Stealth Socialism

Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN insider, talks about ACORN's strategy for imposing socialism on our country by stealth through the Obama presidency.

Moncrief quotes Graham L. Strachan by way of explaining what she means by "stealth socialism:"

"Why did the Western media persist in calling the social system in the Communist bloc 'Communism' instead of Socialism? They did it to manufacture a false reality: to protect the reputation of another form of Socialism which existed in the West....so-called 'Democratic Socialism', socialism by stealth, socialism achieved through the 'permeation' of existing political institutions by members of organisation such as the Fabian Society, in order to influence the policies adopted by those institutions towards socialism.

"Democratic Socialism itself was based on a lie: that Socialism could be implemented peacefully through the ballot box. The implication was that if the voters didn't like it they could vote it out again. That was a hoax. Since Socialism does not permit private ownership of property, it cannot be 'democratic' in the sense of allowing a choice of political Parties. This is not a matter of ideology, but of logistics. It would be impossible to have a two Party system of genuine democracy, for example, under which the state nationalised all property including business when the Socialists were voted into power, then sold it all back to the people again when they were voted out. The intention of Democratic Socialism was (and still is) to be democratic just long enough to gain power. Then it will declare the 'end of history' and entrench itself forever, enforcing its politically correct speech and thought on everybody, and being just as tyrannical as its Marxist revolutionary counterparts."

The article is a little long but it's an eye-opener, especially for those who think that ACORN is just some innocent, community based organization trying to help poor people make it through the day.

RLC

Sin Nombre

With the debate over illegal immigration once again heating up let me recommend a movie, with reservations, that gives an idea of what it must be like for many who seek to enter this country illegally. The film is Sin Nombre, and I qualify my recommendation because it's brutal, raw and certainly not suitable for children. Nevertheless, mature viewers will find it riveting.

The film recounts the story of a member of the Salva Maratrucha gang in Mexico by the name of Casper, who wishes to break away from his past and start over in America. His flight from Mexico and the psychopaths bent on killing him is harrowing and the secondary narratives are fascinating. It's very troubling to ponder that this gang, also known as MS-13, has thousands of members in cities across the U.S.

If you're interested in seeing what a lot of people south of the border have gone through to get here, add Sin Nombre to your Netflix queue.

RLC

Supposed to be Competent

Columnist Peggy Noonan has given President Obama a great deal of slack in the first year and a half of his presidency, but with this essay titled "He Was Supposed to be Competent" she seems to be reaching the end of her patience. She writes:

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

Noonan has joined James Carville, Maureen Dowd, and a host of other erstwhile Obama supporters who wished to see him do well but who are coming to the conclusion that he's out of his depth.

It's a bit surprising, actually, that Mr. Obama's lack of competence is a surprise. Mr. Obama was elected to the presidency largely on the strength of his support among the least educated and least mature members of the electorate: minorities and students. He brought no qualifications whatsoever to the office, he had no accomplishments to speak of, but rather than focus on his dearth of practical experience, a delinquent media chose instead to obsess over Sarah Palin's short-comings. As Rush Limbaugh never tires of pointing out, President Obama is the least qualified person in any room he enters.

Perhaps the nation has learned an important lesson: The presidency is too important to entrust to someone simply because his election would make sociological history, or because, despite a paucity of reasons to believe him, he promises to turn America into the new Jerusalem. One hopes that we've matured beyond electing people on the basis of style rather than substance. One hopes.

RLC

Memorial Day Family History

Someone once said that when an old person dies it's as if an entire library disappears. Many of us have relatives or acquaintances who may not have many years left, but who still have a library full of history stored in their minds. Many of them are vets who served in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam, and many of them are spouses of vets who remember what it was like at home during the war years.

If tomorrow you spend time with a veteran, or a spouse of a veteran, do yourself a big favor and ask him or her about their experiences. Some of them may not want to talk much about it, of course, but if you can persuade them to open up the history you will learn is precious.

When that person passes that history will pass with them, and that will be a shame. Far better that you seek to learn it, write it down, and pass it on to your children.

RLC

Police Profiling

The New York Times is indignant that the NYPD is using profiling to fight crime in the city, or at least that's how they choose to interpret the data on police "stops." For example, blacks made up 55 percent of all stops by police in 2009, though they're only 23 percent of the city's population; whites accounted for 10 percent of all stops, though they're 35 percent of the city's population; Hispanics made up 32 percent of all stops, though 28 percent of the population, and Asians, 3 percent of all stops and 12 percent of the population.

Pretty damning statistics, these, at least in the minds of those predisposed to see nefarious prejudices at play whenever the cops are at work. Heather MacDonald at City Journal refuses to settle for the simplistic analysis of the Times, however, and digs a little deeper. Here's what she comes up with:

Here are the crime data that the Times doesn't want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city's population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city's population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.

The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator-a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times's lead, which stated that "Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped." These crime data are not some artifact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes-the vast majority of whom are minority themselves-report to the police.

You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime. Crime is what drives NYPD tactics; it is the basis of everything the department does. And crime, as reported by victims and witnesses, sends police overwhelmingly to minority neighborhoods, because that's where the vast majority of crime occurs-by minority criminals against minority victims.

The Times's analysis, by contrast, which follows in lock step with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, assumes that policing should mirror census data. The only numerical benchmark that the Times provides for the NYPD's stop data is the city's population ratios. According to this analysis, since whites are 35 percent of the city's population, they should be 35 percent of police stops, even though they commit only 5 percent of all violent crimes. But using census data as a benchmark for policing is as nonsensical as it would be to use census data for fire department activity. If a particular census tract has a disproportionate number of fires, and another census tract has none, no one expects the FDNY to send out fire trucks to non-existent fires in the fire-free census tract just for the sake of equal representation.

It requires very little thought to see the foolishness of trying to use police stops by themselves as evidence of racial bigotry, but it is precisely "very little thought" at which the left seems often to excel. Indeed, when it comes to matters of racial conflict, serious thinking is often the first casualty.

If the Times wishes to probe racial differences in a more fruitful fashion it might look at the disparity in the crime statistics and ask this question: What is wrong with minority communities that their members seem so incapable of living harmoniously with their fellows? An honest examination of that question might result in a story that would actually be both interesting and useful. I doubt, though, that we'll ever see it from the Times or any other mainstream media outlet. The findings might offend too many PC sensibilities and challenge too many liberal dogmas.

RLC

No Third Option

Edward Oakes over at First Things offers up some thoughts on the self-defeating nature of the New Atheists' project. Oakes takes Nietzsche as his foil and writes:

In his book On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche gives us this ultimate atheist scenario: "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'-yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." He continued:

"One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. . . ."

[S]cience teaches that all stars eventually die out, and with them the planets that orbit them, and once those planets are consumed by the suns that gave them birth, so too will vanish the pathetic creatures that emerged from their respective planetary slimes. Sure, soon after their emergence, they began to invent such high-blown Platonic words like knowledge and truth during their brief strut upon the otherwise empty stage of the cosmos. But so what?

I am not trying to argue here against such a scenario, it being an option impervious to argument anyway .... But it is a scenario that can hardly be regarded as consequence-free. The battle is still between nihilism and theism. There is no third option.

When the intellectual history of the last fifty years is written I think it'll be a source of wonder that so few people who embraced an atheist worldview saw the nihilist implications of their unbelief. Christians have for two thousand years based their belief in moral obligation, meaning in life, and objective truth in the transcendent personal God of the Bible. Many atheists reject God but hold on to the Christian view of morality, meaning and truth without realizing that if atheism is true they have no grounds for these things. They are piggy-backing on a Christian tradition that they despise. They're like a man riding a horse while denying that horses exist. Yet they dare not abandon their Christian steed for as soon as they dismount they find they have no place to stand.

It's more than a little ironic that atheists avoid nihilism only by living vicariously and parasitically off the Christian worldview.

RLC

Greatest Humanitarian President

Which American president has the best record of helping the world's poor and oppressed? The chief contender may surprise you. According to the data in this BBC article George W. Bush has a record that I can't imagine any other president exceeding.

Here are the facts the BBC article lists:

• Bush pumped $18 billion into fighting HIV/Aids, much of it in Africa.
• He backed canceling $34 billion worth of debt for 27 African states.
• He launched initiative that has halved Malaria in 15 African countries.
• He led condemnation of Sudan's record in Darfur as genocide.
• He pressed for north-south peace deal in Sudan.
• He "saved millions of lives", according to aid activist Bob Geldof.
• He backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia to battle Islamists.

Add to these achievements the fact that Bush liberated 50 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you'd think he'd receive every humanitarian award there is, particularly the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, he may be the greatest humanitarian ever to lead a nation.

Unfortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't go to people who've advanced the cause of the poor and oppressed and "saved millions of lives." It goes rather to people who make videos on global warming and people of African ancestry who give nice speeches and get elected president.

Let no one say that the Nobel committee lacks a keen sensitivity to the winds of political fashion, even if they're completely oblivious to what constitutes great achievements on behalf of humanity.

RLC

Dirty Laundry

A pair of articles at NRO explain the miasma of legal scandal that is slowly enveloping the White House. The first is by Michelle Malkin and the second is by Robert Costa.

For those who may have been distracted from the news recently the Pennsylvania Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Joe Sestak, let it slip some months ago that he was offered a position in the Obama administration in exchange for not challenging Arlen Specter in the primary. No doubt Sestak rues having ever admitted this because it turns out that such offers are felonious and he has placed both himself and the White House in a very difficult spot.

If Joe Sestak is telling the truth then a law has clearly been broken and someone in the White House, perhaps even the President, is in deep legal doo-doo. Even David Axelrod admitted as much last Sunday. And if Sestak is lying, which seems extremely unlikely, he's finished in his race for the Pennsylvania Senate seat.

The media has been loath to press the matter and Sestak has refused to say who offered him the job (though it can only have been a top official and it's very unlikely the offer was made without the President's connivance) nor what the job was (Sestak is a retired admiral and speculation is that the job was probably Secretary of the Navy). Sestak's stone-walling, however, can't last. As November approaches, the Pennsylvania media is going to be interested in nothing else but pressing Sestak on this. If he continues his non-cooperation the public is going to see him as just another dishonest pol and his chance of defeating Republican Pat Toomey will evaporate. Sestak didn't accept the job offer, but he hasn't been acting very honorably in this affair. A law has been broken, he alleges, but he refuses to help bring the law-breaker to justice.

On the other hand, if he identifies the administration official who offered him the job, everyone is going to realize that a high-level cabinet job could not have been offered without clearing it with the President himself. If Mr. Obama winds up being implicated in a crime, he could well be impeached if Republicans gain control of the congress. Even if it doesn't come to that, his poll numbers will likely slip right over the political event horizon and into the black hole of political irrelevance and impotence.

The White House could essentially call Sestak delusional or mendacious, but either option will probably cost them a Democrat Senate vote in November. Both the administration and Sestak are in a no-win situation in this, and it'll be interesting to see how the Obama people deal with it. My prediction is that someone fairly high up will be required to fall on his sword and take full responsibility, swearing, implausibly, that no one above him knew anything about it. The hapless scapegoat may go to jail, but that'll be seen as the only way to preserve the Obama presidency from scandal and further erosion of public esteem.

Update: Just as I was about to post this I saw that the Obama administration has prevailed upon Bill Clinton to agree to say that he approached Sestak's brother and through him offered Joe Sestak a non-paying advisory position in the administration in exchange for not running against Specter. If this were true then no laws were broken, but is there anyone anywhere in the world so naive as to think this is true? How could Clinton offer a job in the Obama administration unless he was authorized to do so, and why would anyone think that Sestak would be persuaded to give up a Senate race to take a non-paying advisory job? This tactic is, in my opinion, tantamount to an admission by the Obama administration that they're guilty of something serious and they're desperate to find a way out.

For an excellent analysis of why the White House explanation doesn't add up read Dan Foster's piece at NRO.

RLC

Why We're Going Under

An article in The New York Times gives us a glimpse of why our economy, like economies around the world, is in increasing peril:

According to pension data collected by The New York Times from the city and state, about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes. The data belie official reports that the average state pension is a modest $18,000, or $38,000 for retired police officers and firefighters. (The average is low, in part, because it includes people who worked in government only part time, or just a few years, as well as surviving spouses getting partial benefits.)

Roughly one of every 250 retired public workers in New York is collecting a six-figure pension, and that group is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, based on the number of highly paid people in the pipeline.

Some will receive the big pensions for decades. Thirteen New York City police officers recently retired at age 40 with pensions above $100,000 a year; nine did so in their 30s. The plan's public information officer said that the very young retirees had qualified for special disability pensions, which are 50 percent larger than ordinary police pensions. He said several dozen of the highest-paid New York City police retirees had disabilities related to 9/11 and the rest of the disabilities resulted from injuries in the line of duty.

These entitlements are unsustainable. The beleaguered taxpayers of New York must pay people in their thirties and forties over $100,000 a year for the rest of their lives, and then when they're eligible for Social Security they'll get that, too.

New York is a synecdoche for the United States. Public pensions, welfare, health care and public spending of all kinds require an ever increasing tax burden on those who are still working, but this diminishing income pool can't bear this staggering load indefinitely. Almost half the people in the country are paying no income tax so half the population is essentially getting a free ride paid for by the other half. The socio-economic pyramid is beginning to look more like a flattened-out Hershey's kiss.

It might be possible to pay for our extravagance if the administration and Congress were enacting policies which stimulated business growth, but they're not. There's only one way out of the mess they've gotten us into and that's to decrease government spending and reduce the regulatory and tax burdens they've placed on businesses. Unfortunately, the current crowd in D.C. is ideologically averse to reducing taxes and cutting spending, and, in fact, they're eager to do just the opposite.

November can't come soon enough.

RLC

Very Superstitious<b>*</b>

A gentleman who occasionally writes letters to the local paper to criticize Christianity and extol atheism took the occasion in one recent epistle to trot out the tired old shibboleth that Christianity is a mere superstition. This is certainly an amusing claim coming from an atheist. The definition of a superstition is any belief unreasonably upheld by faith in magic, chance or dogma. Consider some of what an atheist must believe in order to believe atheism is true:

They have to believe firstly that something (the universe) can come from nothing. Then, in order to avoid the conclusion that the cosmos is purposefully designed for life, they have to believe, in the complete absence of evidence, the only other possibility: that there are a near infinite number of universes of which ours is just one.

Believing as they do in a naturalistic origin of life they have to also believe that the equivalent of a library full of information (the DNA molecule) was somehow assembled by random chance and then, despite the enormous improbability of it, DNA just by accident developed the highly complex process of self-replication. They have to believe, without any evidence, that human consciousness - the awareness of one's surroundings and the ability to reason, abstract, and experience sensations - somehow arose by chance from chemical reactions occurring in the brain.

They often also believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that atheism is superior to theism in terms of offering a reason to hope that justice will prevail, a meaning for human and individual existence, a ground for moral obligation, and a basis for thinking that human beings have dignity and should be accorded human rights. On atheism there's no absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that there's any real justice, any ultimate meaning to life, any ground for moral obligation or moral judgment, or any reason to think humans have dignity, worth or inherent rights. Yet many atheists believe in all of these things.

So who's being superstitious?

*Superstitious by Stevie Wonder

RLC

A Presidency of Firsts

Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online fears that the country is in the hands of people who care not either for the motherland or its traditions. He takes as symbolic the standing ovation given to Mexican president Felipe Calderon by congressional Democrats as Calderon criticized Arizona for its immigration law, a law, it needs be noted, that is positively innocuous compared to the laws of the country over which Mr. Calderon presides.

McCarthy was the district attorney who prosecuted the terrorists behind the first World Trade Tower bombings in the early 90s. He writes:

[A]s a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona - for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens' lives and property - is slandered as a human-rights violator.

Mr. McCarthy makes a telling point. For the first time in our history we have a president who never talks about America's greatness, who never talks about the blessing America has been to the world, who never praises its history or traditions. For the first time in our history we have a president who feels the need to apologize for America at every opportunity, who abases himself before third world tyrants, whose wife admits to having never been proud of her country. For the first time, at least in modern history, our president is more interested in pitting one group against another than in bringing people together, he's more interested in fueling class resentments than in working for unity.

I never thought that any of the men who served as president throughout my adult life, even those whose policies I thought were misguided, disdained the United States and what it stood for. I never thought any of them actually wanted to see the United States' power and influence diminished around the world. Nor did I ever think that any of them were deliberately trying to weaken the American economy in order to impose a socialist, corporatist, statism on the nation, but, rightly or wrongly, I'm afraid I have come to think that of this president.

I think McCarthy is correct. It says something about the president that from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama appears to feel more comfortable in the company of people who despise this country than in the company of those who love it.

I urge you to read the rest of McCarthy's NRO column at the link.

RLC

Rand Paul vs His Critics

J.E. Dyer at Hot Air takes both left and right to task for their expressions of horror at Rand Paul's heresies. As Dyer observes, in this shameful episode Paul is the only one who seems willing to actually think. Everyone else is rending their garments as though it's perfectly obvious that he has uttered blasphemy, but this seems like a tactic designed to enable them to avoid having to address his main point.

Dyer explains:

There have been two incidents now, since the Kentucky primary, in which Rand Paul has failed to prostrate himself automatically before a political shibboleth. One concerned the Civil Rights Act, the intent of which Paul has expressed full support for. His quarrel is with the element of the Civil Rights Act that authorizes the federal government to regulate private businesses.

The other is Paul's criticism of Obama's "boot on the neck" comment about BP, and of the general societal attitude in the US that everything must be litigated and litigable fault assigned for any bad thing that happens.

As Dyer argues regarding the civil rights matter, just because the federal government is acting to bring about some good doesn't mean that it's right that the federal government is doing it. It may be good that students not adopt Marxist economic ideas, for instance, but it would not be appropriate for the federal government to ban the dissemination of those ideas.

Dyer closes with this:

Tacit, unexamined acceptance of federal authority to do these things is what Rand Paul is challenging. In 2010, he is the one asking people to think, rather than to merely repeat doctrinaire talking points taught to them since birth. His critics, on the other hand, sound like nothing so much as children reciting a catechism, and tsk-tsk-ing over those who don't recite it in exactly the same way. That includes many of his critics on the right - who have agreed to be governed by a list of pieties that makes effective dissent from the left's religious doctrine impossible.

Read the whole piece at the link.

RLC

The New Normal

Imagine a society which finds itself unable to make moral judgments. How long will that society be able to sustain its moral character? How long will it be before that society begins an ever quickening descent into the moral cesspool? How far have we already descended?

Once upon a time there was in America a fairly uniform moral understanding, but that consensus no longer exists. We have lost a common basis for saying that something is wrong, and consequently traditional morality and those who practice it are often objects of derision in our popular culture. Those who seek to hold fast to the convictions of our grandfathers are mocked and intimidated by silly admonitions against imposing one's values upon the rest of society.

Even so, Christian tradition rooted in divine revelation provides a unique platform for resisting, for example, the increasingly bizarre sexualization of our culture. But since Scripture as a source of moral authority no longer has purchase in much of society, Christians who advert to it are usually ignored, often sneered at, and sometimes cowed into silence.

When the societal demographic which actually possesses a ground upon which to base moral claims is silenced, however, moral norms are inevitably established by the lowest common social denominator, and the lowest common denominator in our society is pretty low.

Robin of Berkeley writes about this in a column about this slide into the sewer at The American Thinker. Her piece is worth the few minutes it takes to peruse. Here's a peek:

[O]nce something is repeated often enough, it becomes the New Normal.

Decades ago, the first rap song that celebrated beating "ho's" and shooting cops was shocking. But after the umpteenth song, the lyrics may no longer startle.

When Hustler started showing it all, the gasps were practically audible. Now you can look at perverted stuff online that makes Hustler pale in comparison.

Movies and TV shows used to merely hint at violence. Now films and video games offer a steady diet of graphic mayhem.

At one time, horrendous crimes, like murdering police or carjackings, were unheard of. Now they are commonplace: again, the New Normal.

The degradation of the culture through making the abnormal normal is no coincidence. Members of the Frankfurt School plotted the degeneration almost a hundred years ago. According to one group member, "We'll make the West so corrupt that it stinks."

Their scheming has paid off, creating a cesspool of decadence. The new Pledge of Allegiance is not to the flag, but to the self: If it feels good, do it.

The above link to the Frankfurt School is worth following. The essay by Timothy Matthews that it leads to is an eye-opener.

RLC

Omission and Commission

Jason is reading the late Richard J. Neuhaus' classic work The Naked Public Square, and came across a piece of text he thought worth sharing. I'm glad he did because the passage is typical of Neuhaus' keen insight. In it Neuhaus puts his finger on a fundamental difference between how conservatives and liberals see things when their opposite number is in power. He's talking specifically about liberal and conservative Christians, but I think his observation is valid for liberals and conservatives in general:

"A more believable reason why the left is not likely to raise an effective holy crusade for political change has to do with the intensity of actions and reactions. That is, under a conservative government left-of-center Christians do not feel themselves assaulted. From a liberal viewpoint, the faults of a conservative government are more passive than active, more sins of omission than sins of commission. The liberal complaint against conservative government is that it does not take care of the domestic poor, or advance foreign aid, or expand environmental protection, or press for the extension of minority rights, or a host of other things that liberals think it the business of government to do.

In conservative eyes, however, the sins of liberal government are sins of commission: government does many things they think it should not do and forbids them to do things they think they should be free to do. They are notably outraged by governments that, they believe, advance changes in sexual and family mores - areas that could hardly be more value-laden. While accepting the prohibition of mandatory race segregation, they resent deeply programs such as school busing and 'affirmative action' aimed at mandatory racial integration. They react vociferously to government actions that get in the way of praying in schools, owning handguns, hiring whom they want, and living where they please. In sum, in very everyday ways they feel assaulted by liberal government as liberals do not feel assaulted by conservative government."

This is, of course, very true. Conservative governments by their very nature are glacially slow to implement change and thus are not a threat to liberals, but liberal governments want to effect change in every aspect of our lives, from taxes to personal morality, and they want to do it yesterday. Conservatives thus feel very threatened by them indeed.

It might be noted that the Obama government is liberalism on steroids, and is consequently seen by conservatives as the greatest threat to the values they hold dear that has come along in at least the last 70 years. The fear that Obama is intent on turning their world upside-down and turning America into an impotent economic basket-case is why there is a tea-party movement today.

RLC

Creating Information

Ken MacLeod of The Guardian waxes ecstatic over the feat accomplished by a team of biologists headed up by Craig Venter who manufactured a synthetic strand of DNA and inserted it successfully into a living cell. This is a remarkable technological accomplishment, to be sure, but it's hardly the creation of life as some overly-enthusiastic observers have claimed and as MacLeod comes close to claiming.

An interesting aspect of MacLeod's column is that in it he offers the reader two mutually incompatible claims. He writes first that:

[T]here's something wonderfully confirmatory of mechanistic materialism in the building of a genome from chemically synthesised molecules, that genome running a cell, and that cell replicating to a point where no trace of the original cell's cytoplasm is left in its descendants(emphasis mine).

Mechanistic materialism is the view that everything about living things is reducible to purposeless physical forces and that there's no warrant for supposing that intelligent agents have played any role in the evolution of living things.

But a paragraph further on MacLeod says:

Synthetic life, then, creates no problems even for creationists (after all, it's intelligently designed!) let alone more sophisticated theists (emphasis mine).

Now, these two assertions can't both be true. If the cell's new genome was intelligently designed, which, of course, it was, then the achievement is not at all a confirmation of mechanistic materialism. It is a spectacular confirmation of man's skill and ingenuity, perhaps, but it is completely without value as a prop for materialism. Indeed, what Venter's work confirms is the claim of intelligent design advocates that whenever and wherever we find information (including the genetic code inscribed in DNA) we can be confident that it's the product, somehow, of an intelligent agent. Venter's achievement seems to be a confirming instance, not of mechanistic materialism, but of a fundamental prediction of intelligent design.

RLC

The Stoning of Soraya M.

Some Muslim emigrants, especially those gathered in European countries, are demanding that they be allowed to govern their communities under Islamic, or Sharia, law. Inexplicably, there are some Europeans, like Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams, who are apparently willing to acquiesce to their demand.

Such lunacy is in need of an antidote, and it's our good fortune that one has just become available. A film entitled The Stoning of Soraya M., based on a book that recounts the true story of an Iranian woman who was stoned to death by her family and village in 1986, has recently been released on DVD. According to the account given by the French-Iranian journalist who happened upon the village shortly after Soraya's murder, her husband had wanted a divorce so that he could marry a younger woman. Soraya, for economic reasons, refused, and the husband responded to her refusal by falsely accusing her of infidelity which, under Sharia law, is punishable by death by stoning.

The film, directed by an Iranian-American and featuring many Iranian actors (plus Jim Caveziel of Passion of the Christ fame) is a powerful indictment of the status of women under Sharia. It's also an indictment of the savagery of Islamic law and Islamic culture itself (In the movie, children, including Soraya's own sons, participate in her grisly execution).

The Stoning of Soraya M. is well-acted, but the climactic scene is not easy to watch. Even so, it's an extremely important film and deserves a wide audience. It's especially important that it be seen by anyone who has been indoctrinated in the multiculturalist flummery that all cultures are equally "valid." I can't imagine anyone, especially a woman, watching this film and saying that living under Sharia wouldn't be such a bad thing.

RLC

Learn to Read

If administration diplomats are going to tell the Chinese, of all people, that Arizona's immigration law presents a human rights problem, and if congressional Democrats are going to give the president of Mexico a standing ovation when that hypocritical buffoon criticizes the Arizona law, a law nowhere near as draconian as Mexican immigration laws, then they really should have the decency to have read the legislation that they're criticizing.

It was inexcusable of the Democrats to pass a 2000 page health care reform bill that few of them had taken the trouble to examine. Now they're calling the people of Arizona a bunch of bigots and they haven't even looked to see what's in the law that's all of ten pages long.

Such fatuousness is almost beyond parody, but Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's new ad gives it a game try:

RLC

Roasting the New Atheists

An essay by David Hart in First Things has created a bit of a stir. Hart's eloquent skewering of the new atheists borders on the exquisite. Here are his opening paragraphs:

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole "New Atheism" movement is only a passing fad-not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current "marketplace of ideas" particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in � la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers-who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form-tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God's omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-m�ch� caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a pr�cis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Ad�le Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument-that believers do not really believe what they think they believe-but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of "not anything as such") from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

You really must read it all. Hart is the author of Atheist Delusions which provides an equally enjoyable and satisfying roasting of the likes of Richard Dawkins and his acolytes.

RLC

You Said You'd Never Compromise*

In a world in which corporate moguls are eager to give consumers whatever they want regardless of what it is, Steve Jobs of Apple deserves a special commendation. Jobs has refused to allow his iPhone and iPad to support apps that offer pornography. A writer for Gawker.com took him to task for this stand and Jobs' reply was perfect. Here's part of the story by Peter Smith at Lifesite News.com:

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, says his company will not be a party to the pornography industry and hopes that the iPad and iPhone revolution will help lead to a porn-free world.

Jobs reiterated his position in a heated e-mail exchange with Ryan Tate, a writer for Gawker.com, which follows news and gossip in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Tate, who admitted that he was home alone and slightly inebriated at the time, took issue with a television ad calling the iPad a "revolution" and fired off an e-mail to Jobs.

"If Dylan [American songwriter Bob Dylan is one of Jobs' favorite musicians] was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution?' Revolutions are about freedom," Tate wrote, not expecting a response from Jobs. However, Jobs did respond to Tate, triggering an e-mail duel. "Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom," responded Jobs. "The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

However, Tate accused Jobs of "imposing" his "morality" by having Apple forbid pornographic applications for iPad. "I don't want 'freedom from porn.' Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree," fired back Tate - who later said he regretted mentioning his wife.

Jobs shot back, "You might care more about porn when you have kids."

Among the dumb things Tate says in his email to Jobs the claim that Jobs is "imposing his morality" is perhaps the dumbest. There's more on this story at the link. Thanks to Jason for calling it to our attention.

* From Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan (1965)

RLC

Future Shock

The future of American medical care has been looking bleak for some time and looks even bleaker since passage of Obamacare. One casualty of the woeful state of things is our medicare system which, according to this article, is virtually imploding in places like Texas:

Texas doctors are opting out of Medicare at alarming rates, frustrated by reimbursement cuts they say make participation in government-funded care of seniors unaffordable.

Two years after a survey found nearly half of Texas doctors weren't taking some new Medicare patients, new data shows 100 to 200 a year are now ending all involvement with the program. Before 2007, the number of doctors opting out averaged less than a handful a year.

"This new data shows the Medicare system is beginning to implode," said Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the Texas Medical Association. "If Congress doesn't fix Medicare soon, there'll be more and more doctors dropping out and Congress' promise to provide medical care to seniors will be broken."

More than 300 doctors have dropped the program in the last two years, including 50 in the first three months of 2010, according to data compiled by the Houston Chronicle. Texas Medical Association officials, who conducted the 2008 survey, said the numbers far exceeded their assumptions.

Then there's this dispiriting forecast:

The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don't have a doctor.

"Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it's going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years," said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.

No medicare for many of the nation's elderly. Already crowded emergency rooms soon to be jammed beyond their capacity. Mr. Obama is certainly living up to his promise of being a transformational president.

RLC