Letting the Days Go By

Pretty funny:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

What's Going On?

The Saudis have apparently given Israel permission to use bases on their soil for an attack on Iran.

The U.S. has moved a war fleet into the seas near Iran.

A U.A.E. diplomat endorses an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

What's going on here? It looks like the U.S. and Israel are preparing for a joint effort against Iran's nuclear facilities and they've managed to get the support of at least some of Iran's Arab neighbors.

The Arabs fear a nuclear Iran and they know that if nothing is done to prevent the mullahs from getting these devastating weapons several very bad things will happen in the near term. Iran will use nuclear blackmail to bully it's way around the Middle East; a lot of other countries in the region will rush to procure their own nuclear weapons; Iran will use it's power to bring about the destruction of Israel either through the direct use of nuclear warheads or through the action of surrogates.

Moreover, down the road, it's almost a certainty that these weapons will fall into the hands of those who want to smuggle them into European and U.S. cities.

So here's the question confronting Mr. Obama: Is it better to attack the Iranian facilities now and face the uncertain consequences of such an attack, or is it better to let Iran build their nukes and face the certain consequences of a Middle East embroiled in a nuclear arms race and probable nuclear war?

RLC

Debunking Christianity

John Loftus is an interesting fellow. He holds several degrees in philosophy of religion including a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and studied under one of the foremost Christian apologist/philosophers, William Lane Craig. Nevertheless, Loftus has renounced his faith and written a book titled Why I Became an Atheist. He also manages a blog titled Debunking Christianity on which he once posted an essay titled What Would Convince Me Christianity Is True? In that post he raises a number of objections to belief, and I'd like to consider some of them here.

Loftus writes:

I have been asked what would convince me Christianity is true. Let me answer this question.

I could just as easily ask Christians what it would take to convince them that atheism is true. Given the Christian responses I see at DC (Debunking Christianity), I dare say probably nothing would convince them otherwise. Atheism is outside of that which Christians consider real possibilities. It would take a great deal to change our minds across this great debate, no matter what side we are on. Although, since people convert and deconvert to and away from Christianity there are circumstances and reasons for changing one's mind. Here at DC we have changed our minds, and we offer reasons why.

Loftus seems to be contrasting Christianity and atheism, implying that if Christianity is false atheism must be true, but surely this is not correct. Everything that makes Christianity unique among the world's religions could be false and it would have no bearing at all on the question of whether God exists. Even so, Loftus is probably correct that most people who really want Christianity to be true are highly resistant to evidence that it's not. Likewise, despite what Loftus says, people who don't want Christianity to be true are not likely to be persuaded that it is. We cling to beliefs we want to be the case even when the evidence goes against them, because evidence is rarely dispositive. As Thomas Kuhn says in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, anomalies in a belief system simply do not cause us to overthrow the paradigm. We learn to accommodate them or ignore them as long as this can be done. Belief is more a matter of the heart than of the head.

In the second place, Christianity would have to be revised for me to believe that Jesus arose from the dead, since if Jesus arose from the dead then the whole Bible is probably true as well. But many Biblical beliefs are outside of that which I consider real possibilities for the many reasons I offer on this Blog. I see no reason why a triune eternal God is a solution to any of our questions. I see no reason why God should test Adam & Eve, or punish them and their children and their children's children with such horrific consequences for such a mistake. I see no good reason for the animal pain caused by the law of predation in the natural world if a good God exists, either. Nor do I see why God should send a flood to kill practically all human beings. I can no longer believe in the bloodthirsty God of the Bible. He's a barbaric God. I no longer see the Bible as an inspired book, since it contains absurdities and contradictions, being as it were, written by an ancient superstitious people before the rise of modern science.

Loftus is pulling a bit of a switcheroo here. Logically speaking, one can believe that the New Testament, or the Gospels, are reliable history without holding that the Old Testament is. In other words, suppose we resolve all of the above objections by agreeing with Loftus that the Old Testament misrepresents the nature of God at certain key points. What does that have to do with the heart of Christianity? The claim that Jesus was the self-revelation of God, God incarnate, who died to redeem us from our estrangement from Him and who demonstrated His supernatural provenience through a literal and physical resurrection from the dead could all be true even if the Old Testament contains factual errors and contradictions. Whether it really does contain historical mistakes is a separate question from the matter of the reliability of the Gospel accounts.

I see absolutely no way to understand what it means to say Jesus is "God in the flesh", nor how his death on the cross does anything for us, nor where the human side of the incarnation in Jesus is right now. I see no intelligent reason why God revealed himself exclusively in the ancient superstitious past, since it was an age of tall tales among the masses at a time when they didn't understand nature through the laws of physics.

With all due respect to Mr. Loftus, I think these objections are just smokescreens. If they're not then he's saying that it's a sufficient reason for not believing God exists if a full understanding of God is beyond his ken. This strikes me as extraordinarily presumptuous. It also strikes me as inconsistent with how we normally form our beliefs. We may not understand how the universe could consist of eleven dimensions or how light could be both a wave and a particle, or how a photon would not exist in a particular spot until it is observed there, but we don't disbelieve these things just because our comprehension is not up to the task. Indeed, a god that we could understand would not be much of a god. It'd be more like the gods of the ancient pagans, and people like Loftus would be saying that they can't believe in a god so paltry that our puny understanding is sufficient to encompass him.

I see no reason why this God cares about what we believe, either, since people have honest and sincere disagreements on everything from politics to which diet helps us lose the most weight.

Of course people have sincere disagreements and it could be that religions have historically put too much weight on believing the right thing as a condition of eternal life. Let us suppose they have. Let us suppose that eternal life is primarily a matter of one's attitude toward God and only secondarily a matter of believing the correct things about God. Whether you think this is right or not, it could be right, so why doesn't Loftus embrace this possibility rather than letting what could be a misleading dogma keep him from belief in God?

More on Loftus' essay later.

RLC

Biggest Failing

Joe Carter at First Things argues that American sex education is not education at all:

Unless the middle school in Shenandoah, Iowa, is training junior gynecologists, it is unclear why its eighth-graders need to be taught how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct, male sex organ.

The representative from Planned Parenthood, which provided the instruction, justified the curriculum by saying, "All information we use is medically accurate and science based." For them, sexual education can be denuded of all moral content as long as research studies and reams of statistics back up their claims.

The advocates of "comprehensive sex education" want teenagers to "just wear a condom." Planned Parenthood's amoral appeal to "science" shows why that fails: medically accurate and science-based information doesn't give children any idea how to use that information, while it makes them think they can do what they want if only they practice the "safe sex" techniques they've been taught. But I don't think the abstinence advocates' "Just say no" is always an improvement.

Both types of programs are equally flawed and flawed in the same way. Each indoctrinates the children in a particular viewpoint and tries to inoculate them against the negative results of sexual behavior. Neither school of sex educators is primarily concerned with providing an education.

Carter goes on to argue that sex education should include three broad themes. The first is the purpose of sex. Carter writes:

Is sex mainly for pleasure? For bonding? For procreation? For all three, and if so in what proportion? Which is primary? Is sex a gift from a benevolent Creator or merely blind evolution's way of tricking us into passing on our genetic material? Students must be helped to ask these types of questions before they begin the other discussions.

If, for example, we are nothing but gene transmitters, do we have a reason to value monogamy? Do other evolutionary imperatives, like the maintenance of a stable community, require certain restrictions on sexual behavior? If one of the main purposes of sex is procreation, must we accept responsibility for any children that might be conceived as a result of our behavior, and are we limited in the number of people with whom we can bear children?

The rest of his piece is equally good. Check it out.

It's my opinion that one of the biggest failings of the contemporary church is it's failure to tackle this issue head on. I am mystified as to how we can put our children through confirmation classes and teach them all about church doctrine and history but ignore what may be the single most important aspect of growing up in today's society: the nature of love and the proper purpose of their sexuality. It is for many young people the single toughest issue with which they struggle, and we often leave it to the culture to instill in them the assumptions and attitudes they hold about it.

That seems to me to be gross irresponsibility.

It's also a major reason, perhaps, why the church is often considered irrelevant by young people. It doesn't come to grips with the questions of deepest importance to their lives, it largely ignores the cultural waters they swim in, and if it should assay to dip a toe into those waters it often does so in a very tentative and superficial way.

It may be the biggest failing of the church in the last sixty years.

RLC

Agnostic Manifesto

First we had the New Atheism. Now Ron Rosenbaum at Slate is calling for a New Agnosticism. There are a couple or three things to say about his interesting essay.

First, Rosenbaum is at pains to define agnosticism in a way that, I think, distorts the word.

Second, his piece is largely given to criticizing the New Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens (who, parenthetically, is reported to be suffering from esophageal cancer), an enterprise of which I heartily approve, but when he mentions theism, he mostly fires at a straw man.

Let me explain my objection to Rosenbaum's definition of agnosticism. He starts his manifesto with this:

Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the "New Atheism"-the high-profile denunciations of religion in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens-I believe it's important to define a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.

I don't think this is correct. An atheist is one who lacks a belief in a God or gods. Since agnostics lack a belief in God or gods they are atheists, ab defino. To be sure, there are two kinds of atheists - what we might call strong and weak.

The strong atheist, like Dawkins, et al, claim, often dogmatically, that there is no God. The weak atheist allows that God may exist but that even if he does there's not enough evidence to justify belief that he does. This is precisely the agnostic's position and there's really not much practical difference between it and the stronger form of atheism.

Although his critique of the strong atheists is quite good (despite placing a little too much weight on the atheist's inability, or failure, to come to grips with the question why there is something rather than nothing, a criticism which a lot of atheists will probably dismiss with a shrug of indifference) his problem with Christian theism seems to stem from a profound misunderstanding of Christianity.

For instance he says:

Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship, being lectured to by believers and nonbelievers, I found myself feeling more than anything unconvinced by certainties on either side. And feeling the need for solidarity and identity with other doubters. Thus my call for a revivified agnosticism. Our T-shirt will read: I just don't know.

I don't know which theists he was talking to or what they said, but when I hear intelligent people talk about their Christianity I rarely hear them speak in certainties. I hear them mention their "faith commitment," or a "leap of faith," or "wrestlings with doubts," or "seeing through a glass darkly," or the fact that God's existence is the "best explanation for a host of facts about the world," but I don't hear them talking, as the New Atheists often do, as if they just couldn't be wrong about God's existence. If Rosenbaum thinks Christianity is about certainty he hasn't read Kierkegaard.

He seems to think that Christian commitment is something one makes once they arrive at some proof of the truth of the Gospel, but I don't think that's the case at all. Christians place their trust in God because they're convinced he's there, they have good reasons for believing he's there, and they hope they're right. But what they don't have is certainty. No one is vouchsafed that luxury this side of the Jordan. That's why Scripture says that believers "live by faith."

I did enjoy Rosenbaum's essay, however, and I recommend it for the many good things he says about the New Atheists. Here's one example:

You know about the pons asinorum, right? The so-called "bridge of asses" described by medieval scholars? Initially it referred to Euclid's Fifth Theorem, the one in which geometry really gets difficult and the sheep are separated from the asses among students, and the asses can't get across the bridge at all. Since then the phrase has been applied to any difficult theorem that the asses can't comprehend. And when it comes to the question of why is there something rather than nothing, the "New Atheists" still can't get their asses over the bridge, although many of them are too ignorant to realize that. This sort of ignorance, a condition called "anosognosia," which my friend Errol Morris is exploring in depth on his New York Times blog, means you don't know what you don't know. Or you don't know how stupid you are.

Pons asinorum. I like that.

RLC

Free Will and Murder

Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea and keeper of a blog called The paper is relatively short and does a good job of covering the main issues.

It opens with the horrifying account of a murder that took place in England in 1993:

On February 12th 1993, British toddler Jamie Bulger was enticed away from his mother at a local shopping center and led away by his abductors on a short journey that would end in his tragic and horrific death on the railroad tracks three hours later. Evidence at the trial of the two perpetrators indicated that there were points along the way that they could have changed their course of action. Instead, they brutalized, sexually molested, and battered the child to death with bricks and an iron bar before laying his body across the tracks in hopes of hiding evidence of their involvement in his death. The two murderers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were ten years old (Scott).

From a determinist point of view, Jon Venables's and Robert Thompson's fate was set even before their birth. Born to ill-educated, working class parents, the details of the boys' lives constitute a veritable catalogue of social ills. Venables's parents were unstable and depressed and the father eventually abandoned the family. The boy's older and younger siblings were both developmentally challenged and he suffered the brunt of his suicidal mother's physical and verbal abuse. When arrested for the murder of Jamie Bulger, Venables was described as "nearly illiterate" (Slaughter). Thompson's environment was even worse. The second to the youngest of seven violent and aggressive boys, he was, early on, exposed to the criminal habits of his brothers, one of whom was an arsonist and another who was a master thief. Both parents were alcoholics and the father beat the mother regularly. Given the effects on the boys of the atrocious environments and their family histories of alcoholism and abuse, could Venables and Thompson be said to be morally responsible for the actions which led to the tragic death of Jamie Bulger?

The difficulties in trying to navigate between free will and determinism seem intractable. The determinist challenges the libertarian (one who believes in free will) to explicate the nature of a genuinely free choice. Is a free choice one that is completely uncaused? That can't be because our choices, especially our moral choices, arise out of, and are in some sense caused by, our values and beliefs. If our choices are uncaused then they would seem to be spontaneous, unrelated to anything, and, if so, how can we be responsible for them? So, the challenge for the libertarian is to explain how a choice can be influenced by our character, and how our character can be influenced by our environment and genetics, without being determined by these influences.

On the other hand, determinism, if true, has several very unpleasant implications. If it's true then reward and punishment are never deserved since if our choices and behavior are determined by environment and genetics and not freely chosen, an individual is not responsible for anything he does. He's just a passive piece of flotsam swept along by forces outside of his control. Moreover, if determinism is true there can be no moral obligation for one cannot be obligated to do what one cannot do. Finally, determinism is dehumanizing because it tells us that that which makes us unique as humans, the ability to choose our behavior, is just an illusion. On determinism we are essentially robots which means that the idea that humans have dignity and worth is also an illusion.

There's one more problem with determinism. The determinist holds that we always act upon our strongest motives, but the only way we can assess which motives are strongest is to see what it is that we choose. For example, if I choose to have cereal for breakfast the determinist would tell me that my strongest motive was to eat cereal, but if I chose instead to have pancakes he would say that my strongest motive must have been to eat pancakes. In other words, we can only discern our strongest motive by looking at the choice we made. If this is true, however, it means that determinism reduces to a tautology. Since our strongest motive equals whichever motive we act upon the above italicized claim says nothing more than that we always act upon the motive that we act upon. This is true but not very edifying.

So what's the upshot? Philosophical reasoning seems unable to settle the question. There's no compelling reason, if one is a libertarian, to give up one's belief that one is free. One must decide on other than philosophical grounds where one will stand on the matter. If, for example, one believes that we are all accountable for our actions, that people are not just robots, that there are genuine moral obligations, and that at many moments in our lives there really is more than one possible future, then there's no compelling reason the determinist can give to persuade us otherwise. Nor, for that matter, is there reason, if one is a determinist, if one believes that at every moment in our life there's only one possible future, to give up that belief as long as one is willing to accept the existential consequences.

Anyway, read the article at the link. It's quite good.

RLC

Five Books

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is being touted as a potential GOP presidential candidate. In this piece we get a pretty good glimpse of Daniels' intellectual interests and economic philosophy.

The article is an interview with Daniels about five books that have shaped his thinking about economics. He talks about each at length. The five are:

• Road to Serfdom - Friedrich Hayek
• Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
• What it Means to be a Libertarian - Charles Murray
• The Rise and Decline of Nations - Mancur Olson
• The Future and Its Enemies - Virginia Postrel

What Daniels says about these books is fascinating. It's obvious that he's actually read and digested them.

It'd be nice to have someone in the White House familiar with thinkers of this caliber rather than with the works of Marx, Marcuse, Chomsky, and Alinsky.

RLC

Never Too Late

Timothy Egan at Opinionator.com reminds us that it's never too late in life for a burst of creativity. From Clint Eastwood to Joan Didion and Norman MacLean so much of their best work was done after they turned sixty. Even Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer, who, at 47 years-old, is making a bid for the National League All-Star team, recently became the oldest pitcher ever to beat the New York Yankees.

Even so, I wonder how many writers wrote their first successful book after the age of sixty; how many scientists who made great advances in our understanding of the world did so after they passed their sixtieth year; how many composers and other artists produced a work of enduring beauty in their later years. I suspect not many.

Yet Egan's essay affords hope that just because one finds him or herself well past one's physical and mental prime, that's not a reason to think there's nothing left to accomplish. After all, as George Carlin once noted, 70 is only 21 on the Celsius scale.

RLC

Superposition and Eternity

The world of the quantum is a very weird place. In that world it's possible for particles to move in opposite directions at the same time, it's possible for them to exist in more than one place, and more than one state, at the same time. In fact, in some interpretations, particles don't even exist at all until they've been somehow observed. It's all very bizarre.

This article in New Scientist gives us a hint of the weirdness:

Take the simple process of measuring the spin of a photon [a particle of light energy]. Thanks to the strange nature of the quantum world, it can actually be spinning in two directions at once, a phenomenon known as superposition. When we use a detector to measure the spin, however, the superposition disappears and we register a spin occurring in one direction or the other.

Quantum theory does not explain why this happens. "We don't really understand the measurement process," admits Stephen Adler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

If you want to know how little we know, ask a roomful of physicists what goes on when we measure a particle's properties. All will be able to calculate the result of the measurement, but the explanation they give will differ wildly. Some will tell you that new parallel universes necessarily sprang into being. Others will say that, before a measurement is performed, talk of particles having real properties is meaningless. Still others will say that hidden properties come into play.

Researchers fire a single quantum particle, such as a photon, towards two apertures in a screen. Common sense says the photon has to go through one aperture or the other. However, as long as you don't measure which aperture it went through, something remarkable happens.

At a screen on the far side of the twin slits, an interference pattern [an interference pattern is a series of light and dark bands that are formed by the interaction of two waves] forms. This can only occur if the photon goes through both slits at the same time and interferes with itself. In other words, as long as nobody is watching, the photon exists in two different places at once.

A measurement changes everything, however. If you set up the experiment so you can see which slit the photon goes through, the interference pattern disappears; the photon will have gone through one slit or the other, but not both.

This all has, I think, interesting metaphysical implications. Suppose it is true that we have immortal souls. Suppose further that our existence beyond our physical death occurs outside the temporal world, i.e. we exist in a timeless realm in which the past, present and future of this world are all in our present.

If that's a possible state of affairs then it follows that our deaths, which are for us still future events, have already happened for those, like our ancestors, who have already died. Indeed, for them all events which are still in our future are in their eternal present. This means that for them we have already died and could be experiencing union with them now even as we are living out our temporal existence on this earth.

In other words, like quantum particles in a state of superposition, we could exist in two different states (or "places") at once.

Not only does this suggest that we could already be experiencing eternity with those who went before us - as well as those who will die after us - it also gives us an answer to the question that has perplexed theists throughout history: If there's going to be an "end of the world" (in Christianity, a second coming of Christ) when will it happen? If what we have been suggesting here is correct then the answer is, it will happen at the moment that we die. At that moment, for us, the entire future collapses into the present and all of history lies before us like a page in a book.

Sound too bizarre to be true? Perhaps, but it's really no more bizarre than the reality that physicists are discovering at the sub-atomic level of scale.

RLC

Wallis on Afghanistan

Over at The Washington Post's blog, On Faith, Jim Wallis argues that the war in Afghanistan is immoral and that we should get out. His conclusion may be correct, but the reasons he gives for it are, in my opinion, weak and irrelevant.

Wallis opens his essay with this puzzling remark:

But to begin a war and then an occupation of Afghanistan was the wrong policy, quickly killing more Afghan innocents than the American innocents who died on September 11.

I don't know how he knows how many innocent Afghan civilians were killed by American troops, but grant that the number exceeds the three thousand killed on 9/11. Of what importance is that? Does Wallis think that we went to war in Afghanistan in order to kill as many of their civilians as the al Qaeda terrorists killed of ours? By Wallis' reasoning we should have stopped fighting WWII as soon as we killed as many Japanese civilians as were killed at Pearl Harbor.

Here's the metric: Has our primarily military policy in Afghanistan and Iraq killed more terrorists than it has recruited? I think we know the answer to that.

Well, if we do I don't know how we do, and I doubt that Wallis does either. The implication is that going to war has generated and inspired more terrorists than would have been arrayed against us had we not gone to war. How could Wallis, or anyone, know this to be the case? Could it not be just as plausibly argued that had we not gone to war, Islamic youth by the millions would have smelled weakness and joined up with Osama bin Laden to be in on the destruction of the Great Satan?

A new strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on humanitarian assistance and sustainable economic development, along with international policing, was also never tried. It could have been led by NGOs, both faith-based and secular, who have been in the region for years, have become quite indigenous, and are much more trusted by the people of these countries than are the U.S. military. But such assistance would have to be provided, as much as possible, by independent civilian and non-governmental organizations -- both international and local -- rather than using aid as a government adjunct to military operations.

Here again Wallis makes a claim for which he fails to offer any support. How does he know that the Afghan people trust these NGOs more than they trust the military? If the Taliban are kidnapping their leaders or stealing their property who do the people turn to, do you think, to get it stopped? NGOs or the American military? Moreover, if Wallis thinks that we have not already spent a fortune on aid to the people of Afghanistan then he just hasn't been reading the same stuff everyone else has.

Yes, after taking over the country, we do have a responsibility not to simply walk away. There are ethical and moral issues that need to be considered: legitimately protecting Americans from further terrorism; protecting the lives of U.S. servicemen and women; protecting the Afghan people from the collateral damage of war; defending women from the Taliban; genuinely supporting democracy; and of course, saving innocent lives from the collateral damage of war, to name a few.

And if all these missions require 100,000 troops, numerous operations and lots of dead Taliban should we declare that the price is just too high? Wallis says, on the one hand, that we should get out of Afghanistan for moral reasons and on the other that we need to stay there for moral reasons. Well, which is it?

Non-military strategies should have led the way, rather than the other way around, as counter-insurgency doctrine requires. We should not have made aid and development weapons of war by tying them so closely to the military; rather, we should have only provided the security support needed for the development work to succeed -- led by respected, well-established international organizations with strong local connections.

This is pie-in-the-sky nonsense. The fact is that we went in to Afghanistan to get the people who launched 9/11, not to deliver hot lunches to Afghan shepherds. Once we drove al Qaeda and the Taliban out we had an obligation to keep them from flooding back into the country as soon as we left, so we have tried to create a secure environment for the people of Afghanistan. We undertook to strengthen both the government and the nation's infrastructure. Humanitarian efforts only work in areas which are free of the fear of the Taliban, which means our first mission has to be to pacify the countryside. No international organization is going to be keen on sending their workers into areas where they're likely to lose their heads as soon as they show up.

The article told story after story about families being separated by repeated deployments in an endless war. Soldiers who are fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters are dying for a wrong-headed, ineffective, failed, doomed, arrogant, theologically unjust, and yes, immoral war policy. And of course, the ones dying are not the young people headed for our best universities and successful professional careers, but rather they are the ones who have fewer options, or who see the military as their only option. Those with the least opportunities, and their families, are again the ones to sacrifice and suffer. It's not right and it's not fair.

Set aside the fact that despite what he might think of himself, Wallis is not a prophet. He doesn't know that this effort is "wrong-headed, ineffective, failed, doomed, arrogant." We should remember that this is exactly what the progressive opponents of George Bush were saying about Iraq, which Joe Biden is now claiming as an Obama administration success. We should also bear in mind that we have a volunteer military which means that the people fighting this war chose to make the sacrifices that Wallis enumerates. Moreover, his claim that the ones who are making these sacrifices are young men and women who see the military as their only option is utter nonsense. They joined the military because they saw it as a good option, not their only option. Wallis, like Senator Kerry in 2004, would have us believe that our troops are really life's losers. It says more about Wallis' view of those who go into the military than it does about the young men and women themselves.

Neither has Wallis made even a glimmer of an argument that the Afghanistan war is "theologically unjust, and immoral." He simply asserts it and expects us to nod our heads in agreement. But, never mind. As I said at the outset, almost the entire thrust of his essay is irrelevant. I say that because Wallis is a pacifist and would oppose any use of force in Afghanistan no matter how it was carried out. In other words, his argument is disingenuous. He's not opposed to the way our troops have been used, he's opposed, in principle, to any use of troops. It would be nice if he had the forthrightness to tell us that up front, rather than try to convince us that the reason he thinks we should leave Afghanistan is that the war is being managed badly, that it can't be won, and that the military is not being employed to maximum effect.

RLC

When the Bush Tax Cuts Expire

The Heritage Foundation has sent out a mailing in which they make the following claims about the consequences for you and me when the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire in January. I have no link for this, but according to what they say:

When the cuts expire it will be the equivalent of a $2.4 trillion tax increase on families, seniors and businesses.

One hundred million families will face an average tax increase of $1716 per year.

Seventeen million seniors will see their taxes rise an average of $2034.

Small business owners will be socked with an average increase of $3637.

Set aside Mr. Obama's promise that he would not raise taxes on those with incomes less than $250,000 a year. Few believed he was telling us the truth when he made that promise anyway. The question now is, what effect will this additional financial burden have on poverty levels and the average standard of living in this country? The former will necessarily rise and the latter will perforce decline.

Where does this money go? Well, in 2009 $19.6 billion went for frivolous "pork" projects that rewarded special interest groups. Much of it also goes to pay for the administration's stimulus programs that have been such a colossal failure in creating jobs, and, of course, a bloated federal bureaucracy takes their cut.

If you complain that you're being bled dry by our congressional phlebotomists, that you won't be able to manage on what you have left over, then you're told that you're not being patriotic, or that you're just callous, mean-spirited and unwilling to help the less fortunate. Besides, the country voted for hope and change, and, by golly, the Obama administration is going to give it to us. So shut up, stop complaining, fork it over, and have a nice day.

RLC

Black Haters

Imagine that our Department of Justice decided not to prosecute a couple of white klansmen who were intimidating blacks at the polling booths. Imagine that the klansmen had already forfeited, amounting to a guilty plea, and all that the white Attorney General needed to do was sentence them, but he inexplicably dropped the case. Imagine the outrage that would be fulminating across the airwaves until the administration relented.

Of course, something very much like this did happen in the Obama/Holder administration and the only place there's any outrage is on Fox News. Everywhere else, all one hears is the sound of crickets. Nothing from MSNBC, the New York Times, Jim Wallis. Just silence.

Who was the racist whacko that Holder let go? Watch him in action and marvel at the racial double standard in this country. What white racist would be allowed to do or say what this creep is saying?

If a white guy was doing this he'd be hauled off the street and thrown in jail for incitement to violence, as he should be. Not only that, but he would be justly pilloried for 24/7 on the nation's cable news shows his savage and moronic beliefs. In Obama's America, however, black haters get a pass from the liberal left. Why? Are liberals so racist themselves that they think that this is somehow just blacks being blacks? Or are they so otiose that they think we can improve race relations by holding blacks to a lower standard than we hold others?

J. Christian Adams was an attorney in the Department of Justice who resigned because he refused to be complicit in the corruption of the DOJ's Voting Rights Division. He writes:

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the dismissal and the DOJ's skewed enforcement priorities. Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered us to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptable legal limbo.

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it "payback time." Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race.

What Adams reports here is contemptible and frightening. Under President Obama and Attorney General Holder the chief law enforcement institution in the nation is subordinating equal justice to racial preference. I can think of no better way to stoke the fires of racial hatred and violence in this country than to abandon the principle of equality under the law and to turn a blind eye to black crime.

Congress needs to be looking at ways to remove Mr. Holder from his position and the American people need to be looking at ways to remove Holder's party from Congress in November and from the White House in 2012.

RLC

Religion of Peace

I'm sure there are moderate Muslims who just want to live in a country where their children can grow up without having clerics making their lives miserable. Unfortunately, there are also too many like this Australian fellow:

How many Muslims just like this guy are we hosting in this country - here illegally, living off the taxpayers, and plotting to kill as many of us as possible? But don't let it worry you, lots of Muslims are moderates.

RLC

Religion of Compassion

We have on several occasions talked about the film The Stoning of Soraya M. a true account of the judicial murder of an Iranian woman in the 1980s falsely accused of adultery. Now history is about to repeat itself as another Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, having already been lashed 99 times and imprisoned for five years for alleged adultery has now been sentenced to die by stoning:

Keep in mind two things: The barbaric laws that enjoin such punishments are precisely what millions of Muslims, even in this country, wish to foist on the rest of the world, and the people who do this sort of thing to women will soon have nuclear weapons unless the world does something to stop them.

Check out Hot Air for more on this horrific case.

RLC

Life at the Lighthouse - Day 11 (Conclusion)

I do apologize for being so off topic lately. I know full well you don't come to Viewpoint to read such mundane drivel. Unfortunately, circumstances necessitated that I give some of the parties involved an Internet presence in an effort to "persuade" them to be more reasonable. The good news is that it appears there is a satisfactory solution in the works.

Further, I hasten to add that no such coaching was needed for All My Sons Moving & Storage of Raleigh, NC to step up to the table to make things right.

I contacted Kenon Furlong, Manager of All My Sons Moving & Storage of Raleigh, NC and to my surprise, not only did he agree to a 3-way split but also raised the bar by offering to assume 50% of my share of the responsibility! He went on to encourage me to ask Mid-American Apartment Communities to do likewise, which would relieve me of the entire obligation!

Mr. Robert Donnelley from Mid-American Apartment Communities Customer Relations contacted me and, for the first time, I felt I was speaking to someone from that company who had a soul. He asked what I thought would be a fair arrangement. While it went against my sensibilities, I suggested a 3-way split of the expense by the moving company, the Lighthouse apartment complex, and myself. I mentioned Mr. Furlong's suggestion and he responded that it was a reasonable proposal! Mr. Donnelley even went so far as to suggest that my electric bill be adjusted for the cost of running three industrial-strength fans and a dehumidifier for several days to dry the place out. Finally, this issue is behind me.

There's so much more I'd like to mention about the good people and the bad that we encountered in this nightmare story but rather than dwell on that, I'll post an article or two from brother Dick who forwarded them to me before going out of town.

Thanks for reading,

Life at the Lighthouse - Day 9

This is an open letter to the Board of Directors, the Management Team, and Investor Relations at Mid-America Apartment Communities.

Mid-America Apartment Communities
6584 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee 38138
Mid-America Apartment Communities

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Yesterday I received my first threat of eviction by the Hatchet Lady, Laura Hulsey - Community Manager laura.hulsey@maac.net (904) 278-6006. She informed me that if the $750 bill for water damage cleanup is not paid, she cannot accept my rent check. Since she cannot accept the rent check, we will be evicted for not paying the rent. Showing that her heart (if she has one) is in the right place, she quickly offered to structure the cost into four "easy" payments. What a sweetheart!

The plumbing broke while the clothes washer hose was being connected to it. Note that it has not been determined precisely how or why the pipe broke. It was initially determined and claimed by the emergency service man - Guy, that the moving company that was installing the washer tightened the hose to the plumbing excessively. Were that the case, I wouldn't have much to write about, however, the next day I met with Guy and asked him if any tools were required to remove the broken plumbing from the washer hose to which he replied "No". So, in fact, the washer hose was "finger tight" and not tightened excessively. Several other stories have been crafted in attempts to explain what happened, each one contradicting the other. The latest version being that the man installing the washer "must have been standing between the washer and the wall and after hooking up the hose to the plumbing, either tripped on the hose while trying to climb out from behind the washer or tipped the washer over while climbing over it putting excessive stress on the plumbing". Well which is it? Neither, because the instant the leak began, my wife and I could see the man reaching over the washer trying to turn the water off.

All of the attempts to explain the cause of the problem are engineered to place the blame on the moving company (and me) and away from the apartment company.

All that is truly known at this point is that it could have been abuse of some nature but the fact that the hose was finger tight suggests no reason to suspect abuse. That leaves the possibility of faulty plumbing given the age and stress from people having moved in and out connecting and disconnecting their washers for the last ten years.

But Hatchet Lady, Laura Hulsey will not be reasoned with. Her position is that she will not be confused by the facts. Nor, sadly will Mr. Glenn Evers - Regional Manager glenn.evers@maac.net (904) 363-2300.

You can read the background of events here...Day 6 here...Day 8 and here...Day 9

And so now I appeal my case to you ladies and gentlemen. I want to know if there is someone at Mid-Atlantic Apartment Communities that still has a sense of ethics and a grasp of the meaning of integrity.

Thank you,

Update 2

Well, today marks the one-week anniversary of our moving debacle but I have to say I had a delightful conversation with Mr. Kenon Furlong, Manager - All My Sons Moving & Storage, Raleigh, NC yesterday and he has offered assurances that "they will not let us hang out to dry" regarding the expense of water damages that occurred when we moved into our apartment. As a matter of fact, perhaps 25% of the conversation was "business" related and the rest ended up being about unrelated topics of interest that we discovered were common to both of us. (See Viewpoint for the background of this thread. This is very encouraging as it gives us reason to believe there are still some business people of integrity. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing for the folks at The Lighthouse at Fleming Island in Florida.

On the morning after the flood, I visited Laura Hulsey - Community Manager laura.hulsey@maac.net (904) 278-6006 and instead of expressing any concern or interest for our situation, any inquiry as to our well-being, she matter-of-factly made it clear in no uncertain terms that I would be receiving an invoice for the costs of the water damage cleanup. My lightening-quick instincts (LQI) told me this was an evil, otherworldly creature that relishes every opportunity to abuse and oppress tenants. One look into that cold, stupid, lifeless stare of hers makes it intuitively obvious to even the casual observer that this is so.

Years ago I learned what I call the customer's algorithm. Here's the pseudo code...

while (level of service not = acceptable) do {

escalate efforts by contacting someone higher up the corporate food chain

if ((unethical mentality flows from top down = true or

entire corporate culture = polluted or

evidence of integrity = false) or

(satisfied))

then {

quit

}

Update

We recently moved to Florida and thought it good to rent an apartment for a bit while we get familiar with the area after which we will buy or build a home. The chaos mentioned in my earlier post was because while the movers were installing our clothes washer, the fitting and pipe broke causing the apartment to flood. It was about 6:00 pm and the main office was closed so we called the complex's emergency service and twenty minutes later a service man managed to turn the water off. On his way here he called the carpet service they deal with who eventually arrived to begin the clean up by tearing up the carpet and padding in several rooms and setting up industrial strength fans and a dehumidifier which ran for 48 hours.

After the place was dry the carpet service put down new carpet padding and reinstalled the carpet. Five minutes after they left an envelope was slid under the front door by the apartment management containing a bill for the work that had been done. As of this writing, the apartment management believes we are responsible for the expense of the cleanup.

Note that no tools were used to tighten the washer hose to the plumbing nor (as per the emergency service man) were any required to remove the broken piece from the hose. It was "finger tight".

I have contacted the moving company as well as the regional manager of the apartment complex and communicated what happened while trying to avoid the issue of liability and pointing fingers. If all of this can be resolved in a reasonable and fair manner, I will post an article to that effect giving credit where it is due.

If not, I will be posting weekly articles (with graphics) that will give all parties involved an Internet presence they would probably rather not have. I envision a section to the left of Viewpoint's web page either above or below the Hall of Fame titled Hall of Shame with a link to a page that displays a running compilation of all of the posted articles. I will provide the names of the businesses and individuals involved (and email addresses should you chose to express your outrage) so as to be sure they receive the credit they are due. And of course I will email a permalink to the BBB, apartment guides, organizations that review apartment living, and certainly the "We're On Your Side" television news programs, etc.

Stay tuned,

Hello

We're back!

I apologize for the delay getting the server back on line...this last week has been rather chaotic. I'll follow up with more info shortly.

Hiatus

Today marks the last day Viewpoint will be available until July 10th. Please check back with us then.

RLC

Incredible Shrinking Presidency

In previous posts we wondered why the administration has been so slow to respond to the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, especially after the criticism this president heaped on President Bush for his dilatory response to Hurricane Katrina.

Well, it has turned out that there were two big reasons for refusing offers of help from the Dutch and both of them are disgraceful. The first is that the Dutch skimmers remove a tiny fraction less oil from the water than EPA regulations permit and the second is that the use of Dutch skimmers would have meant that unionized American crews would be excluded from the work, which circumstance offends the labor unions in whose pocket our president is ensconced.

Tens of thousands of Gulf coast residents are losing their livelihoods but, hey, the unions are happy.

There's much more in the article at the link to cause you to despair of the competence and intelligence of the people in the White House who seek to assure us that they've been on top of this disaster from day one.

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said recently that the administration has shown so much incompetence in their handling of the oil clean-up that it'll be a long time before anyone has any confidence in the government's ability to manage a crisis.

Indeed, with every passing day both the confidence Americans have in government's ability to solve problems and the stature of President Obama diminish apace. Mr. Obama has become the political embodiment of the Incredible Shrinking Man, and nothing he says about the spill means anything to anyone any more. Maybe it's time for him to retreat to the links for another round of golf and just let the governors of the affected states handle the clean-up.

RLC

Who Did We Gain Our Independence From?

Jay Leno asks some people (including a college instructor!) some basic questions about American history, and the results are as depressing as they are funny. I know you can't draw sweeping conclusions from a small data set, but still ....

It's scary to think that these people probably vote. Gosh, come to think of it, I wonder who they voted for in the last presidential election.

Exit question: Is there some sociological significance in the fact that the only one on the film who knew the answers was the grandpa?

Thanks to Hot Air for calling our attention to the video.

RLC

Fourth of July Meditation

Most Americans know that Thomas Jefferson, at the age of only 33, was tasked with composing the Declaration of Independence, but we probably don't know much about how his selection came about. The following is a letter John Adams wrote to his secretary of State Thomas Pickering summarizing the selection process (and also giving a few hints as to Adam's personality, a personality captured very well, by the way, by Paul Giamatti in the excellent HBO miniseries titled John Adams).

Adams writes:

"You inquire why so young a man as Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the committee for preparing a Declaration of Independence? I answer: It was the Frankfort advice, to place Virginia at the head of everything. Mr. Richard Henry Lee might be gone to Virginia, to his sick family, for aught I know, but that was not the reason of Mr. Jefferson's appointment. There were three committees appointed at the same time, one for the Declaration of Independence, another for preparing articles of confederation, and another for preparing a treaty to be proposed to France.

Mr. Lee was chosen for the Committee of Confederation, and it was not thought convenient that the same person should be upon both. Mr. Jefferson came into Congress in June, 1775, and brought with him a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent of composition. Writings of his were handed about, remarkable for the peculiar felicity of expression. Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation - not even Samuel Adams was more so - that he soon seized upon my heart; and upon this occasion I gave him my vote, and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the committee. I had the next highest number, and that placed me the second. The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draft, I suppose because we were the two first on the list.

The subcommittee met. Jefferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, 'I will not,' 'You should do it.' 'Oh! no.' 'Why will you not? You ought to do it.' 'I will not.' 'Why?' 'Reasons enough.' 'What can be your reasons?' 'Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.' 'Well,' said Jefferson, 'if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.' 'Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.'

A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant. I thought this too personal, for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature; I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity, only, cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

We reported it to the committee of five. It was read, and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized anything. We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson's handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.

As you justly observe, there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights in the Journals of Congress in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams."

Rich Lowery has a brief but informative piece on the Declaration at NRO in which he says this:

Jefferson's words were more than rhetorical theatrics; they laid the philosophical bedrock of the American republic. In the space of three magnificent sentences in its preamble, the Declaration packs enough content to fill volumes of treatises on political theory.

In declaring that "all men are created equal," it insists that there's no such thing as a natural ruling class. Put another way, it tells us, as Jefferson wrote near the end of his life, "that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

Lowery also discusses several other of Jefferson's phrases and notes that they were borrowed from the writings of John Locke, particularly his Second Treatise on Government, in whose thought the Founding Fathers had been steeped. Lowery omits mention, though, of what may be Locke's most important idea: the notion that our rights are rooted in, and given to us, by God. This is important because if the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson replaced Locke's "property" with "pursuit of happiness") are grounded in anything else then they are not "unalienable." We can only have enduring, unalienable rights if they are endowed by our Creator. Nature certainly confers no rights upon us, and the rights bestowed by men are ephemeral and arbitrary.

Philosopher Todd May, in a rather peculiar essay on the Declaration at the NYT's Opinionator, declares that:

Most philosophers now agree that the rights we have are not rooted in nature or in a divine being but in our social practices, our ways of living together.

May might be correct that this is the view of most philosophers today, but if so we should be deeply troubled. Rights that are grounded in nothing more than our social practices are mere words on paper that can change with the social conventions of the time. Philosophers, and Supreme Court Justices, who think that the rights we have in the Constitution are rooted in 18th century social practices are not going to be zealous in defending and perpetuating those rights. Indeed, this is what Elena Kagan seems to believe, and it's one of the deepest concerns with her nomination. Such a view of the nature of rights, a view that grounds them in the shifting mores of social custom and fashion, is a path that leads straight to the might-makes-right philosophy of tyrants.

In any event, I urge you to take a few minutes this Fourth of July weekend to reflect upon the meaning, the grounds, and the contemporary threats to those freedoms and rights bequeathed to us by the founders of our nation.

RLC

How to Achieve Full Employment

In the course of explaining the benefits of unemployment compensation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi teaches us something I'll bet few really knew or appreciated: Unemployment benefits are a job creator:

Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? All we need do to achieve full employment is to lay everyone off and send them an unemployment check. What could be easier? When next the Nobel Prizes are awarded for economics I hope the committee gives Ms Pelosi due consideration.

RLC

Honey Bee Declines

Honey bee populations around the world are in decline, which is a serious agricultural problem since bees are one of the main pollinators of flowers of all kinds, including food crops. A parasitic mite had been believed to be the culprit, but now there's another suspect: Cell phones. Bees use earth's magnetic field to navigate and cell phones and towers generate electromagnetic radiation that may interfere with the pigment in bees which is involved in sensing the magnetic field. In some studies this has caused the bees to be unable to find their way back to their hives.

If this indeed turns out to be the problem it's possible that changing the frequencies at which cell phones operate will solve the problem, but no one knows for sure.

Go here to read a fuller account of the research that has led to cell phones being implicated in the crash of bee populations.

RLC

Feedback

A friend, former student, and current law school student named Caleb sends along some thoughtful comments on several of our recent posts. His letter can be read on our Feedback page. Check it out.

RLC

Headless Chickens

James Carville's outburst a couple of weeks ago appears to have legitimized Democratic criticism of the Obama White House for its lackadaisical response to the oil spill. One recent example is Democrat House member Gene Taylor who calls Obama's response to the spill incompetent:

As oil spread as close as 1.5 miles from Jackson County's coast Saturday, U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor called the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster "incompetent."

"I'm having a Katrina flashback," said the Bay St. Louis Democrat after an aerial survey of the Mississippi Sound and barrier islands Saturday morning. "I haven't seen this much incompetence since Michael Brown was running FEMA."

All those boats are running around like headless chickens. None of them are skimming for oil. It is criminal. Between the amount of money, the amount of wasted effort, there shouldn't be a drop of oil in the Mississippi Sound, but because of this incompetence, it is there."

It's hard to understand the congressman's complaint, actually. The President has assured us that he's been on the case from "day one" and is not resting until, well, until he's kicked somebody's fanny.

Maybe there are some headless chickens running around in the West Wing, too.

RLC

Three Questions

Justin Taylor over at Evangel relates part of an interview he had with theologian Gerald Bray. During their conversation Bray explained the three overarching questions which we should bring to our reading of any passage of the Bible. If we do this, he says, passages which seem otherwise to have no meaning will become meaningful. Taylor then challenges Bray to apply his method to the genealogies in I Chronicles which certainly seem to have no purpose other than to make the reader's eyes glaze over.

Bray's three questions are these:

The first question we must ask of every biblical text is simply this-what does it tell us about God? What does it say about who he is and about what he does?

The second question is: what does this text say about us human beings? What are we meant to be and what has gone wrong?

The third and final question is: what has God done about this and what does he expect of us in the light of what he has done?

Asking these questions and seeking answers to them will help us interpret the Spirit's message to Christ's people and to each of us as individuals.

Bray's application of these to the I Chronicles genealogies is interesting. Give it a look.

RLC

More Bureaucratic Bungling

Dick Morris paints us a picture of the sort of ineptitude on display by the federal government as it does its best to turn the Gulf oil crisis into a tale straight out of a Franz Kafka novel. I doubt that even the greatest satirist in the history of western literature could have constructed a parody to match what the feds are doing in real life:

According to state disaster relief officials, Alabama conceived a plan - early on - to erect huge booms off shore to shield the approximately 200 miles of their state's coastline from oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough huge, heavy booms - some weighing tons and seven meters high - to guard their coast.

[Unfortunately, two days after James Carville complained about the lack of effort to stop the oil from spilling into Louisiana marshes the Coast Guard moved those booms to protect the Louisiana coast.]

So, Alabama decided on a backup plan. It would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the beaches.

But...the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.

So, Alabama - ever resourceful - decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches in person scooping up oil that had washed ashore.

But ... OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Agency) refused to allow them to work more than twenty minutes out of every hour and required an hour long break after forty minutes of work so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.

[E]very agency - each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda - was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries, and recreational facilities.

Where was the president? Why did he not intervene in these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a focus on the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?

Good questions. They're questions that Mr. Obama needs to be forced by the media to answer. Until he does he simply looks uncaring, disengaged, and incompetent. What's worse for the Democrats in November, it won't be long before bumper stickers start appearing referring to the president as President Obungler.

BTW, these are the same people who are trying to lead us out of the economic doldrums and who have recently arrogated to themselves the power to manage your health care. That should make you feel good.

RLC

Looking for Violence in All the Wrong Places

A number of articles have appeared in the media expressing fear that Tea-Party protests will turn violent and that some TPers may be on the brink of doing something, well, Nazi-like. Meanwhile, there's been real fascism afoot - people being beaten, property being destroyed - and not much is being said about it on the port side of our media ship. Guess why:

Police say the incident began Wednesday morning when non-union construction workers attempted to gain access to the new Toys R Us site, but were blocked by protesting union workers.

When the victims were unable to gain access to the construction site, they drove to the area of the Transportation Center in the King of Prussia Plaza lot to wait for police assistance.

Authorities say while waiting for police to arrive, a black sedan pulled up and several white males exited with baseball bats and shattered both rear windows of the two work trucks. As the victims exited the trucks in fear, police say at least two were physically assaulted with the baseball bats. One of the victims was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for treatment.

Then, of course, there are the rioters at the G20 conference in Toronto:

Black-clad demonstrators broke off from a peaceful protest and torched a police cruiser in the financial district and smashed windows in a shopping district after veering off from the planned protest route.

A group, dressed all in black, smashed the windows of a bank, a coffee shop and some stores before heading to an area where Canada's largest banks are headquartered, smashing restaurant windows there.

Parenthetically, here's video of one Toronto citizen doing the job the police should have been doing:

Anyway, even when the liberal media reports these outrages but they do so almost sotto voce. There's very little commentary on the threat such behavior poses to our polity. Nor is it easy to find liberal commentators expressing revulsion at the penchant by the left for employing violence as a political tool. Why is that?

Perhaps if our journalistic wise men spent less time scrutinizing every protest sign carried by the grannies at Tea Party protests, seeking evidence of the smoldering bigotry and potential terrorism that they just know infects the movement, and spent more time focusing on union thugs and radical leftists who are actually hurting people and property, we'd all be a bit safer.

Exit question: The Toronto Blue Jays out of fear of left-wing violence, actually moved a home series with the Philadelphia Phillies to Philadelphia this past weekend. Can you imagine the Blue Jays moving a set of games out of town for fear of a Tea-Party demonstration?

RLC

Books That Changed Lives

Patheos has an interesting piece in which they invite various contributors to give an annotated list of the books that changed their lives. In the course of his selection Tim Dalrymple mentions a book whose thesis it is that atheism got started when Christians undertook to respond to challenges to present a philosophical argument for the existence of God. The book is Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism. Here's Dalrymple:

Buckley, a Jesuit scholar and professor, has the kind of fine-grained vision of the whole canopy of western theological and philosophical traditions that has all but vanished from the universities today. The path toward atheism began, he argues, when Christians suggested -- in order to defeat skeptics at their own game -- that they could, and must, provide a philosophical demonstration of the existence of God and the revelatory status of scripture before there could be any consideration of the God who reveals Himself within scripture.

Descartes, among others, proposed that the essential elements of Christian thought could be reconstructed essentially without the aid of the Holy Spirit, the witness of the church, and God's self-revelation in Christ; all that is required to demonstrate the truth of Christianity, he argued, is objective rationality reflecting upon its conditions and experience. Proving this proposition became the (hubristic) great task of modern philosophers, and the inability to find any such unassailable proof, when it was made to appear that this was the lynchpin upon which responsible assent to Christian faith must rest, has proven devastating beyond measure to western Christianity. If responsible rationality means believing only that which cannot be doubted, and it is not possible to construct an indubitable series of proofs for the whole of Christian belief, then our faith is an abdication of our responsibilities as rational beings.

I haven't yet read Buckley's book, but I have to say that I'm dubious about laying such enormous blame at the feet of those who desire to demonstrate God's existence. It's true that none of the "proofs" are airtight, but what of that? Suppose Christians had never made the effort to construct such arguments, many of which are compelling even if they do fall short of providing total certainty, would they not still be vulnerable to the charge that their faith is irrational because they refuse to argue for it?

It seems to me that the fault is not with trying to construct logical arguments but with the belief that unless one can prove apodictically that God exists one's faith that He does is irrational.

Anyone who would understand the rise of skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism in the modern west -- and every Christian who seeks to comprehend contemporary western culture should desire to understand these things -- should purchase Michael Buckley's book today and read it as soon as it arrives upon the doorstep. Christians were wrong to attempt to answer philosophically what were essentially theological questions, and wrong to abandon the witness and revelation that are intrinsic to its own tradition in the face of life's most fundamental problems.

Well, perhaps, but this is like saying that it's wrong to speak to others in a language they can understand. The attempt to persuade others requires that we talk to them in their own idiom and vocabulary, much as Paul did on Mars Hill. Throughout much of the last millennium this has meant talking to the very well-educated in the language of philosophical discourse.

It doesn't follow that because someone argues philosophically for the existence of God that that person bases his own faith on the success of his argument. It simply means that skeptics should be helped to see that even on the principle of rational thought which they accept reason is not necessarily their friend.

Maybe I just need to read the book.

RLC

Hunting Down the IED Makers

Strategy Page updates us on what's going on in Afghanistan with regard to the IED war and why Afghanistan IEDs are not the Iraqi IEDs:

June 28, 2010: The successful technique of concentrating on the leaders and technicians, to disrupt terrorist activities, is having an impact on the Taliban IED (improvised explosive device) campaign. More IEDs are duds (the exact number, and why, is kept secret so the enemy cannot fix their mistakes.) More IEDs are going off while being built. Afghanistan always had fewer bomb makers than the Islamic terrorists in Iraq. There, Saddam had trained thousands of his Sunni Iraqi loyalists to handle explosives and build bombs.

The Iraqi population is more literate than the Afghans, and thus easier to train in technical matters, like bomb building. Not surprisingly, much of the IED building in Afghanistan is being done by foreigners, especially Iraqi Sunnis who got out when their movement collapsed in 2008. It's easier to find these foreigners. Afghans have a thing about foreigners, especially Arabs (who tend to be particularly disdainful of these "Afghan hillbillies.") The Taliban leadership is almost all Afghan, and those running the IED operation (which involves thousands of people) have to communicate and move around to instruct, discipline and encourage the troops. This makes them easier to track and catch.

This tactic of going after the bomb builder techs and their leaders was pioneered a decade ago, when the Palestinians began their latest terror campaign against Israel. Within a few years, the Israelis had perfected their techniques, and crippled the Palestinian terror efforts. The U.S. adopted these tactics in Iraq shortly thereafter, and it played a large role in reducing the terrorist violence 90 percent by 2008. Now the tactic is arriving in Afghanistan, and having the same impact it did in Israel and Iraq.

There's more on military tactics in Afghanistan at the link.

RLC

Mood Music

I've been trying to get the image of Al Gore assaulting that masseuse in a hotel room out of my mind, but I just can't. In fact, the more I think about it the more credible the massuese's story seems. After all, not even the world's greatest satirist could concoct a detail like this:

The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to "Dear Mr. President," a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink.

Only Al Gore would find listening to a song that bashes George Bush suitable for erotic mood-setting. No wonder Tipper couldn't take it anymore.

RLC

Blowin' in the Wind

Kyle Smith of the New York Post declares the culture war all but over and conservatives are the losers. He arrives at this melancholy conclusion because of evidence that young voters have rejected the traditionally conservative positions on many of the social issues that their elders have clashed over:

You know something is changing in American mores when the supposed leader of the culture wars from the right, Sarah Palin, declares that smoking pot is "a minimal problem" and that "if somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in."

Like many other pointless wars, the culture conflict has mainly resulted in exhaustion. Now the troops are laying down their arms and going home.

More and more Americans, particularly in the youngest generation of adults, are shrugging at drug use, gay relationships, pre-marital cohabitation, single motherhood, interracial marriage (which is now all but universally accepted) and gun ownership. More and more people aren't bothering to lug their church to the voting booth.

If only people between the ages of 18 to 29 voted, 38 states would support gay marriage, says a study by Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips of Columbia University. Will today's youngsters change their minds about gay marriage as they age? Don't count on it.

You may have heard a word or two about the Tea Party, which is fiscally focused. But the accompanying demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important. The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade.

I'm not saying that Smith isn't correct, he may be, and in my more saturnine moments I fear he is, but it must be said that the views of the young are notoriously volatile, and it's risky to base predictions of the future of our culture conflicts on such a mercurial demographic.

Young people are almost always more liberal than their parents, and they grow increasingly more conservative as they have their own families and experience more of life. Even people who count themselves as liberal today are probably less so now than they were in their late teens and twenties.

For example, the finding that if only the young voted 38 states would support gay marriage is doubtless true, but it probably would have been true forty years ago as well.

Neither does Smith's claim that Sarah Palin would support legalizing marijuana amount to much as an augur of the future because it's really nothing new. Conservative icon Bill Buckley came out for marijuana's legalization back in the 1970s. Nor has interracial marriage been an issue for conservatives for at least a generation. A number of prominent conservatives have mixed race families, either by marriage or adoption. No one is more revered among conservatives than Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and, though he's black, Mrs. Thomas, also a popular conservative activist, is white.

In other words, the youthful attitudes Smith points to as storm clouds on the horizon for cultural conservatives have been around for a long time and yet the culture war still rages. Perhaps Smith is reading into the current shape of the clouds his own hopes for the future.

At any rate, Mr. Smith may be correct, but I think it's a little too early to be prognosticating what society will look like a few decades down the road. History takes strange twists, and it often doesn't take much to nudge it onto a completely different path.

RLC

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

Steve Martin joins the Steep Canyon Rangers at the New Orleans Jazz Festival to perform a little ditty that makes a pretty interesting point, actually:

Well, there was John Lennon's Imagine, but after that ....

Atheism simply doesn't inspire art, at least not sublime art. This is not to say that atheists as individual artists haven't produced great works of art, literature, or music, of course, but rather that the art that they have churned out has not, except in a relatively few instances been inspired by their atheistic worldview. Alexander Pope's Essay on Man comes to mind as an exception, perhaps, but little else does. If I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins laments the inability of the atheism to inspire great art in his book The God Delusion.

If it's true that atheism is such a dry well of inspiration we might take a moment or two to reflect on the reasons why that should be so. Perhaps it's because, followed to its logical conclusions, atheism offers no hope, no good, and no meaning to anything. It's a gateway to despair, and despair has never been an impetus for art that lifts the spirit and soars.

HT: First Thoughts

RLC

Enigma in the White House

Mark Steyn writes with a pungent wit that's at its keenest when Mr. Obama is his subject. In this column he reflects on the air of apathy and detachment that clings to our president:

Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.

He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

It does appear that Mr. Obama's goals for America are such as would have guaranteed electoral defeat if the majority of voters had known what they were. He wanted to become president for one reason: to diminish American economic and military influence in the world and force the nation, Procrustus-like, into a kind of egalitarian Euro-socialism. Nothing else really seems to fire his imagination. Other matters, like the Gulf oil spill, are little more than irritating distractions from his major passion.

To return to Cohen's question: "Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-forties with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Mr. Obama really isn't all that enigmatic for anyone who bothered during the campaign to attend to what he was saying and what others were saying about him. You can learn much about a man by reading the books which bear his name, by looking at the people with whom he surrounds himself throughout his life, and by examining his voting record. You can also learn something of the man by observing what sorts of records about himself he shields from public view. All of these considered together strongly suggested that Mr. Obama was a far-left ideologue of modest academic achievements who did not identify with the history and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon West and was not particularly fond of them. As such the probable path that Mr. Obama would choose to follow as president was fairly clear.

A large segment of America may now be growing disenchanted with the direction Mr. Obama is taking the country. We may be increasingly disturbed by the feeling that no matter how shallow the waters he finds himself in, he's out of his depth. We may find the looming prospect of huge deficits and crushing taxes alarming, but we have no one to blame but ourselves. We had every reason to foresee all this coming and we, or at least a majority of us, voted for it anyway.

RLC