Shameless

We shouldn't do this, and if we had even a modicum of either humility or dignity we wouldn't, but since we have neither we are inviting our readers to consider entering Viewpoint into nomination for a weblog award at 2004 Weblog Awards.

There are a number of categories into which we fit, and we would be grateful to be nominated in one or more of them, if for no other reason than that it would give us greater exposure. We'd do it ourselves, but we have to draw the line against shameless self-promotion somewhere. If you need our URL it's www.wscleary.com/pov/home. Thanks.

Talk Radio

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has a lot to say about talk radio that others of us have been thinking for a long time. He offers essentially four reasons why talk radio seems to be losing its luster: It's politically or ideologically monolithic; it wastes far too much time on commercials and other extraneous, mind-numbing noise which are the talk-radio version of Chinese water-torture and which occupy about half of every hour of air time; the callers are too often either sycophants or banal; and, though it may be heresy among conservatives to say it, the big-time hosts are beginning to grow threadbare.

We confess that we often listen to talk radio when we're driving alone, and frequently find it very informative. Nevertheless every one of Carter's complaints is on the mark. Take, for example, the last.

Rush has for years been a national treasure, but more recently he seems to have become too convinced of his own self-importance. In the early years this was his shtick, now it seems to be his truth. On those occasions when he's not off on a trip somewhere he too often gives the impression that his show has been reduced to a mere sideline in his life. He's still good at pointing out the contradictions of contemporary liberalism, but his program is no longer as richly entertaining as it once was. Perhaps this is because he has allowed himself to become too much a caricature of the fat-cat, cigar-chomping, country-club Republican. His fondness for name-dropping and lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous exploits have become tiresome and are of little or no interest or relevance to the majority of his audience.

Rush is in many ways an admirable person, having risen to the top through dint of hard work and having persevered through a number of very difficult crises in his personal life, but despite his disclaimers, he seems to be taking both his show and his audience for granted.

Sean Hannity seems like a good guy, but he's especially hard to take on the radio. Every conversation is an opportunity for him to talk about himself in tones that ooze a faux humility. He likes to say that it's not about him, but, in fact, it seems to be all about him. His debating style is extremely confrontational and unpleasant. His preferred tactic is to refuse to let a guest speak and to step all over whatever words the unfortunate interlocutor does manage to sputter. It's quite unedifying.

A listener might like to hear a reasoned discussion when Sean has a liberal guest on, but that's pretty much hopeless. Hannity isn't interested in discussion, he's interested mostly in just pummeling his adversary into oblivion. He regards conversation as a kind of combat waged with clubs rather than as an attempt to increase the audience's understanding of the issues he's debating and to help them move closer to the truth. When Sean features a conservative guest with whom he agrees he often spends much of the allotted time talking, usually about himself, and leaves the guest relatively little time to say much of anything before the station has to break for commercials.

None of this isn't to suggest that neither Limbaugh or Hannity aren't still tremendous national assets. They are, but one wonders if, like great athletes, they aren't moving past their peak. Conservative talk radio has been a wonderful boon to this country. It has provided millions of Americans with information that was easily accessible nowhere else and has served to galvanize conservative citizens around a set of ideas that many found difficult to articulate themselves and which many also assumed no one else held. Even so, despite all its virtues, talk-radio is in jeopardy of becoming tired and old. It would be a shame if that were to happen.

The Silence of the Lambs

Bridget Johnson in Opinion Journal notices that Hollywood has been strangely silent about the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam.

One would think that in the name of artistic freedom, the creative community would take a stand against filmmakers being sent into hiding � la Salman Rushdie, or left bleeding in the street. Yet we've heard nary a peep from Hollywood about the van Gogh slaying. Indeed Hollywood has long walked on eggshells regarding the topic of Islamic fundamentalism. The film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" changed Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis out of a desire to avoid offending Arabs or Muslims.

The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic. In a recent conversation with a struggling liberal screenwriter, I brought up the Clancy film as an example of Hollywood shying away from what really affects filmgoers--namely, the al Qaeda threat vs. the neo-Nazi threat. He vehemently defended the script switch. "It's an easy target," he said of Arab terrorism, repeating this like a parrot, then adding, "It's a cheap shot."

How many American moviegoers would think that scripting Arab terrorists as the enemy in a fiction film is a "cheap shot"? In fact, it's realism; it's what touches lives world-wide. It's this disconnect with filmgoers that has left the Hollywood box office bleeding by the side of the road.

Ms Johnson sees a slavish devotion to the dictates of political correctness as the culprit. Maybe she's right. Or maybe van Gogh's murder carried a message that wasn't lost on our courageous Hollywood film makers: It's a lot easier, and safer, to confine your political efforts to telling lies about George Bush than to tell the truth about Islamo-fascism.

They Can Run But They Can't Hide

Recent reports of the assassinations of Sunni clerics have been sparking speculation as to who is behind their deaths. Here's the Strategy Page's take:

In the last week, two members of the Sunni Arab Association of Muslim Scholars have been assassinated. The Association has taken the lead in preaching resistance to the new government, elections and any Shia control of the government. This has caused much anger among the Shia majority. While many Shia have expressed this anger by joining the police or army, others have formed death squads, and gone after notorious murderers and hate mongers in the Sunni Arab community. This includes many Sunni Arab preachers. Shia Arabs and Kurds have thousands of names of Sunni Arabs who personally took part in supporting Saddam's decades of repression. Nearly all of these Sunni Arabs have fled to the traditionally Sunni areas in, around, and to the west of, Baghdad. But Shia death squads have been going in and killing the murderers and preachers of hate.

There are plenty of recent murders and atrocities to motivate these killers. Sunni Arab gangs have taken to setting up roadblocks and stopping Shia Arab or Kurd drivers, and torturing or killing them. The Shia get the most attention, because Sunni Arab clerics preach that Shia are heretics and blasphemers. This is a common attitude among Sunni Arabs, but usually does not result in violence. An exception is the Wahabi form of Sunni Islam. The Wahabi strain is popular in Saudi Arabia, and among al Qaeda members, and has become common among Iraqi Sunni Arabs as well.

Belmont Club has some interesting observations on al Zarqawi's fading fortunes. Among them is this:

A report from Jordan...gives Zarqawi ten days to capitulate or else his money will be confiscated. From the context, it appears the Jordanians are holding some of his property in connection with an earlier Zarqawi attack mounted inside Jordan. The interesting tidbit is that Zarqawi's money is within reach of the US.

"The Jordanian Security Court has given 10 days for the Jordanian fundamentalist leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi and three other men to turn themselves in for plotting attacks in Jordan. According to Jordanian papers publishing the Court's ultimatum, if Zarqawi and the three men, each of whom have a $25 million bounty on them from the United States, do not capitulate, the US administration will confiscate their property holdings."

The Fourth Rail has a report that overlaps with and draws from Belmont Club's analysis, but also features additional material:

Two separate reports, one from the Associated press, and another from ABC News (via Belmont Club), indicated that al Qaeda may be encountering difficulties due to recent operations in the Sunni Triangle. Abu Musab al-Zarqari, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is angry at Muslim leaders for not doing enough to incite the faithful to take up the cause of Jihad.

An audiotape purportedly made by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lashed out Wednesday at Muslim scholars for not speaking out against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying they have "let us down in the darkest circumstances."

It was unclear whether the tape posted Wednesday on the Internet was intended as a direct threat against Iraq's Sunni religious establishment, who have come under attack recently with the slaying this week of two Sunni clerics by gunmen.

"You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy. ... You have quit supporting the mujahedeen," said the voice on the tape, purported to be al-Zarqawi's. "Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence."

"You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the countries and the people to the Jews and Crusaders ... when you resort to silence on their crimes ... and when you prevented youth from heading to the battlefields in order to defend the religion," he said.

"Instead of implementing God's orders, you chose your safety and preferred your money and sons. You left the mujahedeen facing the strongest power in the world," he said. "Are not your hearts shaken by the scenes of your brothers being surrounded and hurt by your enemy?"

Moral support may not be the only problems for the insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq. They are actively begging for manpower and leadership from Afghanis, Chechens, Palestinians and others sympathetic to the cause. The loss of Fallujah and the continuing operations in the Sunni Triangle may be having a devastating effect on enemy command, control and communications.

The new message opens with a plea for advice from Palestinian and Chechen militants as well as Osama bin Laden supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "We face many problems," it reads in Arabic, "and need your military guidance since you have more experience."

The problems, the message says, are the result of losing the insurgent safe haven of Fallujah to U.S. troops. It says the insurgency was hampered as checkpoints and raids spread "to every city and road." Communications broke down as insurgents were forced to spread out through the country. The arrest of some of their military experts, more "spies willing to help the enemy," and a dwindling supply of arms also added to the organizational breakdown, it reads. But the message also lists new "advantages," claiming insurgent groups are spreading -- to Mosul, Tikrit, Baghdad, and as far south as Basra.

The United States' military appears to have the bad guys on the run. The only question is how patient the American people will be in the face of continuing casualties. The elections on January 30th will tell us a lot about both the prospects for the future of Iraq and whether the public will stick with the project of planting another democracy (along with Turkey) in the heart of the Islamic world. One thing is almost certain. If we pull out Islamo-fascism will not only prevail in Iraq it will be an irresistible tide throughout the Arab world. Muslims everywhere will see our withdrawal as a sign from Allah that the end of the infidel is near, that Islamism is vindicated, and there will be no stopping it. Our withdrawal would be a disaster for the world.

Freedom On the March

There are serious events occurring in Ukraine these days which have been precipitated by what is almost universally believed to have been a fraudulent election manipulated to keep a corrupt, pro-Russian oligarchy in power. There is widespread belief that a reform candidate named Yushchenko actually won the election but had it stolen from him by the incumbents. This has produced huge protests in Kiev and elsewhere which threaten to topple the current administration. The police have even joined with the protesters who have through peaceful means managed to shut down the government.

For updates and details from a blogger who is an eyewitness in Kiev (and seems to be an American) go here. Instapundit is also following the events in Ukraine and has a lot of links to other sites.

Somethin' Happenin' Here

Captain's Quarters has caught wind of mysterious, and apparently very important, developments in North Korea:

Two wire service reports indicate that North Korea has made major changes in its normally fanatical approach to its sovereignty and security. Reuters informs its readers that the hermit nation has suddenly developed a sense of urgency about restarting the six-nation talks that Kim Jong-Il previously joined with great reluctance:

North Korea wants urgently to restart six-party talks on its nuclear programs but is still demanding of its certain conditions be met, a top U.N. official told South Korea's Yonhap news agency on Thursday. North Korea still agreed with the format of the talks, it quoted Jean Ping, president of the U.N. General Assembly, as saying. Officials told him during a visit that Pyongyang was committed to denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, it said.

"North Korea not only agreed to the format of the talks but also believes that the talks should restart urgently," Ping was quoted as saying.

North Korea has hardly been a fan of the multilateral negotiations in the past. Their haste to return to the table sounds like someone else may be making the decisions now, an impression that only gains currency with this report from the French news agency AFP. Not only have Kim's pictures been removed from public places in Pyongyang, they've also been pulled from the lapels of traveling Northerners:

South Korea's Unification Ministry confirmed that lapel badges of Kim are no longer being worn by North Koreans travelling from the Stalinist state to China on official business. In the past, they wore either a badge portraying Kim or a similar badge portraying his father, the Stalinist state's founder Kim Il-Sung who died in 1994.

"North Koreans travelling to and from China who formerly wore the badge of either Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il on their chests, have stopped wearing the Kim Jong-Il badge," Unification Ministry spokeswoman Yang Jong-Hwa told AFP, citing an internal report from the ministry's information analysis bureau.

The official party line has Kim issuing orders to put an end to the personality cult he transferred from his father to himself after assuming power. Up to now, the only indication of regime change has been the removal of Kim's pictures, and the official explanation at least sounded plausible. Now that their foreign policy has apparently evolved, the rumors of Kim's demise start taking on a bit more credibility. The Reuters article discusses the latest of them:

Rumors circulated in currency and stock markets in Seoul and Tokyo early on Thursday that Kim had been shot dead. "There have been various rumors about North Korea and some do have an impact on the market, but this time there's no reaction," said a foreign exchange dealer at a bank in Seoul.

Something has changed up there. Maybe Kim just decided to get humble after Bush's re-election, but with the nation starving to death and their neighbors aligning themselves with the US on their nuclear ambitions, one or more of the palace guard may have decided that their Nero needed to go.

Hmmm.

The U.S. Dollar vs. Gold

Recently, brother Dick asked if I would write an article on what is, and has been, happening with the performance of the dollar vs. gold. I thought, gee, I have a degree in psychology and I've been a software engineer for the last fifteen years how can I comment with any degree of authority on said topic? Well, as it turns out, this subject is kind of a hobby of mine and I've been following it for some time. Actually, off and on since the late '70s.

Back in the '70s I had a garage business where I worked on cars for a living. One of my customers was an older guy who would buy used cars, bring them to me for repairs so they would meet state inspection, and then sell them on his used car lot.

He was a gold bug. A gold bug (I prefer the term: gold advocate) is a person who believes that gold is and always will be the only real money, that gold has been wrongfully displaced by the paper dollars that the Federal Reserve creates with a key press on a computer, and that some day gold will again be recognized and restored as the only real currency.

This guy had an impact on me. Through discussions with him, I came to understand the significance of gold. It's actually very simple. Gold is a true store of wealth. In the 1920s, a $20 gold coin (one ounce of gold) would purchase a fine men's suite which retailed for...$20. Today, that same $20 gold coin will still purchase a fine men's suite which retails for $450 because that is what an ounce of gold is worth at the time of this writing. The take home message is that over the long term, gold maintains its value against the ravages of government sanctioned debauchery of its currency. In earlier articles I spoke of many of the issues surrounding gold.

The fact of the matter is that the United States has become bankrupt. This is clearly apparent to even the casual observer who considers the twin deficits this once great country has acquired. These are the trade deficit which results from the U.S. importing more than 1/2 a trillion dollars more than it exports and the budget deficit which has resulted from the U.S. spending (borrowing) 1/2 a trillion dollars more than it generates in revenues. The situation is analogous to an individual who has massively over-extending their credit card. The U.S. must borrow $2 billion dollars from the rest of the word each and every day to finance its debt.

In addition to this is the fact that there exists a $50 trillion dollars in un-funded liabilities (that means there's no money to pay for the socialist style of government programs promised to Americans like Social Security, Medicare, etc.) which is due to become payable as the baby boomer generation begins to retire. See the abyss

This is a classic example of government gone wrong. It initiates socialist policies intended to "take care" of its citizens and ends up hurting them more than helping them. And so it ever is. I've said it before and I'll say it again, government has no business trying to "take care" of its citizens. That's the responsibility and mandate of the Church. If one could have every dollar they've paid to the government's accounts established for their "welfare", they'd be able to provide for their own retirement and wouldn't be in a position where they are depending on the government for their very existence only to be devastated by some bureaucrat's decision to break a promise.

If anyone reading this thinks their investments in the stock market are going to insulate them from this mess, ask yourself what the entire baby-boomer generation is going to do when as they begin to retire. They're going to start liquidating their investments in the stock market into cash because they're going to need it. This will cause the stock market to drop significantly and I doubt I'm the only one that suspects such an eventuality. Many investors, with more understanding than myself are aware of this issue also. I doubt they will stand by idly and watch their investments decline.

And speaking of retirement, I can't see how the majority of Americans will ever actually be able to retire. It's obvious that the government is going to renege on Social Security and Medical benefits. They won't say "you can't have what you have paid into for all of your working life." It will be more like "you can't have what you've paid for until your seventy years old...or seventy-five...or eighty... Consider just the financial burden of insurance. There's health insurance including medical, dental, and vision. People in their latter years will need this more than ever and they're in for a shock when the see what it will cost when it's no longer subsidized by they're employer. Add to this the cost of home-owner's insurance, life insurance, and car insurance. To be sure, the combined costs will be prohibitively expensive for people who are on fixed income or worse, without income. We've already reached a point today where these costs are prohibitively expensive for people who haven't even retired yet!

The new paradigm for many will be to work until they drop or live out their latter years in destitute poverty living a quality of life that is diminished because of poor health. I think it was the pirate, Black Beard who said: "them's that dies is the lucky ones." It could reasonably be interpreted that the government's withholding of benefits to people who have contributed to them throughout their entire working lives would be anything less than the killing off of those who can't meet these expenses.

The American citizen has a choice to make. They can continue to go bankrupt along with the U.S. by holding onto the paper dollars and dollar related investments like the stock market (just as the Germans did with the paper Mark in the '20s) See this link from an earlier post or they can trade that paper for real wealth...gold. Forget about investing in the Euro...it's just another paper charade just like the dollar. After all, it's not redeemable in anything of value. As Murray Rothbard said, "Fiat currency, by any other name smells just as sour."

It's interesting to consider that, since 2001, the U.S. dollar has been devalued by almost 30% against the basket of foreign currencies in the U.S. dollar index yet there has been little or no economic recovery. Historically, this would result in eventual economic recovery for any country in a similar situation as the cost of their exports would drop relative to foreign currencies and their manufacturing sector would surge, create new jobs, and pull them out of the dilemma. Obviously this has not been the case. Why?

There are two reasons that I can think of for why things are different this time. First, the U.S. has, for the most part, exported its manufacturing base overseas so there is no manufacturing sector left to do the heavy lifting and, secondly, some of the countries with which the U.S. maintains a trade deficit (in their wisdom) have pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar. This means that as the dollar drops, their currencies drop so no matter how low the U.S. dollar falls, our exports will not be attractively priced to these countries.

In either case, this is extremely significant as it implies that (A.) the laws of global economics are no longer relevant or (B.) they have apparently been suspended in lieu of a "new world order" or (C.) the party will eventually come to an end and life as we know it will be considerably different.

At this point I suspect I may have digressed from the topic I was asked to address so to gain a better understanding of the current state of the U.S. dollar see this article.

The good news is that the individual American citizen doesn't have to suffer the same economic fate as the U.S government. You are free to choose to salvage and ensure your wealth by breaking free of the paper mentality and acquiring gold which preserves wealth for ever. So while the prospect for increasing financial devastation occurs on a global level, the prudent individual has isolated themselves from the powers they have no control over by acquiring gold.

In 1980 gold reached a high of approximately $800 per ounce. When adjusted for inflation, today that would be equal to approximately $1900 per ounce. Given our current economic situation, one has to ask themselves why gold is at today's price of $450 and govern themselves accordingly.

At this link are two charts: one reflecting the price of gold and beneath it a chart reflecting the value of the U.S. dollar against currencies of other countries. They say more than I ever could about what is going on with the dollar vs. gold.

Keep in mind that gold is a long-term concept. For instance, in November of 2002 gold was at $320. Then it rose to $$380. Then it plummeted to $320 again. That's called volatility and you can't let it influence your thinking. Many who bought gold at $380 sold it at $320 thinking it was the worst investment they ever made. They were controlled by emotions rather than their reasoning and understanding. It's the trend that's important and it appears to me that the trend of gold is to increase in value over the long term. Today, gold is at $450 (I wonder what those folks who sold at $320 are thinking now.) and could very possibly drop to $420 again where it was in April of this year. That too shouldn't influence your thinking. Gold advocates acquire gold and hold on to it for the long term. Gold is the metal of kings, a true store of wealth, and protection from the ravages of governments.

Thanks for reading,

WSC

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Hugh Hewitt has posted an historical document which your child will not be allowed to read in school. Doubtless if any public school teacher was so insensitive as to post this on the classroom bulletin board he or she would be compelled to remove it. We offer it to you, in part, as a way of sticking our thumb in the eye of the censorious mullahs who run our educational bureaucracy and in part so that we may all have a deeper understanding of, and appreciation for, the context in which Thanksgiving originated:

General Thanksgiving

By the PRESIDENT of the United States Of America

A PROCLAMATION

------------------------------------------------------------

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;-- for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;-- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;-- and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

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

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

(signed) G. Washington

Happy Thanksgiving,

and

Administrative Asininity

The Drudge Report links us to this Reuters News article which simply confirms Viewpoint's claim yesterday that examples of bone-headed public school administrative decisions seem to be proliferating across the nation at an alarming pace.

Unless there's a lot more to this story than what we're told, the California elementary school principle in question is evidently not one of the brighter luminaries in the scholastic firmament.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California teacher has been barred by his school from giving students documents from American history that refer to God -- including the Declaration of Independence.

Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.

"It's a fact of American history that our founders were religious men, and to hide this fact from young fifth-graders in the name of political correctness is outrageous and shameful," said Williams' attorney, Terry Thompson.

"Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country," he said. "There is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence."

Vidmar could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose and claims violations of Williams rights to free speech under the First Amendment.

Phyllis Vogel, assistant superintendent for Cupertino Unified School District, said the lawsuit had been forwarded to a staff attorney. She declined to comment further.

Williams asserts in the lawsuit that since May he has been required to submit all of his lesson plans and supplemental handouts to Vidmar for approval, and that the principal will not permit him to use any that contain references to God or Christianity.

Among the materials she has rejected, according to Williams, are excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's journal, John Adams' diary, Samuel Adams' "The Rights of the Colonists" and William Penn's "The Frame of Government of Pennsylvania."

"He hands out a lot of material and perhaps 5 to 10 percent refers to God and Christianity because that's what the founders wrote," said Thompson, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, which advocates for religious freedom. "The principal seems to be systematically censoring material that refers to Christianity and it is pure discrimination."

We'd doubtless have more examples tomorrow of administrative asininity except there's no school for the next four days. All the administrators will be home solemnly giving thanks to John Dewey or Horace Mann, or Alfred Kinsey, or somebody, before they carve into their turkeys.

A Revolutionary President

Charles Krauthammer has an interesting piece on why George Bush's second term is unique in recent presidential history and why Bush has an opportunity to be among the most consequential presidents ever. The gist of it is here:

There is an unusual feature to the second Bush Administration that is extraordinarily important but has been almost entirely overlooked. For the first time in a half-century, a two-term presidency will end without sending out its Vice President to seek a mandate for succession at the next election. Vice President Cheney will not run for the presidency, and everyone knows it. When these eight years are over, the Bush-Cheney Administration will simply close up shop.

[T]he fact that Bush-Cheneyism will never have to seek popular ratification again gives Bush unique freedom of action. Which, in the hands of a President with unusually ambitious goals, will yield perhaps the most energetic - to some, the most dangerous - presidency of our lifetime. Bush is fully aware of his situation. Hence the remarkable alacrity with which, after the election, he seized the moment. No two-month vacation to unwind. No waiting for the January Inauguration to set the agenda. He waited but two days to lay claim not just to victory but to a mandate.

Then, even more audacity. He not only claimed his mandate. He defined it right on the spot. Seizing the third rail of American politics, he promised to reform Social Security with, at minimum, partial privatization. He then added his intention to radically redo the tax code - which includes entertaining such ideas as entirely abolishing the Internal Revenue Service by going to a national sales tax. You cannot get more radical than that. His subsidiary aims, earthshaking in any other context but almost minor in this one, are kneecapping the lawsuit industry with serious tort reform and installing a conservative judiciary that will long outlive his presidency.

[T]he President is taking control of his government. In a country where the bureaucracy is so entrenched that the government is often at war with itself, that is revolutionary. As is the man in charge. Bush is marshaling his forces for the single-minded pursuit of a foreign policy rooted in a radical idea: the spread of democracy, particularly in the Middle East. That means unrelenting pursuit of the war on terrorism and no flinching on Iraq. Those who thought a re-elected Bush might reverse course and seek an exit strategy have been sobered by everything that has happened since Election Day.

This sounds like the next four years will be fun to watch, unless you're a Democrat - or an Islamist.

The Darwinians and John Kerry

Thomas Woodward, writing for Christianity Today.com reviews the cover story on Darwinian evolution in the recent National Geographic. Woodward's review implicitly illuminates the Darwinians' strategy for dealing with the competing theory known as Intelligent Design. The strategy seems to be: Ignore it as if it doesn't exist as long as possible, and, when it must be mentioned, simply declare that it has been thoroughly discredited.

This strategy removes both the necessity of actually having to confront the arguments raised by ID advocates and avoids publicizing the fact that such arguments exist. Very clever.

It sounds quite a lot, though, like the strategy the Kerry campaign adopted to deal with the Swift Vet allegations. The tactic worked poorly for the senator, and it remains to be seen how well it will serve the Darwinians. We suspect that they will find what Senator Kerry found: Unless you actually explain why your opponents' criticisms are wrong, people just are not going to believe you when you insist that they are.

Helping Our Kids

Here's a great way we can all support our young soldiers and Marines overseas and help keep their morale up. The USO, with the help of AT&T, is running a program whereby they provide phone cards for our servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan to enable them to make calls home.

Each card costs fifteen dollars (AT&T is not making any profit from the cards). We can purchase cards for donation (as many as we wish)to military personnel by dialing 1-877-522-7000 and charging the cost to our credit card. The USO will see that the cards are delivered.

It's the very least we can do.

Keeping Abreast of the War

Belmont Club, Strategy Page, The Fourth Rail, and Adventures of Chester continue to provide fascinating insight, reportage, and analysis of the current military situation in Iraq. A visit to any of these sites will produce a lot of very interesting and informative reading.

Uneducated Educators

Stories of bone-headed public school administrators are frequently in the news. Here's one at Captain's Quarters about an administrator in Maryland who will not permit any mention of the fundamental significance of Thanksgiving:

Young students across the state read stories about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, simulate Mayflower voyages, hold mock feasts and learn about the famous meal that temporarily allied two very different groups.

But what teachers don't mention when they describe the feast is that the Pilgrims not only thanked the Native Americans for their peaceful three-day indulgence, but repeatedly thanked God.

"We teach about Thanksgiving from a purely historical perspective, not from a religious perspective," said Charles Ridgell, St. Mary's County Public Schools curriculum and instruction director. School administrators statewide agree, saying religion never coincides with how they teach Thanksgiving to students.

Of course not. Why teach students that Thanksgiving was historically a religious observance? Why teach students that it began as an expression of thankfulness to God and was officially proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln to be a day of gratitude to God? We can't do this, these administrators are convinced, because that would be to graft a religious lesson onto a history lesson, and somehow, they intuit, that would be wrong.

Perhaps someone will inform these "educators" that by teaching about Thanksgiving "from a purely historical perspective" they are making nonsense of both the day and its history. Mr. Ridgell evidently thinks that one can isolate historical events from their context and still teach history, as if the events can be understood apart from the circumstances which cause them. Who or what does Mr. Ridgell think the pilgrims were thanking? How meaningful is any historical discussion of Thanksgiving apart from an accurate understanding of its purpose?

We wish we could say that Mr. Ridgell is in the minority among school administrators and bureaucrats, but we suspect he is not. There are, of course, many fine people in school administration, but too many of them, for all their degrees, are often among the least well-educated individuals on a school faculty. They are not infrequently people who originally went into education to coach, taught subjects which required minimal academic or scholarly preparation, found the demands of the classroom uncongenial, and when finished coaching settled upon a career in administration as an escape. They often read nothing of academic or intellectual merit beyond a few sterile education journals and many of them can scarcely write a coherent, grammatically correct paragraph. Their greatest concern is not to provide the best education possible for students but rather to keep their school boards and parents happy and to stay out of court.

It's little wonder, then, that administrators like Mr. Ridgell don't understand that the religious motivations and beliefs of the pilgrims are an essential aspect of the history of Thanksgiving and that ignoring these only distorts and corrupts history.

Incredible Young Men

Another account of yet another American hero is posted at Captain's Quarters:

Sgt. Rafael Peralta built a reputation as a man who always put his Marines' interests ahead of his own. He showed that again, when he made the ultimate sacrifice of his life Tuesday, by shielding his fellow Marines from a grenade blast....

One of the first Marines to enter the house, Peralta was wounded in the face by rifle fire from a room near the entry door, said Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison, 20, of Tacoma, who was in the house when Peralta was first wounded.

Moments later, an insurgent rolled a fragmentation grenade into the area where a wounded Peralta and the other Marines were seeking cover.

As Morrison and another Marine scrambled to escape the blast, pounding against a locked door, Peralta grabbed the grenade and cradled it into his body, Morrison said. While one Marine was badly wounded by shrapnel from the blast, the Marines said they believe more lives would have been lost if not for Peralta's selfless act.

"He saved half my fire team," said Cpl. Brannon Dyer, 27, of Blairsville, Ga.

There are so many incredible young men and women serving in our military. Our nation really doesn't deserve them. We elevate to celebrity status the worst elements in our society, the thugs and the aesthetes, we pay them millions of dollars to amuse us. We make heroes out of criminals, drug addicts, and porn stars. We very nearly worship them. And men like Rafael Peralta fight and die in obscurity defending us from the Islamists who see clearly the decadence of our culture, despise us for it, and yearn to purge the earth of our presence.

Their mistake is that they see a part, a substantial part to be sure, and assume it is the whole. They fail to discern that amidst a debased popular culture there is still much that is good and noble and excellent in America. They fail to recognize that we are still a nation that, in addition to all the superficiality, banality, and degeneracy of those who comprise our celebrity class, can still produce such as Rafael Peralta. As long as we are a nation which breeds such men the Islamist savages will not win.

The Hell of War

Dexter Filkins has a fine piece of reporting in the New York Times on the horrific conditions faced by our Marines in the initial assault on Fallujah. An excerpt:

On one particularly grim night, a group of marines from Bravo Company's First Platoon turned a corner in the darkness and headed up an alley. As they did so, they came across men dressed in uniforms worn by the Iraqi National Guard. The uniforms were so perfect that they even carried pieces of red tape and white, the signal agreed upon to assure American soldiers that any Iraqis dressed that way would be friendly; the others could be killed.

The marines, spotting the red and white tape, waved, and the men in Iraqi uniforms opened fire. One American, Corporal Anderson, died instantly. One of the wounded men, Pfc. Andrew Russell, lay in the road, screaming from a nearly severed leg.

A group of marines ran forward into the gunfire to pull their comrades out. But the ambush, and the enemy flares and gunfire that followed, rattled the men of Bravo Company more than any event. In the darkness, the men began to argue. Others stood around in the road. As the platoon's leader, Lt. Andy Eckert, struggled to take charge, the Third Platoon seemed on the brink of panic.

"Everybody was scared," Lieutenant Eckert said afterward. "If the leader can't hold, then the unit can't hold together."

The unit did hold, but only after the intervention of Bravo Company's commanding officer, Capt. Read Omohundro.

Time and again through the week, Captain Omohundro kept his men from folding, if not by his resolute manner then by his calmness under fire. In the first 16 hours of battle, when the combat was continuous and the threat of death ever present, Captain Omohundro never flinched, moving his men through the warrens and back alleys of Falluja with an uncanny sense of space and time, sensing the enemy, sensing the location of his men, even in the darkness, entirely self-possessed.

"Damn it, get moving," Captain Omohundro said, and his men, looking relieved that they had been given direction amid the anarchy, were only too happy to oblige.

A little later, Captain Omohundro, a 34-year-old Texan, allowed that the strain of the battle had weighed on him, but he said that he had long ago trained himself to keep any self-doubt hidden from view.

"It's not like I don't feel it," Captain Omohundro said. "But if I were to show it, the whole thing would come apart."

You'll want to read the whole thing.

Ersatz Islam

USA Today recently featured an editorial by Ralph Peters who wishes to persuade us that Islam is really not at war with the West. The people who are fighting against us, he argues, are not true Muslims. They are counterfeits parading under the banner of a religion whose basic tenets they consistently violate. He writes:

Suicide bombings. Assassinations. The wholesale murder of prisoners. The mass slaughter of 9/11. Videotaped beheadings and the execution studios recently discovered in Fallujah. We describe it as "Islamic terrorism." And we're wrong.

The hard-core terrorists spawned by the breakdown of the Middle East quote the Koran. They wear Muslim garments. They perform the daily rituals prescribed by the faith into which they were born. But all of us, in the West and the Middle East, have mistaken the identity of these butchers.

For all of their Muslim trappings, the terrorists of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have returned to pre-Islamic practices, to behaviors that Moses, Christ and Mohammed uniformly rejected: They practice human sacrifice.

When the terrorists we face invoke the names of "Allah" or "Mohammed," they are blaspheming and corrupting a great faith. The prophet was appalled by the religious practices of the early desert peoples. Those who murder in his name today have rejected his message even as they claim to revere it.

We'd be a lot more inclined to accept Peters' argument if those who are indeed orthodox Muslims would speak out more forcefully than they have against the extremists in their midst. We are eager to believe that we are not really in another phase of a war that Islam has waged against the non-Islamic world off and on now for seven centuries. We would love to think that those who desire nothing so much as to be able to slaughter our children are just a tiny minority of the Islamic lunatic fringe. But we can't. As long as the Islamic media, the Imams, and the entire cultural leadership of the Arab world continue to preach the most virulent hatred for the West, as long as the majority of Muslims feel a frisson of pride and pleasure every time an Israeli or American dies at the hands of a Muslim, the term moderate Muslim will continue to be seen by us as an unfortunate oxymoron.

Despite what President Bush would have us believe, a very substantial portion of the Islamic world detests the West and wishes to destroy all that it stands for. It is the goal of Islam to convert the entire world, by the sword if need be, to the Muslim faith and culture. The sooner we realize the nature and extent of the conflict we're in the more likely we'll be to successfully defend ourselves against it.

American Heroes

Chester directs us to this site for an e-mail from a Marine who just finished fighting in Fallujah to his dad at home. He concludes it this way:

I will end with a couple of stories of individual heroism that you may not have heard yet. I was told about both of these incidents shortly after they occurred. No doubt some of the facts will change slightly, but I am confident that the meat is correct.

The first is a Marine from 3/5. His name is Corporal Yeager (Chuck Yeager's grandson). As the Marines cleared and apartment building, they got to the top floor and the point man kicked in the door. As he did so, an enemy grenade and a burst of gunfire came out. The explosion and enemy fire took off the point man's leg. He was then immediately shot in the arm as he lay in the doorway. Corporal Yeager tossed a grenade in the room and ran into the doorway and into the enemy fire in order to pull his buddy back to cover. As he was dragging the wounded Marine to cover, his own grenade came back through the doorway. Without pausing, he reached down and threw the grenade back through the door while he heaved his buddy to safety. The grenade went off inside the room and Cpl. Yeager threw another in. He immediately entered the room following the second explosion. He gunned down three enemy all within three feet of where he stood and then let fly a third grenade as he backed out of the room to complete the evacuation of the wounded Marine. You have to understand that a grenade goes off within 5 seconds of having the pin pulled. Marines usually let them "cook off" for a second or two before tossing them in. Therefore, this entire episode took place in less than 30 seconds.

The second example comes from 3/1. Cpl. Mitchell is a squad leader. He was wounded as his squad was clearing a house when some enemy threw pineapple grenades down on top of them. As he was getting triaged, the doctor told him that he had been shot through the arm. Cpl. Mitchell told the doctor that he had actually been shot "a couple of days ago" and had given himself self aide on the wound. When the doctor got on him about not coming off the line, he firmly told the doctor that he was a squad leader and did not have time to get treated as his men were still fighting. There are a number of Marines who have been wounded multiple times but refuse to leave their fellow Marines.

These guys are just amazing. It makes one proud to be a citizen of the same country they are. For a lot more examples of heroism under fire in the war on terror go to this site.

Teach Your Children Well

The local newspaper runs a piece wherein a young mother, concerned about blurring the line between church and state, is quoted: "I do have a concern", she opines, "that one day a teacher will tell their [sic] students that something is absolutely right or absolutely wrong."

Perhaps the woman has a point. Imagine what our world would be like if teachers started lecturing kids that there is never any moral justification for, say, rape, or for damaging someone's property just for fun, or for committing genocide, or beating a child with one's fists, or sexually abusing a child. Who'd want to live in a world where teachers taught their charges that punishing people for crimes they are known to be innocent of, or driving while drunk just for fun or hurting someone for the thrill of it were categorically wrong?

In our community just last week, a young woman, five months pregnant and her husband serving with the Marines in Iraq, was visiting from out of state. Her hosts took her to get some groceries at a supermarket. As she was getting into the car in the parking lot a young man who later told police that he "just wanted to kill somebody" drove up beside her and shot her in the head with a shotgun. The victim and her child may yet survive this vicious attack, but one searches in vain for any imaginable circumstance which might justify someone doing such a heinous thing.

Maybe the mother who thinks it would be so awful for teachers to instruct their students that some things are absolutely wrong could help us come up with some real-world circumstance in which imbeciles who "just want to kill somebody" are morally justified in gunning down complete strangers.

Anyway, we don't think that the mother need be too concerned that teachers will one day lecture their students that such deeds are absolutely wrong. In order to posit an absolute one has to ground it in something objective, and the only sufficient ground for moral absolutes, as Viewpoint has argued on several prior occasions, is God, and we all know what would happen if teachers started invoking God as the foundation for moral judgments. The day that's permitted we know the country has gone completely to hell.

Open Theism

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has a profile of pastor and theologian Greg Boyd who has made a bit of a name for himself with his advocacy of a theory called "Open Theism". Essentially, this is the view that there are some things about the future that God simply does not know. As a perusal of the comment section following Carter's post will reveal, this is quite a controversial hypothesis among Evangelical Christians.

It is also an interesting hypothesis because it makes sense out of several puzzling issues. It provides a helpful understanding, for example, of petitionary prayer, the concept of which suggests that God can be persuaded to act otherwise than He would have. But, if He knows ahead of time what He will do, in what sense is He subject to persuasion? It also makes sense out of the numerous passages in the Bible which seem to suggest that God changes course, or changes His mind.

Most importantly, in our opinion, the Open Theism hypothesis offers an answer to the question why, if God knew how much evil and suffering there would be in this world, He chose to go ahead and create it anyway. God, after all, could have created any possible world, and a perfectly good God, we might assume, would have created the best world He possibly could have. A world in which people were free to choose and always chose to do right is surely a possible world. So the puzzle is why did God not create that world instead of one in which people so often use their freedom to do evil?

The Open Theism view says that when God made creatures with free will He purposefully divested Himself of a portion of Divine control over the cosmos. He granted to human beings the capacity to create the moral world in which they would live. He also accepted a measure of uncertainty in that since his creatures were free He would not always know what choice they would make. This does not preclude His acting in the world through an exercise of Divine sovereignty by overriding the freedom of some in order to bring about events that He wills to happen, but what it does mean, perhaps, is that prior to His creation of the world, He just didn't know for sure how man would handle his freedom.

Thus He created the best world He possibly could, given the type of world He wished to fashion, and inserted free beings into that world. Ever since then God has pretty much given us the right and the privilege to make as big a mess of it as we wanted.

The fact that Open Theism has a certain explanatory power does not, of course, mean that the theory is correct. There are other answers which have been given to these questions which preserve God's knowledge of the future and which may be closer to the truth.

One objection to Open Theism, however, that doesn't seem to hold much water is that if God does not know the future, then He cannot be omniscient. This objection fails both on Biblical grounds and philosophical grounds: Biblically, because the Bible doesn't insist that God knows every future contingency and indeed seems to imply prima facie just the opposite, and philosophically because omniscience simply means that God knows everything that it is possible to know. It may be logically impossible to know what free beings are going to choose to do in a future that hasn't happened yet. Just as God's omnipotence doesn't mean that He can create square circles, His omniscience may not entail that He can know what has not yet occurred in the mind of free agents.

Nevertheless, there is a certain comfort in the belief that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future. It assures us that He is in control and cannot be surprised by events. Whether the apologetic advantages of Open Theism are enough to offset its unsettling aspects and whether it can ultimately be reconciled with Scripture, we cannot say. We can only invite the interested reader to visit Boyd's web site and follow the links there to various elements of his argument.