Trump Appeals to Dems, Too

At dinner on New Year's Eve a friend and I got into a modest political discussion while waiting for our table. My friend is conservative in the way he lives his life and in many of his social attitudes - second amendment rights, for example. Nevertheless, he plans to vote for Bernie Sanders, a revelation I had difficulty processing, creating as it did, a befuddling blur of cognitive dissonance in my mind.

In any case, he expressed both surprise and disparagement when I speculated that Donald Trump, were he to be the GOP nominee, would appeal to a lot of Democrats and could quite possibly frustrate Hillary Clinton's accession to the throne she has coveted since she was sliming women who accused her husband of various unseemly doings back in their days in Arkansas.

My friend flashed an amused sneer as if to say I had no idea what I was talking about, which was a safe assumption on his part since I often don't, but now comes vindication of my speculations in the form of a US News article. The article states that:

Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they'd cross sides and vote for Trump, while a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim they'd vote for Clinton. When those groups were further broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they are "100 percent sure" of switching than the Republicans.

Twenty percent! I wish I had that stat on New Year's Eve.

Anyway, I suppose that the very things that make Trump attractive to a lot of Republicans also make him attractive to a significant minority of Democrats. If the choice is between a superannuated liberal progressive of the sort we've had in the White House for the last eight years, a woman who evidently put the State Department up for sale during her tenure as Secretary of State, versus someone who has actually accomplished something in his life and who defies all the liberal shibboleths and the wearisome PC folly of the left, a lot of Democrats, apparently, will cross the line and vote for the latter.

Will they worry about what kind of president Trump would be? Probably most voters would, but many of them will also console themselves by asking how much worse he can be than what we've had over the last decade.

Parenthetically, it's regrettable that Jim Webb (Democrat) and Scott Walker (Republican) dropped out of the race early. Both are men of substantial accomplishment and integrity and both were highly qualified for the nation's highest office. Unfortunately, neither exuded the charisma that so captivates a superficial media eager to wade in the shallow waters of scandal, controversy and personal conflict, so neither was able to get traction with a larger public more concerned with the Kardashians' love life than with the the future of the nation. Maybe it's true that we deserve what we get.

Suicidal Compassion

The news media is exploding with stories about Muslims attacking women in European cities. On New Year's Eve there were dozens of assaults by thousands of Muslim men on women in public spaces in cities all across Europe. In most of these cases women were surrounded by gangs of Arab or North African men who forcibly groped and kissed them.

In Cologne, Germany the mayor, in a classic case of blaming the victim, advised women to follow prudent rules of conduct as if it were imprudent to go to a fireworks display in the town square with one's friends. It would not be surprising if this mayor next recommended to the women of her city to don the burka to discourage Muslim men who are otherwise unable to control themselves:

Finns were shocked at the assaults in Helsinki where such crimes were heretofore unheard of.

In many European cities pepper spray is flying off the shelves. Some authorities are planning to instruct refugee men that assaulting and raping women is a no-no in Europe.

In England, 1400 young girls and boys were sexually abused, sodomized, tortured and threatened by gangs of Pakistani men over a period of several years, and that was in just one city, the city of Rotherham. The terror was allowed to go on for years because the victims were generally poor and the authorities feared being branded as bigots if they intervened:

Meanwhile, closer to home, two Iraqi refugees arrested in Texas for plotting terrorism, and a Philadelphia police officer was shot thirteen times just today by a man who claimed to have acted on behalf of Islam. The officer, you see, enforces laws which are antithetical to sharia and Islam decrees therefore that he must die.

The West is committing suicide by believing that somehow it can absorb millions of people who think this way and that social stability and harmony can be maintained nevertheless.

How many of those who advocate that we should open our doors to all who want to come in would invite into their homes men who believe in a religion that teaches that those who don't believe as they do should be killed, who believe that the daughters of their host are there to be fondled and raped, who need to be taught, for heaven's sake, that rape is wrong?

The answer, doubtless, is very few, and that serves to illustrate both the foolishness and the hypocrisy of what the Europeans are doing and what President Obama proposes to do. On New Year's Eve 2015 it was Cologne and other European cities where women were treated like livestock. If Mr. Obama has his way, on New Year's Eve 2020 it could well be your city.

The Ecological Eschaton Is Imminent

It's an odd thing that no one, not even liberal environmentalists, seem too concerned about the imminent arrival of January 27th. That's the day in 2006 when Al Gore warned us that the world had ten years to severely reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses or else we will have passed the point of no return when nothing we do to save the planet will matter.

Well, January 27th is soon upon us, but there seems to be no alarm, no urgency, no real concern. What's wrong with people? Do they think the Nobel prize winning author of An Inconvenient Truth was prevaricating, for heaven's sake?

Maybe people have just grown weary of apocalyptic predictions. In 1988 Ted Danson, who played Sam Malone on the sitcom Cheers, switched roles and played a marine biologist cautioning us that we had only ten years to save the oceans. Since the middle of the last century we've been told by all sorts of folks that peak oil was just around the corner and that by the year 2000 we'd have exhausted the world's supply. In 1968 a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich terrified us with the assurance - in his book The Population Bomb - that by the mid-1980s the world would be awash with mass starvation, war, disease, and chaos. A piece in the New York Times quotes him:

Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement [of the book] was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

It's true, as Yogi Berra is alleged to have claimed, that predictions are very hard to make, especially when they're about the future, but even so none of those dire prophecies has come to pass and evidently no one, not even Gore's biggest fans, think his prognostication is going to be proven correct either. But then we still have a couple of weeks left, so who knows?

Racial Fabrications

Actual cases of white racism are nowadays so rare and/or so trivial that those anxious to prove that it exists have taken to fabricating stories which the gullible and credulous accept as proof that the problem persists. These examples are usually proven to be not at all what they purport to be, but no matter. The impression created is that racism is ubiquitous and if this or that allegation is shown to be spurious the true believers are nevertheless undeterred. Indeed, it's even claimed that the actual rarity of instances of overt racism only shows that racism is more insidiously covert today than it used to be. This take on things would be amusing were it not so widely accepted and so frequently alleged.

In any case, The Daily Caller offers us a list of a dozen or so of the most egregious examples of hoaxes and just absurd interpretations of perfectly innocent actions that were widely cited as proof of white racism and homophobia in 2015. Here are a couple of the DC's selections:

A Columbia University student pitched a fit and cried racism because she couldn’t get into a Yale frat party. A Halloween party thrown by the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter at Yale University caused a huge fracas after a Columbia student visiting campus claimed she was denied entry because it was “white girls only.” The Columbia student, Sofia Petros-Gouin, said an SAE member repeatedly declared “White girls only” and only permitted white women — specifically blonde white women — to enter. “I was shocked,” Petros-Gouin told gullible Washington Post reporter Susan Svrluga. “I was disgusted.” Later, the fraternity’s president said another Yale student hocked a loogie on him. Also, Yale students insulted black SAE members by calling them “Uncle Toms.” Yale officials opened an official investigation. They conducted scores of interviews. About a month later, school officials concluded that exactly no racism had actually occurred at the frat’s Halloween party. “Before the party became crowded, all students — including men and women of color — were admitted on a first-come, first-served basis,” a Yale dean wrote. Later, when the party was hopping and people started queueing outside to get in, frat members began turning people away with “harsh language” — but no racism.

Students at the University of Delaware freaked out because they thought the remains of lanterns hanging from a tree were nooses. Pandemonium struck students and administrators alike at the University of Delaware in November after students claimed they discovered at least three nooses hanging from trees after a Black Lives Matter rally. The alleged nooses were found dangling from a tree on the quad. A police investigation was rapidly launched. Once police officers actually took a close look at the “nooses,” they “determined that the three noose-like items found outside Mitchell Hall were not instruments of a hate crime, but the remnants of paper lanterns from an event previously held on The Green,” as the president of the public school duly explained. After the “hate crime” was exposed as a total non-event, school officials doubled on the necessity of fighting hate on campus.

A black graduate of Kean University used a school computer to threaten to “shoot every black woman and male” on campus. The 24-year-old graduate, Kayla-Simone McKelvey, was charged with creating a false public alarm after reportedly making death threats and bomb threats against black students and professors. The arrest occurred in December. Police say McKelvey, who is black and a self-described race activist, used Twitter and a computer at the taxpayer-funded New Jersey school. McKelvey reportedly chose the Twitter handle @keanuagainstblk (Kean University against black) to make the threats, which included a promise to “shoot every black woman and male.” Police said McKelvey also tweeted: “kean university twitter against blacks is for everyone who hates blacks people.”

There are more at the link. Maybe we should see it as a sign of progress, of a sort, that those who wish to support their claims of racism in this country are now reduced to having to make up the evidence. It doesn't say much for the character of these individuals, nor the discernment of those who are quick to believe them, but it does say something about how far we've come as a society in the last three generations in casting off the bigotries of the past.

Myth of Epidemic Racist Police Shootings

Someone who got their news only from the major news outlets might easily assume that white cops are killing innocent black men willy-nilly across the length and breadth of the country. The fact of the matter is, however, that this is a myth created by those who believe another myth, the myth that white Americans are inveterately racist.

The New York Post recently featured an article which brings some clarity to this discussion. The NYP story actually built off a story which originally appeared in the Washington Post. Here are a few highlights:

Last week, The Washington Post published a study of the police shootings that took place in 2015. Likely they intended the story to be shocking — as on Dec. 24, 965 people were killed by police! Instead, the report quells the notion that trigger-happy cops are out hunting for civilian victims, especially African-Americans. Among its key findings:

• White cops shooting unarmed black men accounted for less than 4% of fatal police shootings.
• In three-quarters of the incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians.
• The majority of those killed were brandishing weapons, suicidal or mentally troubled or bolted when ordered to surrender.
• Nearly a third of police shootings resulted from car chases that began with a minor traffic stop.

The moral of this story is: Don’t point a gun at the cops and don’t run when they tell you stop, and you’re likely to survive. Since the population of the US is about 318 million people, a thousand deaths at the hands of police works out to 1 in 318,000. You have a better chance of being killed in a violent storm (1 in 68,000) or slipping in the tub (1 in 11,500) than being shot by a cop, no matter what color you are.

But even these figures are deceptive. Of those 965 killed, only 90 were unarmed, and the majority of those were white. (And that doesn’t take into account other extenuating circumstances besides a weapon that would have caused a police officer to fire).

Still, the “killer cop” narrative refuses to die, and The Washington Post decided to throw fuel on the racial fire with context-free statements like these: “Although black men make up only 6% of the US population, they account for 40% of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.”

This ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. According to the Department of Justice, blacks committed 52.5% of the murders in America from 1980-2008, while representing only 12.6% of the population.

Indeed, the murder rate in some Chicago neighborhoods is higher (117 per 100,000) than in countries with a reputation for homicidal violence, e.g. Honduras (90.4 per 100,000).

Nevertheless, there is a problem with excessive use of force by some police officers. The shooting last spring of Walter Scott by an officer (who was subsequently placed under arrest and awaits trial) seems to be a clear case of homicide, but these cases are rare and just as importantly, they're not limited to instances of white cops shooting black men. This story recounts a shooting of a white teenager by a white cop, which, if you watch the video, seems totally unjustified. Yet no charges were brought against the cop.

Another instance occurred in Hummelstown, PA where a female cop killed an unarmed white man after the man had been tasered. She was exonerated.

Perhaps she should have been exonerated, and perhaps most of the cops who shoot black suspects should have been exonerated as well. It's hard to say, but to find in these incidents support for one's assumption that the nation is fundamentally racist is unwarranted.

Raising the Minimum Wage Doesn't Help the Poor

We've often wondered here at VP how increasing the minimum wage would actually help anyone beyond just making politicians and other proponents feel good about themselves. A research paper by David Neumark, visiting scholar at the San Francisco Fed, answers the question of what good raising the minimum wage accomplishes by finding that it doesn't accomplish much good at all. The reason is that, aside from the negative effect raising costs has on job creation and availability, relatively few of those falling below the poverty line actually receive the minimum wage in the first place.

Here are some excerpts from an NBC News report on Neumark's findings:

Demographically, about half of the 3 million or so workers receiving the minimum are 16 to 24 years old, with the highest concentration in the leisure and hospitality industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, the percentage of workers at or below the minimum is on the decline, falling to 3.9 percent in 2014 from the most recent high of 6 percent in 2010.

Neumark also points out that many of those receiving the wage aren't poor — there are no workers in 57 percent of families below the poverty line, while 46 percent of poor workers are getting paid more than $10.10 an hour, and 36 percent are making more than $12 an hour, he said.

"Mandating higher wages for low-wage workers does not necessarily do a good job of delivering benefits to poor families," Neumark wrote. "Simple calculations suggest that a sizable share of the benefits from raising the minimum wage would not go to poor families."

It is hard to see how raising the wages of people who aren't poor does much to help people who are poor. Neumark argues that a much better way to help poor families is to raise the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Increasing the earned income tax credit is a more effective way to fight poverty, he said. A family of four can get a credit of up to $5,548, which Neumark said is more tailored toward low-income families than hikes in the minimum wage.

"The earned income tax credit targets low-income families much better, increases employment and reduces poverty, and for all these reasons seems far more effective," he wrote.

Unless Neumark's data can be shown to be misleading or incorrect it seems irresponsible or even disingenuous for political figures and others to keep insisting that they want to help the poor by raising the minimum wage.

Books of 2015

Each January I indulge myself by posting an annotated list of the books I managed to read during the year just past. This list does not include every book, but it does include most of them.

(RR) stands for Reread. There are some works which, no matter how many times I've read them, I always benefit from reading them again a few years, or many years, later.

The diversity of the list is largely explained by the fact that I'm in a reading group which often selects books that I probably would never have otherwise sat down with, but which I'm invariably glad I was compelled to read to fulfill my obligation to the group.

Here's the list with a very brief description of each:

1. The Third Target - Joel Rosenberg: An apocalyptic novel set in the Mid-east in the near future.
2. The Legacy Journey - Dave Ramsey: How to be sure you leave an inheritance for your children.
3. The Existence of God - Richard Swinburne (RR): Prominent philosopher of religion discusses some reasons for believing that God exists.
4. The Coherence of Theism - Richard Swinburne (RR): Swinburne refutes the criticism that the concept of God is incoherent.
5. Washington's Secret Six - Brian Kilmeade: True story about a revolutionary war spy ring.
6. God's Battalions - Rodney Stark (RR): An outstanding account of the causes and conduct of the Crusades and why the crusaders were able to defeat their Muslim foes in virtually every encounter despite working from serious strategic disadvantages.
7. Metaethics: An Introduction - Anthony Fisher (RR): A discussion of the possibility and nature of ethics.
8. Being As Communion - William Dembski (RR): All reality reduces not to matter but to information and thus to mind.
9. Why Football Matters - Mark Edmunson: Life lessons from the authors experience playing high school football in the late 1960s.
10. Consciousness and the Existence of God - J.P. Moreland (RR): A prominent philosopher of mind explains why conscious experience leads to theism.
11. Finding Truth - Nancy Pearcey: An excellent summary of the failures of the naturalistic worldview.
12. Atheists: The Origin of the Species - Nick Spencer: A history of atheism and atheistic thought in the West.
13. Heroes and Heretics - Thomas Cahill: Interesting biographical sketches of medieval personalities.
14. The Italian Renaissance - J.H. Plumb: A historical overview of the major personalities of the Renaissance.
15. Theodicy - Gottfried Leibniz: Leibniz's famous work in which he seeks to explain why God allows suffering and evil in the world.
16. Roman Life in the Days of Cicero - Alfred Church: A look at some of the famous historical personages of Rome prior to the Christian era.
17. Time and Eternity - William Lane Craig (RR): Philosopher William Lane Craig lays out his view of the nature of time.
18. Discourse on Metaphysics - Gottfried Leibniz: Leibniz discusses his metaphysical views.
19. Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume (RR): Perhaps skeptical philosopher David Hume's most famous work.
20. The Grand Design - Hawking and Molodinow: Two famous cosmologists discuss the origin and nature of the universe.
21. Lives of the Artists - Georgi Vasari: Vasari was Florentine artist living toward the end of the fifteenth century who undertook to collect all the biographical information he could on the artists who gave us the Renaissance. Many of these men he knew personally.
22. Reasonable Faith - Wm. Lane Craig (RR): Philosopher W.L. Craig's major work on Christian apologetics.
23. Atheist's Guide to Reality - Alex Rosenberg: Duke philosopher and atheist lays out the case for nihilism as a consequence of atheism.
24. The Agony and the Ecstacy - Irving Stone: Classic novel recounting the life of Michaelangelo.
25. On Guard - Wm. Lane Craig: A simpler version of Craig's Reasonable Faith (see above).
26. Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible - Jerry Coyne: Atheist biologist argues that coexistence between the two spheres is impossible.
27. Things That Matter - Charles Krauthammer: A collection of essays from Krauthammer's long career as a syndicated columnist.
28. Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus - Nabeel Qureshi: Story of one man's journey from devout Muslim to devout Christian.
29. Killing Reagan - O'Reilly and Dugard: Story of Reagan's presidency with emphasis on the assassination attempt by John Hinckley.
30. Aquinas - Ed Feser (RR): Scholastic philosopher Ed Feser discusses the life and philosophy of the great 13th century philosopher theologian Thomas Aquinas.
31. Not in God's Name - Jonathan Sacks: Jewish Rabbi Sacks weaves a fascinating explication of the book of Genesis with a strong message of reconciliation important for our own time.
32. Jesus and the Jihadis - Evans and Johnson: A comparison of the teachings of Christ and Mohammad, Christianity and Islam.
33. Fool's Talk - Os Guinness: Guinness explains how to, and how not to, talk to others about Christianity.
34. Locke - Ed Feser: Feser considers the thought of John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration.
35. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr: An elegant novel about a blind girl in the midst of the German invasion of France during WWII.
36. Là Bas - J.K. Huysmans: An autobiographical novel by the late 19th century French writer who writes about the depravity of fin de siècle Paris and man's need for God.

In the Absence of God and Racial Bigotry

One of the comments I sometimes get from readers of my novel In the Absence of God is that they were somewhat surprised that, in their estimation, much is made of interracial dating in the book. In the opinion of these readers this is just not a concern in these enlightened times.

I'd offer two responses to this criticism. First, I don't think that the book makes that big a deal of it, and second, if anyone thinks that interracial romances are no longer an issue perhaps they should talk to the actress Tamera Mowry. Mowry recently discussed her own experience with Oprah Winfrey:

It’s no secret that “Sister, Sister” star Tamera Mowry is blissfully married to Fox News correspondent Adam Housely, but what some might not have known is that the actress has faced intense online abuse over their mixed-race relationship.

Mowry, 35, tearfully recounted the name-calling and mistreatment she has received as a result of her marriage to Housely in an interview for Oprah Winfrey’s “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”

She appeared on the segment alongside her twin sister and co-star Tia.

The response from online haters has apparently been so intense that Mowry told Winfrey she never experienced “so much hate” in her life until after her 2011 nuptials, the Daily Mail reported.

“See, this is where I get emotional, because it’s hurtful,” Mowry said through tears. “Because when my husband and I are so openly — and we’re fine with showing — in love. But people choose to look past love and spew hate.”

The story at the Daily Mail has more details, particularly about where the hurtful comments are coming from. It really is sad that in 2014 it's still very hard for some people to see past skin color, but apparently it is, and In the Absence of God captures a relatively small and quite mild slice of this bit of social reality.

Note: I ran the preceding post on VP last year and received a lot of feedback on it. Much of the response expressed disappointment and even outrage that still today a white woman cannot date a black man without being subjected to racist hate from other whites. The problem with this reaction is that it simply, and naively, assumed that Tamera Mowry is white, her husband is black, and that the racists who assailed her were also white. In fact, as the story at the link reveals, the opposite is true. It's amazing the assumptions people hold about race and the illicit conclusions they eagerly jump to.

What We'll Lose

Secularists of various stripes applaud the decline of Christianity in the modern era, but should they? Set aside the question whether Christianity is true and ask instead the question what will be lost when Christianity is gone?

Put the question this way: What are the values that Western democracies cherish? At a minimum they would include:

1. Individual equality (including that of women and minorities) under the law
2. Tolerance of dissent
3. Separation of church and state
4. Social Justice (charity, concern for the poor)
5. Freedom of speech
6. Freedom of religion

There are others but just limiting ourselves to these, what other comprehensive belief system or worldview offers a ground for these values? Certainly not Islam which rejects all of them with the possible exception of #4 (but even here concern for the poor often extends only to other Muslims of one's own sect).

Nor does naturalism (the worldview held by many secularists that says that the natural world is all there is) offer any support for any of these. On naturalism we are the product of blind impersonal forces that have shaped us to survive competition with our competitors. There is nothing in this process which in any sense mandates any of the values listed above. There's no reason, on evolutionary grounds, why any society should value any of them over their contraries.

But, it might be argued, evolution has equipped us with reason and reason dictates that these values afford the best way to order a society. We don't need Christianity to instill or ground these values, it might be claimed, reason can do the job.

This, however, is not quite true. Reason can tell us the best way to exemplify these values, perhaps, but it cannot decide whether or not a society should incorporate them. To prefer a society which upholds them over against one which does not is simply an arbitrary preference. It is to say that a society which exhibits these values is better than alternative polities because, well, we just happen to have an arbitrary fondness for these values.

Aside from providing a solid grounding for those political values, what else has Christianity bestowed on the West? There's a consensus among scholars the vast majority of the world's best art and music has been inspired by Christian assumptions. These also furnished the motivation for the development of schools and hospitals in Europe and North America, and provided the fertile philosophical soil in which modern science could germinate and thrive. To the extent that other worldviews have inspired their followers to notable cultural achievements, generally speaking they have neither amounted to much nor been sustained for long without somehow piggy-backing on Christianity.

Naturalism and Islam may succeed in extirpating Christian influence, but the world they would create will look very much like either the Stalinist dystopia of Orwell's 1984 or the Islamic dystopia of ISIS. It might not happen abruptly - an airliner can glide a long way after having exhausted its fuel and the higher its altitude the longer it can remain aloft before crashing to earth - but it won't remain airborne indefinitely. Similarly, one or the other of these two bleak dystopias represents the future that awaits us a generation or two after the fuel of Christian assumptions has finally been drained from the West.

Woodpeckers and Concussions

According to an essay in The Federalist,

The average woodpecker hits its beak against a tree at an estimated 15 miles an hour, 20 times per second, about 12,000 times a day. According to physicists, for the bird, that is an equivalent of coming to a complete stop every second from 26,000 miles per hour. This happens every day over the woodpecker’s lifespan. In g-force—the force exerted using mass, weight, acceleration, and gravity—a woodpecker can withstand 1,200 g. Yet the birds do not suffer any head injuries or brain trauma.

In comparison, the average National Football League hit has two players colliding between 100 to 150 g, often experiencing concussions that register when impact reaches 80 to 100 g. How then, is it possible that a tiny bird can withstand ten times the impact as a human...?

Well, Matt Soniak at Mental Floss has an answer to that question. I've borrowed some of it here:

First, a woodpecker’s skull is built to absorb shock and minimize damage. The bone that surrounds the brain is thick and spongy, and loaded with trabeculae, microscopic beam-like bits of bone that form a tightly woven “mesh” for support and protection. On their scans, the scientists found that this spongy bone is unevenly distributed in woodpeckers, and it is concentrated around the forehead and the back of the skull, where it could act as a shock absorber.

Woodpeckers' hyoid bones act as additional support structures. In humans, the horseshoe-shaped hyoid is an attachment site for certain throat and tongue muscles. Woodpeckers’ hyoids do the same job, but they’re much larger and are differently shaped. The ends of the “horseshoe” wrap all the way around the skull and, in some species, even around the eye socket or into the nasal cavity, eventually meeting to form a sort of sling shape. This bizarre-looking bone, the researchers think, acts like a safety harness for the woodpecker’s skull, absorbing shock stress and keeping it from shaking, rattling and rolling with each peck.

Inside the skull, the brain has its own defenses. It’s small and smooth, and is positioned in a tight space with its largest surface pointing towards the front of the skull. It doesn’t move around too much, and when it does collide with the skull, the force is spread out over a larger area. This makes it more resistant to concussions, the researchers say.

A woodpecker’s beak helps prevent trauma, too. The outer tissue layer of its upper beak is longer than the lower beak, creating a kind of overbite, and the bone structure of the lower beak is longer and stronger than the upper one. The researchers think that the uneven build diverts impact stress away from the brain and distributes it to the lower beak and bottom parts of the skull instead.

The woodpecker’s anatomy doesn’t just prevent injuries to the brain, but also its eyes. Other research using high-speed recordings has shown that, in the fraction of a second just before their beaks strike wood, woodpeckers’ thick nictitans—membranes beneath the lower lid of their eyes, sometimes called the “third eyelid”—close over the eyes. This protects them from debris and keeps them in place. They act like seatbelts, says ophthalmologist Ivan Schwab, author of Evolution's Witness: How Eyes Evolved, and they keep the retina from tearing and the eye from popping right out of the skull.

There’s also a behavioral aspect to the damage control. The researchers found that woodpeckers are pretty good at varying the paths of their pecks. By moving their heads and beaks around as they hammer away, they minimize the number of times in a row that the brain and skull make contact at the same point. Older research also showed that the strike trajectories, as much as they vary, are always almost linear. There’s very little, if any, rotation of the head and almost no movement immediately after impact, minimizing twisting force that could cause injury.

Very interesting, but I have a question for Matt. Early on in his piece on woodpecker adaptations he says this:

In an average day, a woodpecker does this [bangs its head against a tree] around 12,000 times, and yet they don’t seem to hurt themselves or be the least bit bothered by it. This is because, after millions of years of this type of behavior, they’ve evolved some specialized headgear to prevent injuries to their heads, brains, and eyes.

My question is how did they survive for millions of years before the requisite anatomical equipment evolved? Imagine primitive human beings coming to think that banging their heads against a brick wall will somehow help them find food. It would seem that they'd all quickly give up the behavior or else go extinct long before they evolved the cranial structures to mitigate the damage they were doing to themselves. That woodpeckers have obviously not gone extinct, that they've evolved all these marvelous adaptations through sheer blind luck, is testimony to the stupefyingly miraculous powers and wonders of Darwinian naturalism. Or God.

Lewis' Woodpecker

Two Myths

Andrew McCarthy has an insightful piece at NRO in which he challenges two myths, one Republican, one Democrat, about ISIS and moderate Muslims. He begins with the Democrats' myth:

Let me ask you a question. Let’s say you are an authentically moderate Muslim. Perhaps you were born into Islam but have become secularist. Or perhaps you consider yourself a devout Muslim but interpret Islam in a way that rejects violent jihad, rejects the concept that religious and civic life are indivisible, and rejects the principle that sharia’s totalitarian societal framework and legal code must be imposed on the state.

Let’s just take that as a given: You are no more inclined toward terrorism than any truly peaceful, moderate, pro-democratic non-Muslim. So let me pop the question: Is there any insulting thing I could say, no matter how provocative, or any demeaning video I could show you, no matter how lurid, that could convince you to join ISIS?

Mind you, I am not asking whether, upon my insulting and provoking you, you would ever want to have anything to do with me again. I am asking whether there is anything that could be said or done by me, or, say, Donald Trump, or Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — the video producer (Innocence of Muslims) whom Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tried to blame for the Benghazi massacre — that could persuade you to throw up your hands and join the jihad? Is there anything so profoundly offensive to Islam that we could conjure up that would make a truly moderate, peaceful Muslim sign up for mass murder? Torching and beheading? Killing children? Participating in systematic rape as a weapon of war?

I didn’t think so.

Yet, understand, that is what Washington would have you believe. Whether it is Barack Obama sputtering on about how Guantanamo Bay drives jihadist recruitment, or Hillary Clinton obsessing over videos (the real one by Nakoula that she pretended caused terrorism in Libya, and the pretend ones about Donald Trump that she claims have Muslims lined up from Raqqa to Ramadi to join ISIS), you are to believe violent jihad is not something that Muslims do but that Americans incite.

It's ludicrous, of course, to blame Americans and American policies for ISIS, but that's the Left's knee jerk response to whatever is wrong in the world. If it weren't for us evil Americans global peace and love would reign and the lion would lie down with the lamb. It's the bedtime story Barack Obama's mother told him when he was a child and other liberals imbibed from their university professors in the '60s.

Democrats do not hold a monopoly on the mythologizing, however. Republicans fault President Obama for not intervening sooner in Syria on behalf of the rebels, and allege that had he done so ISIS would never have gotten off the ground there. McCarthy thinks this is nonsense, and I, for what it's worth, agree.

McCarthy's point is that ISIS has a broad appeal throughout the Muslim world not because Americans insult Muslims, or because we imprison them in Guantanamo Bay, or because we avoided making the same mistake with Assad that we made with Libya's Qadaffi and Egypt's Mubarak, but because ISIS' violence strongly appeals to many Muslims who embrace a religion whose founder and holy books give ample justification for it.

In other words, the much heralded "moderate Muslim" is not nearly as common as we in America would like to think. If this seems exaggerated I recommend an article by David French at National Review Online in which French presents a compelling argument, backed up by data, in support of this claim with which he opens the essay:

It is simply false to declare that jihadists represent the “tiny few extremists” who sully the reputation of an otherwise peace-loving and tolerant Muslim faith. In reality, the truth is far more troubling — that jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting. Not all Muslims are hateful, of course, but so many are that it’s not remotely surprising that the world is wracked by wave after wave of jihadist violence.

There's much more in French's essay worth reflecting upon.

Sex Über Alles

Is there an absolute right to have sex? Planned Parenthood (PP) evidently thinks so. In fact, according to PP the right to sex trumps everything else, including a partner's right to know that she or he is about to be exposed to HIV. Kimberly Elis provides some details about PP's position at The Federalist:

It’s all laid out in International Planned Parenthood Federation’s booklet for HIV-positive youth entitled “Healthy, Happy and Hot.” It says, “Young people living with HIV have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose their HIV status.” It continues: “Sharing your HIV status is called disclosure. Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.”

In other words, Planned Parenthood thinks it’s your human right to risk exposing other people to a potentially deadly disease without telling them.

“Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.”

The pamphlet then gives tips to protect oneself from criminalization, and does say that the best way to protect yourself (which is apparently more important than protecting your partner) is to tell your partner that you are infected before you have sex. This section ends with the statement, “Get involved in advocacy to change laws that violate your rights.” It appears that, according to Planned Parenthood, [the] right to have sex trumps [a] partners’ right to live.

This, I should think, raises an interesting question for secularists: Is PP right or are they wrong? Not just "reckless" or "tasteless" or "inappropriate", but morally wrong in the sense that someone who knowingly exposes a sex partner to AIDS has in fact violated an objective moral duty and justly deserves punishment.

Of course, if there is no divine moral law to which we're accountable then there's no reason why we should not put our own desires ahead of the well-being of others, there's no reason why it would be wrong in any morally meaningful sense to use people as a means to the end of our pleasure, which is essentially what PP is endorsing. They're advocating an egoistic hedonism that really is the ethical default position in a secular world.

If a secularist or atheist thinks it is wrong, though, to withhold what may be life or death information from one's partner, then at least two things follow. First, the secularist is tacitly admitting that there exists a moral authority to whom we are accountable who has proscribed this sort of behavior. Second, the person is admitting that ethical relativism is unworkable and that the notion that in a tolerant society we cannot condemn the behavior of others is arrant nonsense.

So we must decide. Either PP is right that no one should be obligated to disclose to a partner that they're HIV positive, or they're wrong and there is a moral duty to put the welfare of others ahead of one's own gratification. If there is no transcendent moral authority then, of course, PP is right and no one is doing anything immoral, no one is doing anything for which he incurs any sort of moral guilt, by putting one's own interests ahead of the interests of others.

If, however, we conclude that PP is wrong and that a person is morally culpable if he endangers someone's well-being simply for his own selfish purposes, then we are tacitly acknowledging an objective moral code that egoistic behavior violates. But an objective moral code can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority to promulgate it. In other words, saying that PP is wrong and that people do not have the right to expose a partner to HIV without the partner's knowledge is very close to saying that God, or something very much like God, must exist.

For Christmas Eve

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding the Incarnation. The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and His creatures could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the source and meaning is irrelevant. All the talk of Santa Claus, ads for cars, beer, movies and phones, all the insipid secular "holiday" songs - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. Christmas Eve is sterile and empty without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

Here are two traditional Christmas pieces (and a third contemporary piece) that capture some of the magic, mystery, and power of this night. I hope you enjoy them and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful Christmas and a very special 2016:

It might be best just to listen to this next one without watching it since the video is a bit out of sync with the audio:

And if you have a little time, this is perhaps my favorite contemporary Christmas song, particularly the lyrics in the second part which never fail to move me, though I'm not sure I can articulate exactly why:

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

No Safe Spaces at Morning Joe

Mika Brezinski on MSNBC's Morning Joe gave former senator Rick Santorum a good browbeating yesterday for holding politically incorrect views on Muslims, but she herself said something that should have sent the racial sensitivity antenna of liberals humming toward the end of her reprimand:

Forget that citing white men with guns seemed like a bit of a non-sequitur in the context of the discussion, the deeper concern is the explicit racism, at least as the PC crowd see racism, in her challenge to Santorum. Why "white" men? Why does race matter when talking about gun deaths? Why not just say "men with guns"? This seems a clear-cut case of racial "macroaggression" if ever there was one.

Maybe somebody might reply that Mika believes the problem in this country really is white men with guns, that white men are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun deaths nationally, but surely she can't think that. If she does she's burying her head in the sand. Has she not heard of the homicide statistics coming out of cities like Chicago where in one year five hundred victims are murdered by non-whites wielding guns?

Consider the data from FBI statistics for 2014:

2722 homicides were committed by whites (including several hundred females and Hispanics) in 2014. Blacks, despite being only 12% -15% of the population, committed 2676 homicides - virtually the same number as whites. If we assume that most of these murders were committed with guns then for Mika to implicate white men when white men are, in terms of their proportion of the population, obviously not responsible for the gun death problem in America clearly reveals a racial animus on her part toward whites.

Here's an irony: Her implied claim that the gun problem is a problem primarily of white men is factually incorrect but evidently acceptable in the liberal circles in which she moves because it's politically correct. However, had a conservative alleged that the real problem is black men with guns, she would be factually correct but would be labelled a racist for saying it because political correctness is more important in much of our society than is truth.

P.S. Those who, like me, are concerned about excessive use of force by police, might find this chart interesting. Look at the tiny sliver (pale blue) of deaths caused by police at the top of the chart. Notice that not only are the percentages of deaths, including justified deaths, caused by police miniscule, they're also about the same for whites as they are for blacks. We don't hear much about that from our media:

Cosmogenesis

One of the most popular forms of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God (or at least something like God) goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

The argument then goes on to flesh out what sort of attributes a cause of the universe must have, and it turns out that those attributes describe a being that comes pretty close to the God of theism. It must, for example, transcend space, time, and materiality. It must be unimaginably powerful, intelligent, and personal.

Skeptics, however, take issue with the second premise. They argue that the universe could be past eternal, i.e. that it never had a beginning, but this view seems to run counter to the standard Big Bang model of cosmology which states that the universe exploded into being from a single point about 14 billion years ago.

One of the most prominent cosmologists in the field is a physicist named Alexander Vilenkin, who, along with Alan Guth and Arvinde Borde, developed the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin theorem which asserts, among other things that any universe that has the characteristics that ours does, had a beginning. Vilenkin writes about the implications of this theorem in an interesting piece here.

The passages most relevant to the second premise of the above argument are these:

Inflation [of the universe] cannot be eternal and must have some sort of a beginning.

[T]he universe could not have existed for an infinite amount of time before the onset of inflation.

This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cyclic universe cannot be past-eternal.

The answer to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.

Nevertheless, Vilenkin sees a problem with the first premise. He asserts that it's possible for a universe to pop into existence out of nothing:

If all the conserved numbers of a closed universe are equal to zero, then there is nothing to prevent such a universe from being spontaneously created out of nothing. And according to quantum mechanics, any process which is not strictly forbidden by the conservation laws will happen with some probability.

...No cause is needed for the quantum creation of the universe.

The theory of quantum creation is no more than a speculative hypothesis. It is unclear how, or whether, it can be tested observationally. It is nonetheless the first attempt to formulate the problem of cosmic origin and to address it in a quantitative way.

Two things: Vilenkin is not saying that the universe actually did begin causelessly out of "nothing," but rather that quantum theory can't rule it out.

Secondly, Vilenkin employs a metaphysically problematic concept of "nothing." He seems to be saying that the pre-creational state could have been a physical system of zero energy out of which the universe could have arisen uncaused. This state he defines as "nothing," but a physical state of any sort is surely not nothing. It may have no material substance and the positive and negative energies may total zero or there may be no energy at all, but if it's a physical state it's not nothing. We may have difficulty comprehending it and describing it, but at least we can say that it is something. Nothing means "not anything," and what Vilenkin describes does not fit that definition.

In any event he closes his paper with these thoughts:

When physicists or theologians ask me about the BGV theorem, I am happy to oblige. But my own view is that the theorem does not tell us anything about the existence of God. A deep mystery remains. The laws of physics that describe the quantum creation of the universe also describe its evolution. This seems to suggest that they have some independent existence.

What exactly this means, we don’t know.

And why are these laws the ones we have? Why not other laws? We have no way to begin to address this mystery.

Well, with due respect to Professor Vilenkin, a good beginning to addressing the mystery can be found in the argument at the top of this post.

Miscellany

The media was mildly surprised (disappointed?) that no disturbances materialized in Baltimore after a mistrial was declared in the case of officer William Porter who was charged in the death of a man named Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody. There should've been no surprise. Officer Porter is black. Had he been white the city would now be in flames. This case is really not about the death of Freddie Gray, it's about the perceived mistreatment of blacks by white cops. If a black cop mistreats a black suspect that doesn't stoke the anger of the African American community, but if a white cop did the same thing and the jury failed to reach a verdict it would be explosive. The media would be dumping gas on the fire by pointing out at every opportunity the race of the cop (it was often never mentioned in the Porter case), and all but declaring that the whole system is racist. In other words, white cops are held to a higher standard than are black cops. Isn't that itself racist?

Bernie Sanders is rightly upset that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) has chosen to hold their presidential primary debate tonight, a Saturday night during peak shopping season when it's guaranteed that hardly anyone will be watching television. Of course, the DNC doesn't actually want anyone to watch the debate since the more exposure Hillary gets the lower her ratings fall, and the DNC wants her as their candidate. So, the DNC's chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has chosen to hide her from public view as much as possible. The DNC has also blocked the Sanders campaign from accessing a voter database, a move which Sanders is interpreting as yet another attempt to sabotage his campaign. Perhaps Sanders should consider exacting the ultimate revenge against the Democrats by running in the general election as an independent candidate. He's already an Independent senator and he has every reason to think he's been treated unfairly by the Democrats, so why not? Run, Bernie, Run!

Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has added his name to the growing list of ex-SecDefs who've expressed their dismay with the manner in which the Obama administration conducts its foreign policy. Hagel gives the impression that the president and his team are flying by the seat of their pants:

Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him.

It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day approving final plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders to fire.

Instead, Obama told a stunned Hagel to stand down. Assad’s Aug. 21 chemical attack in a Damascus suburb had killed hundreds of civilians, but the president said the United States wasn’t going to take any military action against the Syrian government. The president had decided to ignore his own red line — a decision, Hagel believes, that dealt a severe blow to the credibility of both Obama and the United States.

In the days and months afterward, Hagel’s counterparts around the world told him their confidence in Washington had been shaken over Obama’s sudden about-face. And the former defense secretary said he still hears complaints to this day from foreign leaders.

“A president’s word is a big thing, and when the president says things, that’s a big deal,” he said.

Hagel's complaint leads us to wonder why the options for our response to the contingency that Assad would cross Mr. Obama's "red line" not all planned out and agreed upon in advance. Isn't that how a competent White House would operate?

The Trump/Limbaugh Axis

Every now and then I read a column in which the writer says so many things that I agree with, and says them so well, that I just have to sit back and admire the piece as one would a work of art. Guy Benson has composed such a work recently in a TownHall essay.

What he says about Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh seems to me precisely right and expresses almost exactly the feelings I've had for some time about Limbaugh's advocacy of Trump. Limbaugh has been assiduously promoting Trump since last spring, shedding both logical consistency and his vaunted conservative principles like a newlywed shedding clothing in a dash to the wedding bed, and in the process depriving other more worthy candidates of much-needed political oxygen. Had Rush focused from the beginning on the accomplishments of the candidates instead of jumping headlong onto the Trump bandwagon perhaps Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal, two eminently qualified governors, might still be in the race.

Making his shameless shilling worse, all the while he has denied that that's what he's doing. It's discouraging to hear Limbaugh, who fancies himself the voice of genuine conservatism, joining the multitude of erstwhile conservatives who've been seduced into forfeiting their ideological chastity by a man who has himself been a life-long liberal.

Benson provides chapter and verse, supporting each of his claims about Trump with links to sources. His column might be an education for those who think Trump is the conservative Moses anointed to lead us out of Obama's Egypt. Here's his close:

My opposition to Trump, therefore, is rooted in a commitment to principles, an abiding belief that character matters, and a burning desire to win. People are welcome to disagree with my analysis. Rush Limbaugh, who's been at this longer than I've been alive, may recognize some utility in Trump that I'm missing. But I wish he and others would quit suggesting that passionate conservative resistance to Trump must be a capitulation to political correctness, or a "tell" that one has been seduced by the siren song of impressing the so-called 'smart set.'

Indeed, motive-impugning can cut both ways. For instance, some have suggested that Rush et al are indulging Trump against their better judgment because they're fearful of alienating their own audience, having stoked the embers of anti-establishment resentment for so long. But rather than ascribing unseemly and ulterior motives to one another, perhaps those of us who still care about issues and who prioritize the defeat of Hillary Clinton should focus our energies on a serious, substantive debate about who best fulfills William F. Buckley's sage electoral standard: Who is the most conservative candidate with the best chance of winning?

The answer to that question is necessarily subjective on both fronts, and opinions will inevitably vary. I'd submit that Donald Trump satisfies neither criterion; just the opposite, in fact. Despite his attention-grabbing bravado and unapologetic demeanor that appeals to many right-leaning voters at the moment, a robust empirical case can be made that he's both the least conservative and least electable figure in the GOP race. If you disagree, terrific. Feel free state your case and employ arguments to persuade Trump skeptics, preferably while eschewing his penchant for personal invective. I'll leave you with this -- which is, with respect, not persuasive [here Benson posts a tweet from Limbaugh essentially claiming that since Hamas condemns Trump's proposed ban on Muslims and many Republicans also condemned the ban, therefore the Republicans are in bed with Hamas]

Comparing Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Charles Krauthammer, and Dick Cheney -- among many others -- to Hamas for opposing Trump's half-baked, already-revised Muslim moratorium "plan" relies on logic so fatuous that I'd very much enjoy listening to a Rush Limbaugh segment eviscerating it. If only it had been deployed by somebody else, against somebody else.

Me too.

Unserious

President Obama has assured us that his intent as Commander-in-Chief is to degrade and destroy ISIS, but the American people might be forgiven for thinking that he's not really serious about this. In fact, to think he's not serious is to put the most charitable construction on the president's execution of his stated policy. The alternative explanation is that he's grossly incompetent. Here's why:

1. The most effective anti-ISIS fighting force currently in theater are the Kurds, but to defeat ISIS the Kurds need more sophisticated weaponry which the Obama administration has refused to give them.
2. The Obama administration agreed to essentially give 1.5 billion dollars to Iran which they are free to use to finance terror around the world, construct ICBMs, and eventually nuclear weapons. In exchange for this we got nothing. Not even the four Americans being held prisoner in Iranian jails.
3. When the Russians decided to retaliate for ISIS' blowing up their airliner over Sinai they found hundreds of oil tankers to bomb. After over a year of our bombing ISIS targets why were these trucks, vehicles that are crucial to ISIS' ability to sell oil on the black market, still available as targets?
4. When the French decided to retaliate for the Paris attacks they found training facilities and Command centers still available as targets. How could that be after we'd dropped so much ordnance on ISIS?
5. Facilities used by ISIS to propagandize the Muslim world and recruit fresh jihadi warriors have also been left untouched by our aircraft.
6. Now we're discovering that four years ago a DHS memo was circulated which suggested it might be useful to review the social media postings of those applying for visas to the U.S., but the Obama administration rejected the proposal. Had Tashfeen Malik been subjected to this sort of scrutiny she may not have ever been allowed into this country where she and her husband murdered a dozen of his co-workers:

Perhaps an alternative explanation for this administration's desultory approach to the threats which confront us is that Mr. Obama and his advisors are so deeply marinated in left-wing ideology that they're simply blind to the possibility that conservatives have been right all along about the severity of the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalists. This may be so, but it's indistinguishable from the possibility offered above that the demands placed on the occupant of the Oval Office are way over Mr. Obama's head.

The Muslim Dilemma

Ross Douthat has penned a thoughtful piece in the New York Times on what he calls the Islamic dilemma. After citing polls which show a majority of Americans believing that Islam is incompatible with "American values", Douthat writes:

But for several reasons — because we don’t understand Islam from the inside, but also because we’re divided about what our civilization stands for and where religious faith fits in — we have a hard time articulating what a “moderate” Muslim would actually believe, or what we expect a modernized Islam to become.

And to any Muslim who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, it must seem that many Western ideas about how Islam ought to change just promise its eventual extinction.

This is clearly true of the idea, held by certain prominent atheists and some of my fellow conservatives and Christians, that the heart of Islam is necessarily illiberal — that because the faith was born in conquest and theocracy, it simply can’t accommodate itself to pluralism without a massive rupture, an apostasy in fact if not in name.

This is, of course true. At the heart of Islam is adherence to the law inscribed in the Qu'ran and Hadith called sharia. To renounce sharia is, in the eyes of many if not most Muslims, tantamount to renouncing Islam, but sharia is incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed in our Bill of Rights. Sharia does not permit freedom of speech or equality of persons. It imposes a patriarchal rule of men over women, enjoins mutilation for certain crimes and makes sodomy and conversion from Islam a capital offense.

As long as the numbers of Muslims are relatively few the Constitution can be enforced in their communities, but this would get more and more difficult as their numbers and political power grows.

Thus, as Muslims see it, they have two choices, hold on to sharia, the Qu'ran, and the example of Mohammad or simply reinterpret all the problematic stuff out of existence. Douthat goes on to discuss these alternatives:

The first idea basically offers a counsel of despair: Muslims simply cannot be at home in the liberal democratic West without becoming something else entirely: atheists, Christians, or at least post-Islamic.

The second idea seems kinder, but it arrives at a similar destination. Instead of a life-changing, obedience-demanding revelation of the Absolute, its modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch – one more sigil in the COEXIST bumper sticker, one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition.

The first idea assumes theology’s immutability; the second assumes its irrelevance. And both play into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda: The first by confirming their own clash-of-civilizations narrative, the second by making assimilation seem indistinguishable from the arid secularism that’s helped turn Europe into a prime jihadist recruiting ground.

Parenthetically, it's unfortunate that Douthat reverts here to this tiresome meme. It seems to reflect a belief that whatever we do it plays into the hands of ISIS. According to this belief, we can't win. If we attack ISIS they use "Crusader aggression" to win recruits. If we leave them to their demonic deeds young men around the world see them as sweeping all before them and rush to sign up to be in on the victory over the infidels. ISIS has us completely out-foxed, so it seems that we may as well all just convert and get it over with. Perhaps we should campaign for a moratorium on the use of "We're just playing into the hands of the terrorists." Anyway, Douthat continues:

In this landscape of options, the clearest model for Islam’s transition to modernity might lie in American evangelicalism — like Islam a missionary faith, like Islam decentralized and intensely scripture-oriented, and like Islam a tradition that often assumes an organic link between the theological and political.

Of course American evangelicals are often particularly hostile to Islam — as they are to Mormonism, which also offers an interesting model for modernizing Muslims.

But this is less an irony than a form of recognition: An Islam that set aside the sword without abandoning its fervor would be working in the same mission territory, Western and global, where evangelicals and Mormons presently compete and clash.

But it has to set aside the sword.

The problem is that in order for Muslims to set aside the sword they also have to set aside 1400 years of history and tradition, they have to set aside large chunks of the Qu'ran and Hadith, and they have to stop trying to emulate their founder, Mohammad. That's a very tall order. It would mean that Islam would have to morph into something very much different than it actually is. It amounts in fact, to adopting that second idea Douthat discusses above. Given the social pressures on Muslims to conform and the sense of utter betrayal they'd feel were they to reject the faith of their family and community, it's not likely that many will find it an attractive option.