.