Nuclear Proliferation

The predictable seems to be happening in the Middle East. The failure of the world community to dissuade or prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons has had the completely unsurprising result that other nations in the region have decided it's in their interest to obtain such weapons for themselves. The newest proud owner of these weapons of mass death, if this report is correct, is Saudi Arabia which has allegedly purchased a pair of warheads from Pakistan:

With an eye on the nuclear arms race led by its neighbor Iran, Saudi Arabia has arranged to have available for its use two Pakistani nuclear bombs or guided missile warheads, debkafile's military and intelligence sources reveal. They are most probably held in Pakistan's nuclear air base at Kamra in the northern district of Attock. Pakistan has already sent the desert kingdom its latest version of the Ghauri-II missile after extending its range to 2,300 kilometers.

At least two giant Saudi transport planes sporting civilian colors and no insignia are parked permanently at Pakistan's Kamra base with air crews on standby. They will fly the nuclear weapons home upon receipt of a double coded signal from King Abdullah and the Director of General Intelligence Prince Muqrin bin Abdel Aziz. A single signal would not be enough.

I haven't seen this report anywhere else so it may not be true, but if it is, it's very troubling.

We still have the chance to avoid this proliferation by preventing Iran from building its own nukes, but so far we've chosen half-measures and dithering. Now the whole region is on the brink of becoming nuclearized. How many dictatorships will have nuclear weapons before someone decides to use them? As North Korea becomes more nuclearized and more bellicose, how long will it be before Japan and South Korea decide that they better arm themselves as well? Will we also stand aside while Venezuela purchases these weapons?

I'm not saying that the international community should use military strikes to halt Iran's weapons program, but it should at some point be an option. War is a terrible thing with manifold unforeseeable consequences, but sometimes the lack of war can also be a terrible thing. In the case of declining to decisively prevent Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons the consequences are pretty much predictable. Within a decade or so everyone will have them and someone will eventually use them.

Good News from Afghanistan

Included in a helpful update on the battle for Afghanistan at Strategy Page was this interesting datum:

Meanwhile, the country, overall, prospers. GDP grew over 20 percent this year. Inflation has been reduced (from 9 to 3 percent) in the last two years. All this is a new experience for Afghanistan, which has for centuries been too chaotic to generate much sustained economic growth. The occasional violence in the south makes the news, but the economic growth is what most Afghans pay attention to. The violence has been around here forever, the prosperity is something new.

Who'd have thought it? We keep hearing reports suggesting that we're bogged down in an unwinnable war, but whenever there's an actual analysis of what's happening there the news is often much less gloomy than we'd been led to believe it was.

Public Employees' Unions

In light of allegations that supervisors of New York city's municipal workers union ordered that snow removal be slowed down as payback for union layoffs and other offenses, calls for the abolition of public sector unions are growing louder.

As John Hinderaker points out at Powerline such unions only gained legal status in the 60s and 70s. He notes:

Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public employee unions have become perhaps the dominant force in our political life. They extract dues from their members which go to fund the candidacies of politicians who will pay public employees even more money. The unions' ill-gotten clout has created a vicious cycle; at the same time that government units are going broke, public employees are now far better paid than their private sector counterparts, while enjoying better benefits and ridiculous job security.

Not to mention extravagant pension plans which the taxpayers, often with very little in the way of a pension plan themselves, are obligated to pay.

Around the nation a number of cities have had enough and are privatizing things like garbage and snow removal and are saving their taxpayers a boodle. We've experimented with public employees' unions for fifty years, but we can no longer afford to continue the experiment. It's time to end it.

It's also time to make public employees accountable for their own retirement. People who are directly responsible for the death of a newborn infant in New York because an ambulance couldn't traverse the streets that these guys didn't plow surely don't deserve to receive for twenty five years or more a pension close to, or more than, 100% of what they were making when they were working and paid for by the very taxpayers whose child is now dead.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

Secular Morality

Susan Jacoby is an atheist who writes for the Washington Post's On Faith blog. Her year-end offering touts repeal of DADT as the most important victory for secular values of 2010. In the course of her essay she writes these two perplexing paragraphs:

For a secularist and for people of the more inclusive brands of faith, the sexual preference of adults who love other adults is not a moral issue, period. The moral issue is whether the straight majority condemns and forces a double life on those who happen to desire members of their own sex.

The ending of DADT is one of those rare political issues in which morality is more important than any other consideration. It is simply wrong for a government to demand that people lie about who they are in order to enjoy the rights and take on the responsibilities of a citizen.

Let's set aside arguments over whether repealing DADT is a good thing or bad thing, whether it will weaken our military or strengthen it. Let's focus instead on the following two claims Ms Jacoby, a self-acclaimed voterie of Reason, makes in these graphs.

She asserts, firstly, that sexual preference is not a moral issue for secularists, and second, that it is "simply wrong" to "demand" that people lie about who they are.

Why are these claims perplexing? Because for the secularist one's moral values are subjectively chosen preferences, like one's preference in the music to which one listens. Without a transcendent moral authority (i.e. God) there's simply no objective standard of right and wrong and certainly no duty to do one thing rather than another. This being so, for the rational secularist no issue, not just sexual preference but any behavior, can be a moral issue. What secularists like Jacoby call moral issues are like disagreements over whether chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla, the color blue is more attractive than green, or Beethoven's music is more enjoyable than that of Bach. They're just matters of individual taste.

For something to be a moral issue there has to be the presumption that one choice conforms better to another to some objective, non-arbitrary standard, but in the absence of God there is no such standard, and all choices about values are morally indifferent. They're all based on subjective predilections, and no one can say that their own predilections are any more "right" than anyone else's. Nor can anyone say that others are under any obligation to follow one's own set of values rather than some other set.

Thus, for Jacoby to state that sexual preference isn't a moral issue is banal because, if her atheism is true, there are no moral issues at all. There are only actions that some people like and others don't.

Moreover, when Jacoby further avers that it's "wrong to demand that people lie about who they are" she's uttering a vacuity. One might ask her to explain exactly why it is wrong to force people to lie.

Unfortunately, no answer she can give will make any sense, given her atheism. It may offend her own private value system to see someone put others in compromising positions, but only the most egocentric individual would consider that what she finds personally offensive is a sufficient ground for declaring it wrong for others to do. Indeed, what right does Jacoby have to judge others, anyway?

Atheists like Jacoby need to make a choice. Either they should give up making moral judgments or they should give up their atheism. They can't hold on to both and still regard themselves to be reasonable people. They can't continue to sustain the contradiction of living as if God existed while denying that He does. At least they can't do this and still expect the rest of us to admire their sophistication and intellect.

Seething Hatred

This news piece surprised me a bit:

CBS anchor Katie Couric believes a “Muslim version of ‘The Cosby Show’” could open the eyes of Americans and perhaps put an end to all the ”seething hatred many people feel towards all Muslims.”

“The bigotry expressed against Muslims in this country has been one of the most disturbing stories to surface,” Couric said. “Of course, a lot of noise was made about the Islamic Center, mosque, down near the World Trade Center, but I think there wasn’t enough sort of careful analysis and evaluation of where this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, and how this seething hatred many people feel for all Muslims, which I think is so misdirected, and so wrong — and so disappointing.”

Well, maybe Ms Couric finds this "seething hatred" for Muslims in the circles in which she travels, but I don't see it. What I do see are a lot of Americans bending over backward to distinguish between Islam and Islamic extremism, between faithful Muslims and Muslims who pervert their religion, and to give Muslims the benefit of every doubt. Sure, there've been criticisms of Muslims and of Islam, we've made them here, but unless Ms Couric equates criticism with hatred I don't know what her evidence is for her claim that Muslims are the object of such awful hostility. It seems to me, in fact, that the hatred is flowing in precisely the opposite direction.

In much of the world it is Muslims who express their hatred of Christians and Jews by killing them whenever the opportunity presents itself. One searches in vain for news accounts of Christians dragging Muslim imams out of mosques and riddling their bodies with bullets. Nor is it commonplace to find reports of gangs of Christians beheading Muslim children, or placing fatwas of death on "Christians" who convert to Islam, but maybe I don't read the same news sources as Ms Couric. In any event, almost any perusal of the daily paper turns up horrifying accounts of such atrocities being perpetrated against Christians.

Moreover, if Ms Couric wants to see "seething hatred" perhaps she might direct her attention to the writings of the New Atheists, most of whom are liberals like herself, who've made it their mission in life to broadcast to the world their utter contempt for the Christian church, the doctrines it holds, and the people who teach and believe them. One only need pick up Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens to feel themselves in the presence of someone who genuinely hates Christianity. Hitchens once wrote a book in which he ranted for the entire volume against Mother Teresa, of all people. To be fair, these writers despise all religious creeds, especially of the monotheistic variety, but it is Christianity which most particularly makes the veins in their necks bulge.

I wonder if Ms Couric would endorse an Evangelical version of the Cosby show to meliorate the anti-Christian hatred and bias that's festering in many liberal precincts in our society. Maybe the program could feature a family such as the one depicted in the movie Blindside. How about it Ms Couric?

Some Birds of 2010

Long time readers of Viewpoint know that birding is a hobby of mine and 2010 produced a number of unusual species of birds in and near Pennsylvania. Here are four that I was able to see while they were "visiting" (The birds in the photos are not of the same individuals I saw):


The first is a shorebird which is experiencing population decline throughout much of its arctic breeding range. It migrates from the far north through the Mississippi valley but occasionally wanders eastward. The islands in the Susquehanna river sometimes attract a vagrant or two, and that's where one was found last summer. The bird is a Buff-breasted sandpiper, and the pic doesn't really do justice to the delicate orange, brown, and black colors the bird displays in good light:

Buff-breasted sandpiper




The next rarity is a small western songbird called a Townsend's warbler that sometimes strays east after the breeding season is over. This one was found in Cobbs Creek park in Philadelphia last fall.



Townsend's warbler

 The third species is a duck found in the northwest and across the northern latitudes to Greenland. It only rarely shows up in winter in Pennsylvania although there have been two sightings in the state this December. The duck is called a Harlequin (meaning fancifully colorful) and the one I saw was in the Juniata river in Huntingdon, PA.

Harlequin ducks

The last find is very rare. It's a European bird related to the American robin called a Wheatear. This one was found by a guy bicycling in Fox Point park in northeastern Wilmington, right along the Delaware river in mid-December.




Northern wheatear

Birds are such beautiful creatures. I never tire of seeing them.

An Atheist's Dilemma

It's not easy being an intellectually honest atheistic lefty in America. Just ask philosopher Michael Ruse who gets insulted by his left-wing allies simply for raising honest and incisive questions. For example, in a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he relates how Eugenie Scott, who heads up the National Center for Science Education, called him "dumb" for posing this perfectly reasonable conundrum:

[Evolutionary biologist David] Barash and I are united in thinking that Creationism (and the rest) are religion, and that they should not be taught in biology (or other science classes) of the nation—the publicly financed ones, that is.

So my question (and it is a genuine one, to which I don’t have an answer) to David Barash is this....[I]f you accept modern science, then religion—pretty much all religion, certainly pretty much all religion that Americans want to accept—is false. Is it then constitutional to teach science?

There are several fascinating things to note in what Ruse says here.

First, in his mind, science entails the falsity of religious belief. Second, this being so, teaching science to students is tantamount to teaching that religion is false. Thus, if creationism (or intelligent design) can't be taught because it entails religious conclusions about the world, how can science be taught in public schools if it does the same thing?

Ruse is genuinely perplexed by the problem, as well he should be.

We've posed this very question ourselves many times in the past, albeit in slightly different ways, and it's gratifying to see an atheist recognizing the problem.

One way we've put the difficulty is this: The basic claim of intelligent design is that natural forces and processes are not by themselves adequate to account for the origin, structure and diversity of both the universe and life. If that's a religious claim (which it's not, but never mind that now) and is constitutionally disqualified from being presented in a public school science classroom, how is it that its negation - the claim that physical forces are adequate to account for the origin, structure and diversity of the universe and life - is constitutionally permissable? If the claim P is religious then surely the claim not-P is also religious.

Parenthetically, I happen to disagree with Ruse that science entails atheism (It would certainly be awkward to try to convince Isaac Newton or dozens of other giants in the history of science that it does), but a lot of his fellow atheists believe it, so it would be interesting to see how they respond to his consternation. Perhaps some of them will have something more helpful to say than that his puzzlement is just "dumb".

Thanks to Bradford at Telic Thoughts for calling Ruse's article to our attention.

What Women Want

Dennis Prager seems to know his way around both the male and female psyches. In an article at NRO he explains to us what it is that women want and, in the telling, what men want as well. If you're at all interested in the relationship between the sexes this relatively short piece contains some very good advice.

Prager not only tells us what women want most from a man, and what men want most from a woman (it's not what you think), he also tells us what sort of man a woman is going to find most attractive. I don't want to give anything away, but I will mention that what he says is about as incendiary in some politically correct circles as napalm at a paper mill. It all makes for good fun and tasty food for thought.

More on the Ethics of Abortion

A few days ago we discussed an exchange between Michael Egnor and John Rosenau on the subject of abortion.

Subsequent to Egnor's response to Rosenau a blogger who goes by the name of Tantalus Prime posted a further series of questions for Egnor to answer. The questions are interesting even if Tantalus' insolence is off-putting.

His challenge to Egnor can be found here. Egnor's response, which is very good (though I don't agree with all of it), is here.

A big part of the case Tantalus puts to Egnor and, indeed, to anyone who is pro-life, is in this paragraph:

Egnor asserts that humanity is a discrete, not a continuous variable. If so, then would he kindly point to the exact point at which the human begins? After all, fertilization itself is a multi-step process. So, where is it? When the sperm breaches the oocyte membrane? Formation of the pro-nuclei? Initial DNA replication? Degeneration of the pro-nuclei membrane? Formation of the mitotic spindle? Fusion of the chromosomes? Division of the chromosomes and formation of the first daughter cells? This really should be an easy answer for Egnor. Since biological science affirms that there is a discrete distinction between human and gametes, pointing to that magic point should be trivial.

Egnor's response to this and Tantalus' other questions is worth checking out.

African Genesis

Back when cosmologists first hypothesized that the universe began in an explosion essentially out of nothing, many scientists scoffed and some squirmed. The idea sounded a bit too much like what theologians had been saying for centuries, and the implications of a sudden ex nihilo beginning of the universe was repugnant to those who ridiculed its theological echoes. Consequently, there was a lot of hostility to the theory (Fred Hoyle, for example, referred to it as the Big Bang. He intended this to be a term of derision, but the name stuck) until the discovery by Penzias and Wilson in 1963 of the predicted vestigial energy from this explosion made further resistance to it futile.

I wonder if there won't be a similar reaction to the recent discovery in Israel of human teeth that are twice as old as fossil humans found in Africa. Up till now it has been paleontological dogma that, contrary to the tradition of the world's monotheistic religions, mankind's genesis was not in the Middle East but in Africa and from there he subsequently dispersed around the globe.

Now there appears to be reason to think that the out-of-Africa theory is incorrect. Unless the evidence is misleading it appears that human beings were in the Middle East 200,000 years before they appeared in Africa.

Here's an excerpt from the report on this discovery in the Daily Mail:

Archeologists from Tel Aviv University say eight human-like teeth found in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin - 10 miles from Israel’s international airport - are 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, making them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered anywhere in the world.

The size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. Until now, the earliest examples found were in Africa, dating back only 200,000 years.

Other scientists have argued that human beings originated in Africa before moving to other regions 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens discovered in Middle Awash, Ethiopia, from 160,000 years ago were believed to be the oldest 'modern' human beings.

I'm reminded of the closing lines of astronomer Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers. Jastrow had no religious predilections, but as he concluded his account of how modern discoveries in cosmology, particularly the Big Bang, were pretty much what would be expected if the Judeo-Christian cosmology were true, he writes: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Next thing you know a team of archeologists will discover Noah's ark and atheistic naturalists all across the land will have to be kept away from bridges and high buildings.

The Year's Movies

Continuing our look back at the year just ending I offer here a list of the films I viewed in 2010 with a few comments or descriptions. I didn't see as many movies as I would have liked, but each of the ones I did see I feel I could recommend, albeit for different reasons, of course, and not to the same people. Each of them, in their own way, was worth the time spent to watch:

• Book of Eli - A post apocalyptic story that blends Christian faithfulness with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Has Denzel Washington ever made a bad movie?
• The Blind Side - A touching film based upon the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher, it's about a family's compassion and willingness to help a young man surmount awful circumstances. Unfortunately, the film's writers, producers and directors understand neither Christian evangelicals nor high school football programs.
• Into Great Silence - A documentary about life in a monastery in which the monks rarely speak. It may not sound like it would fascinating, but it is.
• Synecdoche, New York - A well-crafted glimpse of the existential emptiness of modern life without God. I don't know if that was what the filmmaker had in mind, but that's certainly what he communicates.
• The Insider - Based on a true story, the film depicts the pressures faced by whistle-blowers in corporate America. Very well-acted.
• The Constant Gardener - An outstanding tale of courage of a man's determination to get to the bottom of his wife's apparent infidelity and murder in Africa. Lots of plot twists and turns that keep the viewer guessing throughout whether the wife really had been unfaithful to her husband.
• The Chosen - A cinematic rendition of the Chaim Potok novel of the same name.
• Angels & Demons - An enjoyable romp with Tom Hanks through the streets of Rome in pursuit of power-mad villains. Based on Dan Brown's novel.
• The Stoning of Soraya M. - The true story of a an Iranian woman falsely accused of adultery by her husband so that he could escape his marriage in order to philander. The penalty in Iran for adultery is death by stoning.
• Sin Nombre - A powerful account of the ordeal millions of illegal immigrants have been willing to endure in order to get into this country.
• A Serious Man - Another film on the existential absurdity of life. This one by the Coen brothers, portrays the travails of a modern day Job-like character. At once funny and tragic.
• The Class - A good film for anyone who would like to know why kids go through school without learning anything. It's filmed in France, but the school it depicts doubtless has numerous counterparts in the U.S.
• John Adams - An excellent three part series on the life of America's second president.
• The Hurt Locker - Perhaps the best movie with a contemporary war theme yet made.
• Journey from the Fall - A tale of a South Vietnamese family's struggle to escape from South Vietnam after its fall to the North Vietnamese in the mid-seventies, and the difficulties they face once they arrive in the U.S.

The Year's Reading

The end of the December is often a time to take a look back at the year just ending. In my case, I like to look back at the books I've read and the films I've watched. Below is a list of the books. Perhaps you've read some of these also. If so, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on them.

My reading this year was heavily invested in C.S. Lewis and Friedrich Nietzsche, an odd juxtaposition, perhaps. I also reread a number of books with which I wanted to renew my acquaintance. Some of this year's books are truly great and some are quite forgettable, but in any case here they are with a word or two of description of each:

• Perelandra: C.S. Lewis (2nd reading) - Lewis imagines how things might have turned out in Eden. The book is an allegory of the Fall but with a much happier outcome.
• Going Rogue: Sarah Palin - Palin's account of her selection as McCain's running mate and the subsequent campaign. She's far from the demoniac the left has made her out to be.
• The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown - A typical Brown page-turner until he gets to the last chapter where he feels obliged to give his own thoughts on institutional religion. He was badly served by his editor here.
• The Screwtape Letters: C.S. Lewis (2nd reading) - A classic tale of human foibles, weakness, and strength told from the standpoint of the demons who seek to subvert those who have committed their lives to God.
• The Chosen: Chaim Potok - A wonderful story about friendship and growing up in America as an orthodox Jew.
• The Promise: Chaim Potok - Ditto
• The Four Loves: C.S. Lewis - Lewis has some very helpful things to say in this book about friendship and eros.
• A New Kind of Christianity: Brian McLaren - McLaren is one of the leading contemporary advocates for a more post-modern Christianity, one that's heavy on human caring and light on doctrinal distinctions.
• Son of Hamas: Mosab Yousef - A fascinating story written by the son of one of the founders of Hamas. Yousef early on became disenchanted with both Hamas and Islam and wound up rejecting both. He lives today in the U.S.
• Till We Have Faces: C.S. Lewis - Another of Lewis' wonderful allegories.
• Quantum Enigma: Rosenblum and Kuttner (2nd reading) - A great book for the reader who wants to at least understand why quantum mechanics is not understandable. The authors do a good job of illustrating the bizarre world of the quantum.
• Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide: Edw. Feeser - An excellent introductory guide to Aquinas' philosophy.
• Tea With Hezbollah: Ted Dekker - Dekker went around the Middle East interviewing people on both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict to try to get a feel for the prospects of peace in the region. The book seems very superficial in some ways, especially compared to the somewhat similar Terror in the Name of God (below).
• To Change the World: James D. Hunter - An excellent analysis of the idea and nature of worldview thinking. Will probably become a classic on the topic.
• No Laughing in the Kremlin: Valery Kostyleff - Kostyleff is a Russian immigrant who formerly worked for the Soviet news agency TASS. He's written a satire on the fall of the Soviet Union and its transition to capitalism.
• The Gay Science: Friedrich Nietzsche - Nietszche calls his readers to, among other things, exult in the death of God and all that that entails.
• Nickel and Dimed: Barbara Ehrenreich - Ehrenreich set out to see how hard it is to live on minimum wage jobs for a year and writes about her experiences. It's easy to become engrossed in her story.
• Good News About Injustice: Gary Haughens - A call for people, especially Christians, to work for justice on behalf of the world's oppressed.
• The Copper Scroll: Joel Rosenberg - A Middle East thriller, but not, in my opinion, one of Rosenberg's best.
• A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome: Alberto Angela - Angela takes the reader on an imaginary tour of ancient Rome c. 115 A.D. An excellent glimpse of what daily life was like for the average Roman of the time.
• At the Origin of Modern Atheism: Michael Buckley - A very scholarly, and in some ways pedantic, excursis through the history of the development of materialism among the French philosophes and British Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th century. Those who might want a more readable treatment of the same themes should try The Roads to Modernity (see below).
• Genealogy of Morals: Friedrich Nietzsche - See Gay Science above
• Ecce Homo: Friedrich Nietzsche - See Gay Science above
• Flight of the Intellectuals: Paul Berman - Berman is a liberal who is very critical of his fellow liberals for their moral blind spot regarding Islamic extremism. In this book the specific blind spot has to do with the left's misplaced fondness for Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Not God's Type: Holly Ordway - A journal of one college professor's journey from secularism to faith.
• Liberty and Tyranny: Mark Levin - A conservative manifesto in which Levin contrasts the philosophy of conservatism with the philosophy of progressive statism. Very helpful for those who want to learn why labels matter.
• The Roads to Modernity: Gertrude Himmelfarb - Historian Himmelfarb compares and contrasts what she sees as three different enlightenments - British, American, and French - and compares the fruits of each.
• Where Men Win Glory: Jon Krakauer - The story of the death of former pro football player turned army ranger Pat Tillman. Tillman was a victim of friendly fire in Afghanistan.
• The Brothers Karamazov: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2nd reading) - One of the greatest novels in all of literature and one of my personal top three favorites. The chapters titled The Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor are stand alone classics.
• Terror in the Name of God: Jessica Stern - Stern interviews a number of Jewish, Christian and Muslim terrorists and focuses on their motives and other psychological aspects of their worldviews.
• The Faithful: Jonathan Weyer - A novel about the paranormal and the supernatural.
• Beyond Good and Evil: Friedrich Nietzsche (2nd reading) - See Gay Science above.

My New Year's resolution for 2011 is to finally get through three books that I've started on several occasions, including last summer, and never finished. The three are, Augustine's City of God, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has found these works tough going, but I'm determined to see them through. I'll report back next December to let you know how it went.

 

Smarter Than They Think

On Fox News Sunday the other day Juan Williams, a liberal contributor to Fox News, was assessing the possible GOP presidential candidates, and made the rather dubious claim that, “There’s nobody out there, except for Sarah Palin, who can absolutely dominate the stage, and she can’t stand on the intellectual stage with Obama."

Now I'm not one of those who's convinced that Mr. Obama is the intellectual colossus his supporters assure us he is. I don't think that an extraordinary intellect is immediately apparent when the President speaks, nor do I know what evidence there is upon which such an encomium is based. On the other hand, neither am I convinced that Ms Palin is the intellectual lightweight she's often portrayed to be and, admittedly, has sometimes come across as being. Nevertheless, two or three unfortunate locutions notwithstanding, she at least appears to understand that there are 50 states in the union, suggesting a knowledge of certain basic facts which surpasses that of candidate Obama.

At any rate, an editorial in the New York Sun should give pause to fair-minded observers who might be inclined to scoff at Ms Palin's political perspicacity. Consider this passage from the column:

One of the questions raised by the news that the Obama administration is going to use regulation rather than legislation to bring in the so-called “death panels” as part of Obamacare is how it happened that this was first foreseen not by the newspapers or the members of Congress but by Governor Palin. Confirmation of Mrs. Palin’s scoop was brought in by the New York Times in a dispatch issued Christmas day, more than a year after Mrs. Palin issued her warning about Obamacare leading to government involvement in end-of-life issues.

At the time, Mrs. Palin’s prophecy touched off an enormous hue and a cry among the liberal intelligentsia, so much so that the scheme was dropped in Congress. Yet even though it was dropped by Congress the New York Times is reporting that “the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation” and will start doing so January 1. The Times says that the government “will now pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.”

It seems to be the administration's conception of democracy that after the Congress so pointedly left this out of the Obamacare legislation the scheme can be advanced by regulation. The point is underscored in Robert Pear’s dispatch in the Times, which quotes one of the congressmen originally advocating for the so-called death panels, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, as saying of the regulatory approach, “we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet” and warning that the regulation could yet be “modified or reversed.”

The question that we find ourselves thinking about is how was Mrs. Palin able to see this issue when others weren’t. Is she just smarter than the editors and the Congress? Or does she just have more life experience? Is it that her religion gives her a framework for learning all this stuff? Or is it that her sensitivity was heightened by making of her own decision to bring Trig into the world? Or is it something about the Alaskan spirit?

The editors go on to enumerate other examples of how Palin has been out in front of the media on a number of different issues. It's interesting.

A friend asked me recently if I supported Palin for the GOP nomination for president. My answer was that just because someone is an outstanding linebacker doesn't mean he'd be a good quarterback. I think Palin's a great linebacker, but I don't know if she'd be a good quarterback. We'll have to see how the primary campaign unfolds. I reject, though, the assertion that she lacks the qualifications to be president, or, I should say that I reject it when it comes from the lips of anyone who thought that Mr. Obama did possess those qualifications. It's hard to see what preparation he had that she doesn't.

Private and Public Generosity

This theme has been touched upon before but it's good to remind ourselves from time to time just how mistaken are those who seek to portray conservatives as grinches who hate the poor. Arthur Brooks has done a number of pieces in which he disabuses his readers of this misconception, and he has another one out now in the Wall Street Journal. Here's a part of his column:

It is common to hear that the popular uprising against the growth of the welfare state, with rising taxes and deficits, is based on a lack of caring toward those who are suffering the most in the current crisis. As soon-to-be ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi puts it, the tea party is working "for the rich instead of for the great middle class." Others have asserted that the backlash against the growth of government is nothing more than an attack on the poor.

Americans in general are very charitable, by international standards. Study after study shows that we privately give multiples of what our Social Democratic friends in Europe donate, per capita. But not all Americans are equally generous. One characteristic of givers is especially important in the current debate: the opinion that the government should not redistribute income to achieve greater economic equality.

Consider the answer to the question, "Do you believe the government has a responsibility to reduce income differences between rich and poor?" Many surveys have asked this over the years. In 2006, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) found that Americans were almost equally divided on this question (52% in favor, 48% against). This is in stark contrast to the Europeans. For example, 94% of the Portuguese in the 2006 ISSP survey were in favor of redistribution; only 6% were against.

When it comes to voluntarily spreading their own wealth around, a distinct "charity gap" opens up between Americans who are for and against government income leveling. Your intuition might tell you that people who favor government redistribution care most about the less fortunate and would give more to charity. Initially, this was my own assumption. But the data tell a different story.

The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

No doubt there are a number of reasons for this disparity between conservatives and liberals. Perhaps one of them is that conservatives are often motivated by religious beliefs which enjoin them to help the poor whereas liberals are more likely to be secularists who feel themselves under no such obligation.

Whatever the reason there appears to be little connection between opposition to the welfare state and personal generosity. If that's so, then the question arises as to why people who are personally charitable are so opposed to helping others through government largesse. I think the obvious answer is because, except in extreme cases of last resort, they perceive government aid as a band-aid that simply subsidizes poverty and provides a disincentive for getting out of it. It doesn't work and is often, even usually, a waste of money. People would much rather help through agencies they know are punctilious about how their money is used and which make every effort to apply every dollar as efficiently and effectively as possible. In other words, they prefer the government not handle their charity.

The More Things Change

Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club makes the interesting point that there's every bit as much moral judgmentalism infusing the public square as ever there was, but that what is considered moral and immoral is very much different today than, say, forty years ago. He writes:

Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area. It may now be a crime to quote the Bible.

For example, in May of 2010 a British preacher [a Mr. McAlpine]was arrested for handing out leaflets saying that homosexuality was a sin. A policeman approached “to warn him they had received complaints and that if he made any racist or homophobic comments he would be arrested.”

I told him homosexuality is a sin, and he told me “I am a homosexual, I find that offensive, and I’m also the liaison officer for the bisexual-lesbian-gay-transsexual community”,’ he said yesterday. ‘I told him it was still a sin.’

Mr Adams last year represented Cumbria Police at the Gay Pride march in Manchester. On the social networking site MySpace, he describes his orientation as gay and his religion as atheist.

After the warning, Mr McAlpine took over preaching for 20 minutes, although he claims he did not cover homosexuality. But while he talked to a passer-by the PCSO radioed for assistance and he was arrested by uniformed officers.

He was taken to a police station, had his pockets emptied and his mobile phone taken along with his belt and shoes, and was kept in the cells for seven hours where he sang hymns to keep his spirits up.

It is exactly the same process that might have occurred fifty years ago but with a policeman warning a homosexual he could not distribute leaflets advocating sodomy. What has changed isn’t that people are being warned off for their beliefs. What is different is which beliefs they are being warned against. The Ins and the Outs have changed places, but he door remains the same. Wikipedia writes that “views on public morality do change over time,” but whether public morality itself can ever be abolished is an open question.

One of the drivers of the new public morality is who can fight back. British policemen do not go around telling Muslim imams not to preach against homosexuality because such preachers may take strenuous exception to their warnings. But the rules of the new morality are often capricious, unstated or simply arcane.

Fernandez has a point. You'd risk being shouted down were you to suggest publicly that almost any form of sexual expression is wrong. You'd be called a prude, a bigot, and intolerant. On the other hand, progressive society is very intolerant of people who don't belong to any of the groups approved or favored by the contemporary standard-setters. If one is a smoker, a meat-eater, or wears furs, one can expect to meet with a certain measure of social opprobrium in our more liberal precincts. Likewise if one is a Catholic or fundamentalist or a pro-lifer.

Tolerance of other peoples' preferences and beliefs often extends only to those who think the way our left-leaning elites think. All others merit society's anathema and execration.

Remember These During the Christmas Season

Paul Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. He studies the persecution of Christians and has a very sobering piece at National Review Online on the atrocities many believers are forced to suffer around the globe. One wonders why there's not an international outcry against the sort of brutal oppression he recounts. It certainly doesn't seem to have triggered the same sort of response that, say, the deaths of a half dozen terrorists at the hands of Israelis attempting to enforce an embargo would trigger.

I copy Marshall's full essay here because it just seems too important to interrupt by having the reader go to the link. I hope he and NRO don't mind. Please read it all:

Herod has his current imitators. In 1991, China’s state-run press noted the role of the churches in undercutting Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, adding that if China did “not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.” Al-Qaeda has declared that all Middle Eastern Christians should be killed, and many Christians in Iraq have canceled their Christmas celebrations lest they be targeted.

Others, while less explicit, have similar ends. Iran has passed a death sentence on Yousef Nadarkhani, pastor of the Full Gospel Church of Iran congregation in the northern city of Rasht. Nadarkhani became a Christian 16 years ago and was arrested on October 12, 2009, after protesting a government decision that his son must study the Koran. On Sept. 21 and 22, 2010, the Eleventh Chamber of the Assizes Court of Gilan Province said that he was guilty of apostasy and sentenced him to death for leaving Islam. (Apostasy is not a crime under any Iranian statute — the judges simply referred to the opinions of Iranian legal scholars).

Another Iranian Christian pastor, Behrouz Sadegh-Khanjani, may face a similar fate. He was arrested on June 6, 2010, and is still being held even though his detention order expired in October.

In Afghanistan, after a TV program showed video of indigenous Christians worshipping last May, many Christians were forced to flee, and as many as 25 were arrested. One of those arrested was Said Musa, a father of six young children, who had converted to Christianity eight years previous. He had stepped on a landmine while serving in the Afghan Army and now has a prosthetic leg. Musa had worked for the Red Cross/Red Crescent for 15 years, fitting patients for prosthetic limbs — it was after going to their office in Kabul on May 31 to request leave that he was arrested.

The prosecutor, Din Mohammad Quraishi, said Musa was accused of conversion to another religion. In early June, the deputy secretary of the Afghan parliament, Abdul Sattar Khawasi, said that “those Afghans that appeared on this video film should be executed in public.” The authorities forced Musa to renounce Christianity on television, but he has continued to say he is a Christian. In the first months of his detention, he suffered sexual abuse, beatings, mockery, and sleep deprivation because of his faith. He appeared, shackled, before a judge on November 27. No Afghan lawyer will defend him and, in early December, authorities denied him access to a foreign lawyer.

Another Afghan Christian, Shoib Assadullah, was arrested on October 21, 2010, for giving a copy of the New Testament to a man, and is being held in Mazar-e-Sharif. As with Musa, no Afghan lawyer has agreed to defend him, and both will probably face charges of apostasy, a crime that is punishable by death under the government’s version of sharia. As the State Department’s 2010 International Religious Freedom Report notes, religious freedom in Afghanistan has diminished “particularly for Christian groups and individuals.”

One of the most ignored stories of 2010 has been the campaign by the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab militia in Somalia to kill all Somali Christians on the grounds that they are apostates. They have even beheaded Christians’ children. In one of the latest incidents, 17-year-old girl Nurta Mohamed Farah fled her village of Bardher in the Gedo Region after her parents shackled her to a tree and tortured her for leaving Islam. She went to the Galgadud Region to live with relatives, but shortly after, she was shot in the head and the chest and died.

Not content with killing people, on December 16, al-Shabab destroyed a Christian library they found in a derelict farm in the Luuq district — Christians often bury their Bibles and other books to escape detection. International Christian Concern reports that al-Shabab brought Bibles, Christian books, and audio/video materials to the city center and burned them after noon prayers.

At Christmas, we should remember these churches, each of which continues to grow, and remember these prisoners and others like them. Assadullah emphasizes that he “wants others to know that he is not frightened, and that his faith is strong.” Musa writes that “because the Holy Spirit always with me my situation is not bad until now. I see after what the plan of God is with me.”

It's a symptom of intellectual insecurity, I suppose, that people are so threatened by another belief system, one that does them no harm and has certainly done them much good, that they'll seek to kill those who adhere to it. It's a symptom not only of stupidity but also of savagery and barbarism.

Perhaps the best reason for pulling our troops and aid out of Afghanistan, indeed the toughest question that I've seen posed by advocates of getting out now, is Why should American soldiers be fighting and dying for people like these? That's a hard one to answer.

The Cost of Premarital Sex

The Mail Online has an article which discusses the correlation between premarital sex and the quality of a marriage. The results of the research evidently fly full in the face of the contemporary Zeitgeist. Here's the heart of it:

Scientists at the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Utah interviewed 2,035 married people about when they first had sex with their partner.

Analysis of the results showed that couples who waited until marriage before having sex enjoyed a much healthier relationship with their partner than those who started having sex in the early part of their relationship.

In particular, relationship stability was rated 22 per cent higher, relationship satisfaction was 20 per cent higher, quality of sex was 15 per cent better and even communication between partners was 12 per cent better.

There's more on this at the link.

The results don't surprise, or at least shouldn't surprise. When a couple is not committed to waiting, sex tends to crowd out everything else that should be going on in the time they are together before their marriage. The relationship isn't nourished or explored. Compatibility problems in areas other than the physical, areas which will become critical when the couple has to make a life together, tend to become suppressed and glossed over. It doesn't seem important that the two people may have little in common or are unable to communicate on the same wavelength. Good sex makes it all well.

Unfortunately, those who have been saying since the sexual revolution of the 60s that sexual attraction will not sustain a relationship, much less a marriage, have been shunted aside and scoffed at for being "old-fashioned" and irrelevant. Turns out, though, that studies like this one, plus the statistics on divorce and family cohesion, show them to have been right.

We always have to learn the hard way, it seems.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

A Comeback?

Jennifer Rubin is a conservative blogger at the liberal Washington Post which is to be commended for giving her a perch there. Her most recent post assesses the flurry of enthusiasm among the liberal media for Obama's finish during the lame duck session. Just when everyone seemed to be pronouncing the President's political life all but over, he got a couple of things he wanted, things to which no one seemed to be too strongly opposed in any event, and much of the media has reacted as if they'd just witnessed Lazarus emerge from the tomb.

Rubin demurs and suggests instead that the excitement over the revivification of Mr. Obama's political career is either phony, misplaced, or premature. She maintains that there is no "comeback":

[I]f the highlight of Obama's term, according to outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was the "historic" ObamaCare legislation, then the highlight could soon be extinguished. Obama's central domestic achievement is facing judicial scrutiny, a Republican onslaught to repeal, or at least defund, it, and a public that has never "learned" to love the bill.

Only inside the Beltway could the passage of an arms control treaty and repeal of DADT consume so many for so long and result in such exaggerated punditry. Would Republicans have traded wins on DADT and START for their wins on the DREAM act, the tax deal and the omnibus spending bill? Not in a million years.

But liberal media mavens have a narrative that resists "bad news" (i.e. scandals, polling, the Tea Party movement) which suggests trouble for the Obama administration. They also confuse legislative achievement with political success. If passing stuff was the secret to a political comeback, then the Democrats after ObamaCare and the stimulus plan would have had the greatest year ever [at the polls].

Obama may yet stage a comeback. But to do that, he'll have to do what the left loathes -- cut domestic programs, rework entitlement programs, stand up to foreign adversaries (Obama's legacy is irretrievably ruined if Iran gets the bomb on his watch), cut back on growth-restricting regulations and keep tax rates low. And so long as unemployment remains at historic highs, Obama's chances of re-election remain poor.

I particularly like the sentence that says that the left-leaning media confuse legislative achievement with political success. They also confuse legislative action with national progress. Turn on almost any program at MSNBC and the talk is all about how great it is that the Democrats won on DADT and START. It's like watching a sports talk show. It's all about whether one's own side wins. There's rarely any discussion of what these things will actually mean for the country and whether we'll be better off once they're passed.

You'd think, watching the commentary on MSNBC, that what's actually in these measures and what their consequences will be is totally irrelevant. How many newspapers have actually walked their readers through the provisions of the START treaty and pointed out what the proponents like and the opponents don't, and why? I suppose some have, but most news outlets spent their time during the lame-duck session chattering about the political alignments and who among the Republicans Mr. Obama might win over to his side to get the treaty passed. Then, once it passed, they reported on this as a great victory for the President with little or no explanation why we should think that it was a great victory for the country.

The television talking heads also prattle a lot about Obama's "move to the center", as if this were a brilliant stratagem. I've heard almost no one talk about what it says for a man's principles if he campaigns on the left (or right), but then moves to the middle once elected in order to improve his chances of reelection. If Mr. Obama abandons his core convictions to compromise with the Republicans the country will be better off than had he not, but Mr. Obama will be shown to have been nothing more, politically speaking, than John McCain without McCain's experience. So what was the point of all the sturm und drang in 2008? What did all the rhetoric about a coming transformational presidency actually mean?

It would seem that it meant that the electorate had been snookered into believing that they were getting something novel in our politics when, in fact, they were getting the same old thing.

Christmas Wish for You

I want to take a moment on this Christmas eve to wish all of our readers, including those in Russia, Thailand, India, Africa, Israel, Canada, and all across Europe, whether you are Christian or not, a wonderful and meaningful Christmas.

I hope each of you is warmed this night by the love of God and that you each have opportunity to direct that love to all those around you in ways great and small.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

He's Kidding, Right?

Casey Schwartz at The Daily Beast has a piece on teen pregnancy that contains some good news. Apparently teens are continuing a trend that started back in the 90's of getting pregnant less and less frequently. There's lots of information in the article, but one thing that struck me was the speculation about the cause of the downward trend. Read this excerpt and see what you think:

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its preliminary findings of all things birth rate for America in 2009. The report showed that the birth rate among American teenagers is now the lowest it has been in the 70 years since such records were kept. In 2009, 39.1 in 1,000 teenagers had a baby, down from 41.5 in 2008, a 6 percent decrease.

“Six percent is a huge drop,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “To get a birth rate dropping 6 percent in one year is really quite remarkable.”

The heft of the decline seemed to catch experts and advocacy groups off guard, and no clear explanation for the change was forthcoming.

Some experts are pointing to the economic recession as an operating factor....Albert was initially skeptical that the economy could be responsible for the downturn, but has become a “recent convert” to the possibility.

“It may be that the recession has had a bit of a sobering effect on teenagers in the following respect: Maybe their parents are having a tough time. Maybe they have neighbors who have been unable to find a job. Maybe they have neighbors who have lost their home,” he said. Survey data on teens show “they are very, very pessimistic about their economic future. Maybe that has placed a governor of sorts on their sexual appetite.”

It was hard not to laugh when I read this. It's difficult to believe that teenagers with hormones at full throttle and their passion all but incandescent, are pausing to think about the recession, of all things. If they're not inhibited by all the other hazards that often accompany teenage sex, they're hardly likely to be dissuaded by sudden concerns over the jobless rate.

I'd like to think that maybe the reason that there are fewer teen pregnancies now is that teenagers are simply having less sex today than they were a decade ago, but that might sound to some ears almost as silly as claiming that the reason they're not getting pregnant is their profound alarm over the national debt.