Offering commentary on current developments and controversies in politics, religion, philosophy, science, education and anything else which attracts our interest.
A recent essay by Michael Metzger succinctly explains why it is that so many modern marriages are in trouble:
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond cites the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Diamond goes on to write, "By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness."
In other words, lots of things all have to go right for a marriage to succeed and only one thing has to go wrong for it to fail. Add to Diamond's list the fact that in the modern workplace men and women are in close contact with each other to an extent that's probably unique in human history. It's a situation in which they see every day people of the opposite sex to whom their own spouses often measure up unfavorably. The constant proximity and interaction between the sexes in the workplace creates the potential for marital challenges that are perhaps unprecedented in Western culture.
At any rate, without wishing to sound like an e-harmony commercial the problem for many moderns is that as our culture becomes more and more diverse, as traditional values give way to a wider spectrum of moral assumptions, and as more people see religion as extraneous to human well-being, it gets harder and harder to find someone who matches well in all those "essential respects" Diamond lists.
It's another reason for being skeptical, perhaps, of the alleged merits of "diversity." The more varied we become as a society the more likely the pool of compatible potential mates will shrink to a puddle.
Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science, author of Signature in the Cell, and an intelligent design advocate gave a presentation at Biola college recently on evidence for intelligent design in the genetic code of living things. After Meyer's talk there was a panel discussion with two critics of Meyer's book.
The other panelists were Steve Matheson, a theistic evolutionist from Calvin College, and Arthur Hunt a Darwinist and biologist from the University of Kentucky.
Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Views provides a transcript of an interesting part of their exchange. I've edited it slightly to make it easier to read:
Matheson: I don't find the argument convincing, I really don't, but I think I know why. And the reason why is, I just figured out tonight, you said that we reason backwards from what we know works, which is that intelligence makes codes. I'll agree with that. Can I see the hands of people that don't agree? Of course not.
Okay, well we reason back and say, therefore, this is the one explanation we know that can do this. I buy that, I get it, it's obvious. But I see the world differently than you do. And so here's the thing. You said intelligence always creates information, and my view is a little different. Everywhere I look, and every time I look, if I wait long enough, there is a natural and even materialistic explanation to things.
Now, don't I have the right to say I'm going to go ahead and extrapolate that back, like Steve's book, not because I'm an obnoxious Calvinist-maybe that's true-but because that's just kinda my preference? And so what I want all of us to agree on is that it's fruitless, it's pointless to say, Steve, don't be stupid, design doesn't explain what you want it to. Well, of course it does-how could it not? But wouldn't it be reasonable for some of the Christians in this room to say, You know-
Meyer: You're comfortable waiting for another explanation.
Matheson: I am.
Meyer: Which, in a strict sense, concedes that the one I offer is currently best-[The audience erupts into applause. Unintelligible between Meyer and Matheson]-and we have a different philosophy of science, which is where the locus of our disagreement probably lies, and where we should continue to converse.
Matheson: I'll offer the acknowledgment: Design will always be an excellent and irrefutable explanation. How can it not be. I'm just saying it doesn't look designed to me. He's [Meyer] right, and there's some stuff that goes on in the cell, I don't know how you get design into there. But it's easy to simply say, and maybe you [referring to Arthur Hunt] do say this, let's wait, maybe there's a good reason why the cell, those proteins, billions [every] day, go straight into the wood-chipper. Maybe there's a good reason for that. You said that. There's nothing wrong with talking like that. There's also nothing wrong with saying, Wow, man, I don't know.
In other words, Matheson admits, though he doesn't want to, that intelligent design is the best explanation on offer for the origin of the information contained in living cells. Even so, like the travelers in the play Waiting for Godot, he's philosophically committed to withholding acceptance of ID in the hope that a plausible naturalistic explanation will some day come along.
This is an odd way to go about things. All theories in science and philosophy are held tentatively. One embraces the best explanation available until something better presents itself. If Matheson believes that ID makes more sense than Darwinian naturalism then the proper thing to do is to accept ID until such time as it is no longer the superior theory. Indeed, this is the rationale many Darwinists give for holding on to Darwinism - they argue that it's really the only plausible game in town.
To refuse to accept a theory that one believes is the best among those in play, however, just because one does not like the metaphysical implications of the theory - in this case that a transcendent intelligence is an active agent in the world - is to display an irrational prejudice for naturalism. A Calvinist like Matheson should be embarrassed to admit that that's his position, although in his defense perhaps he could argue that his peculiar refusal to accept the theory that he thinks is the best has been predestined by God and there's nothing he can do about it.
You'll remember that Dan Rather's career pretty much came to a sudden conclusion when he broadcast charges that President Bush had lied about his military service. Rather's allegations turned out to be based on a phony document and Rather's shoddy attempt at disgracing Bush wound up disgracing himself.
Too bad Rather wasn't interested in checking on the military careers of Democrats else he might have unearthed a nugget in Connecticut's Attorney General's office.
It turns out that Richard Blumenthal, the current Attorney General of Connecticut and the heir apparent to retiring Senator Chris Dodd, has been caught by the New York Times in what can only be called a lie about his military service. The Times has discovered that Mr. Blumenthal, despite having sought repeated deferments from service during the Vietnam war, and never having served in that theater, has nevertheless both explicitly and implicitly claimed on a number of occasions that he did.
"We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam," Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. "And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it - Afghanistan or Iraq - we owe our military men and women unconditional support."
There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.
Mr. Blumenthal, alert to the fact that most voters are sick and tired of being lied to by politicians, is now repenting of having "misspoken." How one misspeaks about having been in a war zone when one, in fact, never was is something of a mystery. Mr. Blumenthal is now apologizing for what he euphemistically calls a few "misplaced words." Well, it's certainly true that he misplaced the words "I served in Vietnam."
This is a sad revelation, of course. Nobody wants to see a man destroy himself in public, but equally as sad is that Democrat poobahs are defending him:
DSCC Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Tuesday Democrats "will continue to support" embattled candidate Richard Blumenthal in his bid to become the next senator from Connecticut...."I think he's corrected the record in the past and I think his actions as it relates to standing up for veterans over a long period of time speaks volumes about where his heart and his actions are."
Well, actually, according to the NYT he hasn't corrected the record in the past, and "where his heart is" does not give him license to lie about his record, but never mind. A Senate seat hangs in the balance, and that's more important than honor, integrity, truth and all that boy scout stuff. After all, it's not as if United States Senators are supposed to be role models or something.
Speaking of truth, I'm reminded of the words of post-modern philosopher Richard Rorty who once declared that truth is whatever your peer-group will let you get away with saying. By that rather flexible standard I suppose Blumenthal's claim to have served in Vietnam is true after all since his Democrat peers are certainly willing to let him get away with saying it.
Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, George Bush, and Tim Tebow all have some things in common. They're all outspoken about their Christian faith and the liberal media seems to punish them for it. We've talked here at Viewpoint on occasion about what might be called Christian Derangement Syndrome as it relates to Prejean, Palin, and Bush, but we've never really discussed CDS as it has been directed at Tebow.
Stuart Schwartz at American Thinker has done the legwork for us, however, and his column is worth a read, especially if you think journalists are open-minded and tolerant of beliefs they don't themselves share.
Tim Tebow, as most readers probably know, was an outstanding college quarterback at the University of Florida and was drafted in the first round of the NFL draft by the Denver Broncos. Here's Scwartz's lede:
What do women, Tim Tebow, and evangelical Christians have in common?
They are all largely despised by the sports journalism division of our media elite. The continuing controversy over the first round selection in the National Football League draft of quarterback Tim Tebow by the Denver Broncos is a reminder that sports journalists are simply smaller and often nastier versions of their elite brothers on the serious side of the business.
Get accused twice of rape (Ben Roethlisberger, Pittsburgh), repeatedly abuse your wife (Michael Pittman, Tampa Bay), regularly strangle and drown hapless dogs (Michael Vick, Atlanta)? Ah, well, boys will be boys, it is society's fault -- and besides, women and dogs don't wear Super Bowl rings. But pray, work with the poor, and refuse to engage in casual sex -- there's something seriously wrong with you. Or, as one Sports Illustrated writer put it, you are a certified "wackdo."
And so the controversy has swirled around "wackdo" Timothy Richard "Tim" Tebow, the evangelical Christian whose Denver Bronco jersey has become the top NFL merchandise seller before he set foot on Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium. Fans love this clean-cut, home-schooled son of Christian missionaries as much as the sports journalism establishment despises him.
I wonder if the SI writer would refer to a Muslim athlete as a "wackdo." Probably not. Anyway, you should read the rest of Schwartz's column on the sorts of things that've been said about Tebow for no other reason than that he's not shy about talking about his faith.
One of the interesting ancillary points Schwartz makes concerns misogyny among sports journalists - he claims that it's almost exclusively a liberal phenomenon. This comes as no surprise, actually, since liberals so often display what can at best be described as maladroitness and at worst be described as bigotry when it comes to matters of both race and religion. They may as well complete the trifecta and be sexists, too.
Byron puts me on to an interesting article in The Economist about the plight of black women. The difficulty they face is that there is tremendous competition among black women for the shrinking pool of marriageable black men which leads to a number of very regrettable social consequences:
Imagine that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called "The Logic of Life". With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she "steals" a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little.
Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr Harford's imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
The article concludes that this disparity is largely responsible for the explosion of unwed motherhood in the black community and matriarchal families:
Black women tend to stay in school longer than black men. Looking only at the non-incarcerated population, black women are 40% more likely to go to college. They are also more likely than white women to seek work. One reason why so many black women strive so hard is because they do not expect to split the household bills with a male provider. And the educational disparity creates its own tensions. If you are a college-educated black woman with a good job and you wish to marry a black man who is your socioeconomic equal, the odds are not good.
"I thought I was a catch," sighs an attractive black female doctor at a hospital in Washington, DC. Black men with good jobs know they are "a hot commodity", she observes. When there are six women chasing one man, "It's like, what are you going to do extra, to get his attention?" Some women offer sex on the first date, she says, which makes life harder for those who prefer to combine romance with commitment.
The Economist opines that the solution is to stop incarcerating black men for non-violent crimes, but I don't see how that helps. It makes more men available, perhaps, but it does nothing to improve the quality of the marriage pool. Educated black women looking for a quality male are not going to be helped by increasing the number of unincarcerated criminals in the pool.
Perhaps it will soon get to the point where such women get tired of the social inhibitions in the black community against dating white men and start competing with white women for white males. If that happens there could be serious sociological consequences for African-American society as the most "desirable" black women move out of that community to marry white men. Those left, both male and female, will be poorer, less educated and more dysfunctional, but how else can this problem be solved?
You've heard, no doubt, that Los Angeles is boycotting Arizona over their new immigration law which, like our attorney general who seems never to pass up an opportunity to erode our confidence in his judgment and competence, the good people of L.A. probably haven't read.
I wonder if, when California comes hat in hand to the federal government to bail them out of the fiscal mess they've spent themselves into, they'll demand that no Arizona tax dollars sully the offering we make toward sustaining their welfare state. I wonder, too, if Los Angeles will boycott the nine or so other states considering measures similar to the Arizona law.
Perhaps Los Angeles should just secede from the union and become a part of Mexico. I, for one, would not object. Or, borrowing an idea advanced by Hot Air, perhaps L.A. might be persuaded to take in all of Arizona's illegals so Arizona doesn't have to send them back to Mexico and points south. The city fathers of L.A. are so irate that Arizona may be deporting people who shouldn't be in the U.S., maybe they should show how deeply compassionate they are by doing something substantive and volunteering to house, feed, clothe, and educate them themselves. Do you think they will?Neither do I.
At any rate, the president's role in this contretemps has been very disappointing. He should have and could have been a healer in the midst of conflict. He could have talked about how the federal government needs to be more responsive to the needs and frustrations of Arizonans and more responsible in enforcing the law. He could have talked about how immigrants need to obey our laws and enter the country properly. He could have talked about how Americans and legal immigrants could work together to find solutions to this difficult problem. He could have actually read the law before he piped up about it, and pointed out that the worst fears of the Hispanic community about the law are unwarranted. But no. Regrettably, like a good disciple of Saul Alinsky he chose instead to be incendiary and suggest that the people of Arizona were bigots, that the law was irresponsible, and that Hispanics would be oppressed and hassled by the police as a result of it.
His words provided all the encouragement that the left and Hispanics needed to take to the streets and start demanding that Arizona be punished for not allowing itself to be overrun by hordes of poor people and criminals. Now, as a result of the president's demogoguery, we have states pitted against each other, people on all sides are extremely angry with each other, and inter-ethnic hatreds are swelling. Well played, Mr. President.
Anyway, here's Allahpundit at Hot Air suggesting that this episode is actually, if you can imagine it, being manipulated by our leadership for political gain:
[T]he left isn't interested in the facts about this. That was my point yesterday about Holder admitting that he hasn't read the statute. If he reads it then he's accountable for smearing it; better to stay ignorant and smear away for as long as possible and then, when called on it, grudgingly chalk it up to being misinformed. Besides, ever since the law was amended to ban racial profiling, the critique has shifted to how it'll be applied in practice by cops, not how it looks on the page. Even if it's found constitutional - and it very well may be - it'll take months of proper enforcement by Arizona police before that point can be factually challenged. For another thing, there's too much political skin in this game for the hysterics to relax. A Univision poll shows that 67 percent of Latinos oppose the law even though national majorities are strongly in favor. Democrats aren't going to pass amnesty this year so screaming "Nazi!" is their best chance to lock in Hispanic voters for the midterms and beyond. Look at it this way: When you've got the Simon Wiesenthal Center issuing statements deploring the sort of rhetoric being tossed at Arizona, you're way too far into Godwinland ever to make it back out. As a wise man once said, you can't reason a man out of that which he wasn't reasoned into...
At some point people have just got to say that they no longer care what the liberal elites say or think of them. They're going to do the right thing, they're going to enforce the law, they're going to protect themselves and their state from financial ruin, and if Los Angeles and the President don't like it they can go pound sand. We need more people in positions of leadership like, well, like New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie, for example:
Gov Christie calls S-L columnist thin-skinned for inquiring about his 'confrontational tone'
Maybe New Jersey will pass a law like Arizona's. I hope so. I'd love to hear Christie's reaction to a threat from Los Angeles to boycott New Jersey.
One of the reasons so few conservatives have confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder's judgment is that, though he had no trouble calling white America a nation of cowards and the Bush administration a bunch of war criminals, he just can't bring himself to say that Muslim terrorists are radical Islamic extremists, or even acknowledge that the phrase is meaningful:
It really shouldn't be hard to attribute acts of terror by people like the Times Square bomber, the Christmas bomber, or the Fort Hood shooter to Islamic extremism, a term which seems to some Americans to be a redundancy.
Islamists, i.e. the millions of Muslims who embrace or support militant jihad, see themselves as engaged in a holy war against religious infidelity. The Koran encourages them to kill those who refuse to accept the teachings of the Prophet, especially the Jews and whoever supports the Jews. Those who in the 1990s attacked the World Trade Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the Khobar Towers, those who hijacked the planes on 9/11, and all those who have come after, share one thing in common - they believe they're doing the will of Allah. They are radical Islamists. Holder's reluctance to admit this is deeply troubling, especially since he leaves us with only a narrow range of possible explanations for his demurral:
He's either very naive, very uninformed, very dumb, or, most troubling of all, very reluctant to impugn people with whom he feels a measure of sympathy. Whichever of these is the case, it's not good.
David Horowitz is a Jew and former communist who today speaks and writes about the threat of Islamic extremism, not just abroad but on American campuses. A few days ago he was confronted by an American Muslim student whose answer to a question he poses is both chilling and clarifying. It certainly shows that some people who look moderate and sound moderate are in their hearts just as murderous as any terrorist who blows up school busses in Israel:
There is a myth that has gained currency in this country, especially among liberals, that holds that the overwhelming number of Muslims are peace-loving folk who condemn terrorism, Hezbollah, and Hamas. I say it is a myth because although I believe that such Muslims probably exist, and certainly hope that they do, it's very difficult to actually find one of them. It's especially hard to find them on our university campuses.
Check out Horowitz's website FrontPage Mag where he documents many of his encounters with Muslim students, and you'll understand what I mean.
Bill adds a very important observation to our post titled Death Spiral:
On your Death Spiral post, I just wanted to mention that while all of what you wrote is probably true, you may have missed a not so insignificant fact. The bail out of Greece is not actually a bail out of "Greece" rather it's a bailout of the banks, primarily in Germany and France, that have leant Greece money by buying Greek bonds.
It's no different than what happened in this country. For example AIG had insured investments that Goldman Sachs had made and when those investments went bust, AIG couldn't pay so the taxpayer footed the bill. Tens of billions of dollars of the bailout to AIG went directly to GS. GS didn't lose a penny. The interesting thing about this is that when the bonds from a company go bad (AIG), the bond holders (GS) ALWAYS take a haircut by negotiating for some percentage of pennies on the dollar. Not so in this case, and the banks were made completely whole as the US Treasury and the Fed didn't even attempt to negotiate a settlement.
The same thing is happening with Greece. The moral hazard has gone over the top. The banks know that they can make whatever investments they choose and all losses will be paid for by the public. The big banks have firmly fixed the IV into the arm of the public and will slowly suck out every drop of blood. Unfortunately, nobody seems interested in doing anything about this.
Sadly, these bailouts don't fix anything, rather they simply kick the debt can down the road for a couple of years and the same thing or worse will happen again. If Greece was ready to default today, what are they going to do that will enable them to pay off their present debt (that they can't pay today) along with an additional hundreds of billions that will come due in two years? Giving them the loans just enables them to continue to be grasshoppers.
All that had to be done was for Greece to default and leave the ECU and the Euro until they got their fiscal house in order at which time they could rejoin the union. Greece would have been better off, the ECU and the Euro would have been better off, but the banks would have lost some money. Guess we can't have that now, can we?
The ECU really screwed up because they have sent the message to the world that they aren't really serious about a solid Euro currency. It's just another fiat currency with no discipline...just like the dollar. The Euro price is dropping like a rock as people are bailing out, and that's primarily why the price of gold is going up.
Further, look what's happening every Friday afternoon on the FDIC website where they announce the closing of banks for the week. It doesn't take much to figure out that the assets of the closed banks are being assumed by other banks with the FDIC assuming the garbage assets that aren't wanted.
So what we're getting is more and more banks growing bigger and bigger as the smaller ones go under. The big fish are eating the little fish. At some point all of them will be too big to fail.
The banks are looting the world...
Meanwhile the president, all his tough talk notwithstanding, does nothing to stanch the looting, which isn't surprising given the number of former Goldman Sachs bigwigs with which he has stocked his administration.
It's human nature, I suppose, to whine and complain about how tough things are, how boring life is, how there's nothing to do, how awful George Bush was, and so on. Next time you're tempted to complain about your life perhaps you'll recall a story told me by one of my students, an immigrant from one of the most hellish places on earth - Sudan. He recounted an event that happened to him when he was a boy (he's thirty-something now). His name is Jacob, and here's what he said:
When the Muslims attacked our people and drove us out of our villages, we walked hundreds of miles as a group to safety. One time we were being chased by the militia so we were running to cross the river to get away. Most of us had not learned to swim and the river was full of crocodiles so the crossing was full of danger but we had to cross because the militia was coming upon us with guns and swords. Then, on the other side came Arab soldiers to shoot us when we got across. It was a terrible time. Some strong men carried a rope across the river for people to hang onto as they crossed. Some of us were killed by crocodiles. Many older men, women and children drowned. Many others were shot in the water from both sides of the river. I was a boy at the time and fortunately I knew how to swim. I do not know how, but I got across the river even though my two friends were killed. I was able to climb to safety on the other side along with the others who got across safely. I believe it was God's power that saved me on that day!
Kind of makes many of our concerns and troubles seem petty, doesn't it.
Why do some atheists think it's a bad idea to draw too close a relationship between naturalism and Darwinism? One possible reason is they fear that eventually some astute judge will realize that Darwinism is essentially of the same philosophical genre as intelligent design and will conclude that if ID is religious then so, too, must Darwinism be. This judicial epiphany will ultimately eventuate in the loss of Darwinism's position of privilege in publicly funded schools.
Casey Luskin makes this point in an interesting essay at Evolution News and Views.
The fact that Darwinism and ID are philosophical mirror images should be obvious to all but the most otiose of observers, but for some reason, it's not. Darwinism claims that physical processes and forces are capable of explaining all of the biological facts of nature. ID is simply the denial of this claim. Why, then, should the latter be ruled "religious" while the former is not? How can one claim be deemed to be science, while it's negation is deemed to be religious?
If the courts ever realize how simple this matter is they're going to find themselves in the awkward position of having to rule that either ID is science, even if it's false (Richard Dawkins' position), or that Darwinism is essentially religious, even if it's true. It'll be interesting to watch judges and lawyers trying to massage that porcupine.
Here's a fast-paced primer on why our economic predicament is so dire. It's good, but I advise that you use the pause button to allow you to digest the information:
Whether it's Greece or California, it seems clear that excessive spending and borrowing leads only to disaster. I can't think of any example from history when it hasn't. So why has the Obama administration, and to a lesser extent the Bush administration, nevertheless spent us to the brink of catastrophic collapse? Are these people economic or historical illiterates? Are they stupid? Are they deliberately trying to destroy our economy? Are there any other possible explanations?
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks historian Paul Berman, a man of the Left, wrote a book titled Terror and Liberalism in which he punctured the pretensions of his fellow liberal intellectuals for their fascination with terrorism and their reluctance to think ill of the people who perpetrate it.
Now Berman has come out with a follow-up book titled The Flight of the Intellectuals which, I understand, picks up where his first book leaves off.
I haven't read the second book yet but I have read Terror and Liberalism and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the strange relationship between liberalism and radical Islamism and the motives behind this infatuation.
I also urge readers to read through an interview Berman does with journalist Michael Totten on the themes of his two books. It's an extraordinary piece. Berman has his predilections and prejudices but he is one of the most fair-minded people I've ever encountered. He didn't like George Bush much at all, and that certainly comes through in the interview, but he doesn't hesitate to give Bush credit for his clear-sightedness in the war against Islamic terrorism.
Here's an excerpt taken from a portion of the interview in which Berman and Totten are talking about the mindset of a certain group of liberal intellectuals who are willing to celebrate tyrants if the tyrants are anti-American. Berman observes that:
[T]here's another idea that appeals to many people, which is based not on our own feeling of superiority, but on our own inferiority. We look at ourselves in the Western countries and we say that, if we are rich, relatively speaking, as a society, it is because we have plundered our wealth from other people. Our wealth is a sign of our guilt. If we are powerful, compared with the rest of the world, it is because we treat people in other parts of the world in oppressive and morally objectionable ways. Our privileged position in the world is actually a sign of how racist we are and how imperialistic and exploitative we are. All the wonderful successes of our society are actually the signs of how morally inferior we are, and we have much to regret and feel guilty about. So when we look at the world, we should look at it in a spirit of humility and remorse, and we should recognize that other people have been unfairly treated.
We should recognize the superiority of those other people over ourselves. Money-wise, we may be richer. But, morally, the other people are richer. And so, we should despise ourselves, and we should love the other people -- the people who possess qualities so superior to our own as barely to be human. And then, filled with those very peculiar ideas, we set about looking for messianic figures who might express the superior culture of the other people, and might lead the human race to a higher stage of development. And if someone objects to this analysis, we say, oh, we inferior Westerners are incapable of understanding the mysterious thought-patterns of those other people, so who are you to judge?
The interview is a little long, but it'll be the most intellectually profitable 15 minutes you'll spend today.
Newsweek's Robert Samuelson discusses the causes of the crisis in Greece, and what he describes sounds eerily like the situation the United States will find itself in about four years. The problem is fewer workers supporting more and more non-workers and a profligate spending binge leading to ever increasing budget deficits.
Here's an excerpt from Samuelson's column:
Budget deficits and debt are the real problems; and these stem from all the welfare benefits (unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, health insurance) provided by modern governments.
Countries everywhere already have high budget deficits, aggravated by the recession. Greece is exceptional only by degree. In 2009, its budget deficit was 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product (a measure of its economy); its debt, the accumulation of past deficits, was 115 percent of GDP. Spain's deficit was 11.2 percent of GDP, its debt 56.2 percent; Portugal's figures were 9.4 percent and 76.8 percent. Comparable figures for the United States -- calculated slightly differently -- were 9.9 percent and 53 percent.
There are no hard rules as to what's excessive, but financial markets -- the banks and investors that buy government bonds -- are obviously worried. Aging populations make the outlook worse. In Greece, the 65-and-over population is projected to go from 18 percent of the total in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030. For Spain, the increase is from 17 percent to 25 percent.
The welfare state's death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day -- no one knows when -- doubt governments' ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.
But we shouldn't worry. Eat, drink, and be merry. Revel in hope and change. Enjoy American Idol. No great superpower lasts forever. After a while, all governments spend themselves into oblivion. Those among our elites who so admire Europe and European ways can take comfort in the fact that we're on course to follow them right down the drain.
When George Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme court the firestorm of protest was so hot that she withdrew her name from consideration. Ms. Miers, it was argued from both the right and the left, had almost no relevant experience to qualify her for the court. Surely, many observers opined, there must be others more qualified than Ms Miers who was awarded the nomination, it was widely suspected, simply because she was a friend of George Bush's.
Well, now Barack Obama has nominated a woman, a friend of his, with no judicial experience and little courtroom experience to be the next Supreme Court Justice. Elena Kagan has no written body of work upon which anyone can base an assessment of her qualifications. She is Barack Obama's Harriet Miers - and also his dopplegänger - with one exception. No one among congressional Democrats thinks her selection is anything less than "superb" as Senator Leahy inexplicably declared.
When Bush nominated Miers, Republicans let him know how disappointed they were that he didn't select the best candidate in the field. He eventually came to his senses and gave us the brilliant Samuel Alito instead. When Obama nominated Kagan, on the other hand, Democrats all lined up to praise the nominee, but none of them can say exactly what it is they're praising her for. It's certainly not her qualifications to sit on the highest court in the land. I guess they feel that in the age of Obama qualifications for high office are just so 20th century.
One of the arguments against the idea of an intelligent designer, going back at least to David Hume, is that if such a designer exists it must be incompetent given all the "bad" designs found in nature. One of the prized exhibits in this argument has for years been the "backwards" design of the retina, but, unfortunately for many authors who've hitched their Darwinian wagon to it, this old horse appears headed for the glue factory.
It looks wrong, but the strange, "backwards" structure of the vertebrate retina actually improves vision.
Certain cells act as optical fibres, and rather than being just a workaround to make up for the eye's peculiarities, they help filter and focus light, making images clearer and keeping colours sharp.
Although rods and cones are responsible for capturing light, they are in a curious position. Hidden at the base of the retina, they are covered by several layers of cells as well as the bed of nerves that carries visual information to the brain. One result is a blind spot in our visual field, leading the vertebrate retina to be listed among evolution's biggest "mistakes".
Light clearly gets through, however, and in 2007 researchers analysing the retinas of guinea pigs reported that the glial cells which nourish and physically support the bed of neurons also act as optical fibres for the rods and cones. These M�ller cells are funnel-shaped, with wide tops that cover the surface of the retina and a long slender body that guides light to the receptors below.
Now Amichai Labin and Erez Ribak of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have used data from human eye cells to model the workings of the retina. Their findings suggest that sending light via the M�ller cells offers several advantages.
The rest of the article gives a very interesting explanation of the two advantages these researchers have discovered. Besides these there are other excellent reasons for wiring the retina the way it is that have been understood for some time and which are discussed in this article.
One might think that theists would be heartened by such findings since they seem to support the idea that a designer played some role in the creation. Not so Ken Miller, however. Miller is a theistic evolutionist whose career is heavily invested in persuading people that there's absolutely no evidence for intelligent design in biology, particularly in the human eye, and he's adamant that we not draw any inferences from the research cited by New Scientist that would support ID:
However, Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island cautions that this doesn't mean that the backwards retina itself helps us to see. Rather, it emphasises the extent to which evolution has coped with the flawed layout. "The shape, orientation and structure of the M�ller cells help the retina to overcome one of the principal shortcomings of its inside-out wiring," says Miller.
Well, this is certainly an odd take on the research. One might think that the backwards wiring of the retina is only backwards if it impedes vision, but this system actually aids vision. Nevertheless, Miller assumes it's still backwards, apparently because it's not how he would have designed it, and then marvels at how evolution has compensated for the engineering error.
I think probably the retina is less backwards than is Miller's reasoning. If Professor Miller wants my advice it would be to stop digging, throw down his shovel, and pretend that he never heard of the retina.
Thomas Sowell reflects upon his childhood and suggests that the moral distance we've traveled in the last seventy years or so is inversely correlated to how educated we've become. Here's his lede:
One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have "a duty to die," rather than become a burden to others.
This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.
Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.
There was a time-- fortunately, now long past-- when some desperately poor societies had to abandon old people to their fate, because there was just not enough margin for everyone to survive. Sometimes the elderly themselves would simply go off from their family and community to face their fate alone.
But is that where we are today?
Sowell goes on to illustrate with a poignant anecdote how we have shifted from a focus on helping others to focussing on living for ourselves. Check it out.
It's a modern conceit that somehow education and technology have, in ways that matter, made us superior to our forebears. This attitude is a naive bit of chauvinistic self-congratulation. Knowing more about physics makes us neither wiser nor more ethical than those who lived prior to the knowledge explosion. Indeed, more people can read today than at any time in history, we can enjoy films, we can surf the web, we can drive cars, but how do we use these wonderful gifts? Much of what we read and watch is junk. For all of our knowledge, wealth, and technology we're certainly no happier than were our grandparents, our families are less stable, and our mental health much more precarious.
Why is that? Perhaps it's because our grandparents knew something that many moderns don't: Happiness is not something that one can obtain through deliberate pursuit. It's not a drug, nor is it the result of the accumulation of knowledge or goods. It is, rather, a by-product of living a life of virtue, meaning, and caring for others.
Modernity, however, scoffs at this. Moderns believe that we should look out for #1 and that when other people stand in the way of our well-being they need to be shoved out of the way. That's why the abortion industry is so lucrative and why there's political presure to limit the care we provide to the elderly. Moderns also deny that there's any such thing as virtue and they hold that meaning can be injected into life by gratifying one's desires, whether sensual or material.
Unfortunately, there's not much evidence to support these beliefs. Surely Shakespeare was correct that, if death is the end of our existence, life is simply "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Sowell thinks the modern world has lost something crucially important to human flourishing. I think he's right.
Dennis Prager observes that those who are miffed with the tea party folks who oppose expnsive government power regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This criticism, Prager claims, is intended by opponents to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration (MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann come immediately to mind in this regard.). In the course of explaining his case Prager notes something about the way lefties often think that's helpful to those who wish to understand how the liberal mind works.
He writes:
The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers.
It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of race, gender and class rather than through the moral prism of right and wrong.
One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor (class).
Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color -- and gender (not just "whites" but "white males") -- of the tea partiers rather than to their ideas.
As a Leftist rule of thumb -- once again rendering intellectual debate unnecessary and impossible -- white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one additional division on the Left -- strong and weak -- to which the same rule applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the Israelis (strong), for example.
Presumably, then, in the eyes of many on the Left if you're a rich white male you're automatically suspect (despite the peculiar fact that so many Lefties are themselves rich, white males). If a powerful nation has a grievance with a weaker nation then the powerful nation is assumed to be in the wrong until they prove themselves innocent. If a largely white American legislature passes a law that would prevent poor, dark-skinned people from pouring across the border, it's the white legislature that's assumed to be wrong, not those who break the law to enter the country.
I can see why some people would find this an attractive formula. It has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it relieves those who embrace it of the responsibility of having to actually think.
A lot of folks in the conservative media are wondering where the President has been while Nashville suffered through a major disaster last week.
Mr. Obama was quick to send aid to Haiti and to claim that the government is doing all it can to force BP to clean up the Gulf oil spill. Yet a once in a century flood has devastated Nashville, and it doesn't seem to be prominently featured on his radar screen. Some cynics think that the reason the man who was quick to criticize President Bush for waiting a day or two too long to rush aid to New Orleans has been dilatory on Tennessee is because Tennessee is a red state and not likely to vote Democratic. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it's not. I don't like to think that our president is that small-minded and vindictive. Such a motive would, moreover, be counterproductive for the president since administrative indifference is a good way to insure that Tennessee never votes Democratic.
I think, though, that the reason for the lack of apparent concern for the people of Tennessee in the administration and the media may be something that is at once less political and more subconsciously sinister. Perhaps, as with the Mississippi river floods a couple of years ago, people just assume that the victims in these regions don't need government help to cope, that they're a self-reliant, proud breed capable of taking care of themselves, which may well be true. But if this is what's in the back of the minds of administration officials what does that say about their attitude, no doubt subliminal, toward the victims in New Orleans and elsewhere as a result of Katrina? Were those people helpless to do anything to help themselves? Why, with fleets of school busses available couldn't the local authorities evacuate their people? Why couldn't the citizens of the city provide care for each other? Were they so lacking in initiative, so dependent on the federal government, that they just sat around in their City Hall offices and their houses waiting for the government to come in and rescue them?
If that's so, then we need to ask why it is so. Is it because the New Orleans victims were poor, or is it because they've been behaviorally conditioned by a paternalistic welfare state to accept a permanent lassitude, indolence and child-like dependency that the proud people of Nashville and elsewhere disdain? Just wondering.
A friend writes to chide me for making the claim that many liberals don't require evidence to believe what they believe. They often think as they do, I averred, simply because it comports or coheres with their liberal worldview. My friend thought this was tantamount to calling liberals liars. On the contrary, I certainly was not saying that many liberals are liars - although if pressed I'd have to agree that some surely are and that many of these even endorse lying as a strategy (read, for instance, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals).
In my post, however, I was making the more modest claim that many on the left are simply uncritical and gullible. For example, here's a list of ten beliefs many liberals hold, sometimes devoutly, despite the fact that they have little or no evidence for them:
1) That candidate Obama was qualified to hold the highest office in the land.
2) That President Obama is a natural born citizen of the U.S. (This is not to say he isn't, but rather that belief that he is requires an act of faith since he refuses to present his birth certificate).
3) That the Democrats' health care reform proposal will be good for the country.
4) That global warming is caused by human activity and is an imminent threat to the world.
5) That the Arizona law will result in oppressive police tactics against innocent Americans.
6) That intelligent design is just gussied up creationism (Most lay-people who believe this know nothing about ID. They just know that it's wrong.).
7) That tea-partiers are racists.
8) That George Bush and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks on New York.
9) That the Palestinians genuinely desire to live in peace with Israel.
10) That an unborn child is nothing more, ontologically speaking, than a blob of tissue.
You can probably think of more examples. If so, please feel free to share them with us.
