Thoughts on a Tragedy

By now you've doubtless heard the tragic story of Tyler Clementi, the young Rutgers student who was secretly taped by his roommate, Dharun Ravi, while engaged in a homosexual encounter. Ravi and a friend named Molly Wei then placed the tape on the internet to mock Clementi to the whole world. Mortified, Clementi leapt off the George Washington bridge to his death in the river below.

This awful story is being cited by some as a sign of a need for increased tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality, but I think there's something larger at issue that we should not ignore.

We might frame the issue with several questions: Why did Ravi and Wei think they had the right to do what they did? Why did they want to humiliate Clementi? Why were they so indifferent to this boy's feelings that they were willing to profoundly embarrass him, hurt him, and laugh at his pain?

I think a case can be made that Ravi and Wei are not an aberration but are rather a synecdoche for a culture that has lost not just the will, but the ability, to teach it's young the difference between right and wrong behavior and how to respect other people. Sure, we tell them about tolerance and respect, but we've abandoned the ability to give a reason why it's wrong to be intolerant or to treat people like Clementi was treated. We can no longer give a reason why we should treat others with dignity, respect and kindness, and the reason we can't is because we've secularized our public life, including especially our schools.

The scrubbing of our public life of all traces of religion means, among other things, that our young people must be exposed only to secular influences, anything carrying the faintest whiff of religion is to be strictly forbidden.

Many schools have become moral wastelands, and many students never get any moral instruction at all. A crucial element of a student's development, his or her moral development, goes unattended and stunted. To be sure, students are admonished that it's wrong to cheat on tests and "inappropriate" to sexually harass girls, and that such behaviors will not be tolerated. Many students refrain from these for fear, perhaps, of being penalized by the school, but they're never convinced that those behaviors are actually wrong because they're never given a reason for thinking they're wrong. Indeed, they can't be given a reason because secularism has no reason beyond a tepid assertion that "they're just not nice."

Moreover, schools almost inevitably send students mixed messages about these matters. Teachers, for example, insist to their students that bullying is wrong, but then the student goes to biology class and learns that he's essentially an animal engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival and for breeding partners, and that the strong outcompete the weak, and that all of our behavior is determined by our genes anyway, so there really is no right and wrong.

Some teachers try to convince students that the materialistic, hedonistic, consumer culture that encourages them to judge others by their appearance and their clothes is fundamentally arid and empty, but even if the educators were capable of offering a plausible alternative to the culture they deplore, they wouldn't be allowed to do so because the only genuine alternative is a religious alternative. The only coherent critique of the hedonistic materialism that holds so many of our young people in its seductive grip is a religious critique, and we've decided as a society that such alternatives are to be assiduously ignored.

Students are immersed in a culture of consumerism that promotes self-centeredness and narcissism. It encourages young adults to treat others as means to their own happiness. Nevertheless, occasionally the young person is able to discern a barely audible voice whispering in his ear that he should indeed care about others and treat others with respect. But soon enough he turns on the television and sees someone like Simon Cowell applauded by all and sundry - and very handsomely rewarded - for nothing more than humiliating people on American Idol, and that tiny voice is easily forgotten.

I want to close with an irony about the tragedy of Tyler Clementi and others like him. The secular culture sedulously promotes the need for tolerance and acceptance. It persistently reminds us that gays are not to be discriminated against in any way, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. Yet it's precisely in secular settings where gays are most at risk of being tormented to the point of suicide. And not just gays. It is in secular settings almost always where teens feel driven to despair by the treatment they receive from their fellow students.

On the other hand, Christians often believe that homosexuality is wrong, that it's outside the will of God. Yet, a young gay man or woman is much less likely to be treated at a Christian school with the kind of cruelty that many gays are subjected to in the secular hells in which they find themselves. They're much more likely to be treated with dignity, respect and kindness - with genuine love - at a Christian high school or college than at a secular school.

Why do you suppose that is? Perhaps it's because at a Christian school students are enjoined to view each person as a child of God, as someone whom God loves. Secularism, or more properly naturalism, simply sees each individual as nothing but "a machine made of meat." In which environment would you feel most comfortable if you were a little different from your peers?

Tax Cuts and Your Job

There's a big debate in Washington currently over whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended only for those making less than $250,000 a year or whether they should be extended for everyone.

The Democrats argue that those making over $250,000 can afford to have their taxes raised. They claim that taxing them at rates similar to what they paid in the Clinton years would bring billions of dollars into the treasury and help reduce the deficit.

Republicans argue that the way to reduce the deficit is to cut spending, not raise taxes. Raising taxes on those making over $250,000 would mean raising costs on many small businesses and doing so would force them to layoff workers and/or not hire new employees. Unemployment would go up, fewer people working would mean fewer people paying taxes, and thus not only would there be no appreciable increase in revenue to the government, economic growth would be suppressed.

This difference between the parties is really the fundamental difference between economic liberals and economic conservatives. Liberals favor higher taxes, conservatives favor less spending. Liberals desire big government with lots of programs and high taxes to pay for them. Conservatives believe we should live within our means, that high taxes stifle economic growth, and that workers and employers should be permitted to keep as much of the money they earn as possible.

With this background in mind this column by economist Robert Samuelson, who writes for both Newsweek and The Washington Post, both of which are liberal journals, is interesting. Samuelson thinks that the extravagant spending of the last two years of the Bush administration and the meteoric increase in spending of the first two years of the Obama administration, did, in fact, keep us from falling into an economic depression. But there's something else deep in the column that bears upon what we said above.

First, though, here's what he says about Bush's TARP and Obama's Stimulus:

When Obama took office in early 2009, the economy and financial markets were in virtual free-fall. By summer, they were not. Only a rabid partisan can think that Obama's policies had nothing to do with the reversal. His forcefulness helped calmed the prevailing hysteria.

True, many recovery policies came from the Federal Reserve, and others -- notably, the unpopular Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) -- began under the Bush administration. Obama's contributions included the "stimulus program," a rescue of the auto industry and a "stress test" for 19 large banks. The stress test explored whether banks needed big infusions of capital. Most didn't.

The process was messy, and, although many details can be questioned, the overall impact was huge. Without government's aggressive response, gross domestic product would have dropped 12 percent instead of 4 percent and 16.6 million jobs would have been lost instead of 8.4 million, estimate economists Alan Blinder of Princeton and Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics. Unemployment would have hit 16 percent. These numbers, too, can be disputed (they seem high to me), but the direction is certainly correct.

So, Samuelson believes both TARP and the Stimulus were bungee cords tied around the waist of a plunging economy, but, and here's the crucial point relating to taxes, Obama's proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts on those making over $250,000 will be catastrophic:

The right's sweeping indictment of Obama is wildly exaggerated. It is not, however, entirely misplaced.

Confidence is crucial to stimulating consumer spending and business investment, and Obama constantly subverts confidence. In the past year, he's undone some of the good of his first months. He loves to pick fights with Wall Street bankers, oil companies, multinational firms, health insurers and others. He thinks that he can separate policies that claim to promote recovery from those that appeal to his liberal "base," even when the partisan policies raise business costs, stymie job creation or augment uncertainty -- and, thereby, undermine recovery. His health-care "reform" will make hiring more expensive to employers by mandating insurance coverage. The moratorium on deep-water oil drilling kills jobs; the administration's estimate of employment loss is up to 12,000.

Obama's proposal to increase taxes on personal incomes exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles) is the latest example of his delusional approach. It satisfies the liberal itch to "get the rich." Well, the rich and most other taxpayers will ultimately have to pay higher taxes to help close budget deficits. But not now.

Raising taxes in a weak economy doesn't make sense. Just consider this astonishing fact: These affluent households represent almost a quarter of all consumer spending, according to Zandi. Increasing their taxes, he estimates, would cost 770,000 jobs by mid-2012. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers, says his data suggest that uncertainty about the extension of the Bush tax cuts has already caused affluent buyers to cut their spending.

Some small businesses would also be affected, because many (sole proprietorships, partnerships and subchapter S corporations) file their taxes on personal returns. Higher taxes would discourage hiring and expansion. No one knows by how much, but the Tax Policy Center estimates that higher business taxes would affect 725,000 returns with about $400 billion of business income. Some of these are partnerships of doctors, lawyers and accountants. Others are contractors, restaurant owners, florists and plumbers.

If this is a sober assessment of Obamanomics and its effects I wonder how bad the Republican critique is that makes it "wildly exagerrated." I don't know how it can be any more of an indictment than this.

Anyway, the Democrats who control Congress have made the uncertainty Samuelson mentions even worse by delaying a vote on whether to extend the tax cuts until after the November election, presumably so that congresspersons running for reelection wouldn't pay a price for their vote at the polls and others who are defeated in the election would not be reluctant to vote for the tax increase in a lame-duck session.

This is why Americans despise government. Congress has time to call Stephen Colbert to "testify" in a hearing, wasting taxpayer money and making a mockery of the process, they have time to adjourn early so they can get back to their districts and campaign, but they don't have time to let businessmen know whether they'll be paying higher taxes next year. With that uncertainty looming over them businesses are not going to be hiring any time soon, so if you're looking for a job and can't find one, thank your local Democratic congressman. Better yet, just vote for his or her opponent on November 2nd.

J. Alfred Prufrock and the GZ Mosque

Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things, has an essay in the October issue that is about as incisive a piece of commentary on the Ground Zero mosque controversy as I've seen - well, at least outside our posts on Viewpoint.

Here's a sample:

Nearly everyone in America seems to have opined on this situation already. Cheering it, fearing it, sneering at those who object, mocking those who favor the building of the mosque. President Obama was for it, before he was against it: first giving a speech about religion and our constitutional system so high-minded that it was audible only to bats — and then, as criticism mounted, hurriedly explaining that he wasn’t actually lending his support to the project. That is not what he meant at all. That is not it, at all. The man is turning into J. Alfred Prufrock, here before our eyes.

Perhaps New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves credit, then, for saying straight out, and sticking to his position, that the mosque “is as important a test” of “the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime.” Indeed, he added, “We would be untrue to the best part of ourselves — and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans — if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.”

And yet, there’s something in that Bloombergian line that puts one’s back up. Something condescending, superior, and hectoring. Something of the school marm and, more to the point, something of the 1950s high-liberal technocrat who just doesn’t like the messiness of human interaction. And if we could reach down to the root of the mayor’s error, we would have some understanding of how religion actually works in a constitutional democracy.

Obama as Prufrock. Pretty funny. Anyway, read the whole thing, it's not long, and it's very good.

Standing in the Schoolhouse Door

Columnist Cal Thomas writes about the new documentary film, Waiting for Superman, and states that it should be "mandatory viewing for every member of Congress."

One of the things the film does, intentionally or otherwise, is show how the Democrat party has trapped poor children in deplorable schools from which there's no escape and in which there's no hope. The Democrats do this by quashing all attempts to give these children the financial means, through vouchers for example, to attend private schools or more affluent schools in the suburbs.

Why do they do this? Because they're in thrall to the teachers' unions, and those unions see educational choice as a threat to their job security. The more children who opt out of public schools the fewer teachers that'll be needed to staff those schools.

Thomas writes:

As a synopsis on the Fandango movie site says, this film "explores the tragic ways in which the American public education system is failing our nation's children. ..."

Not only do we see children and their parents on the edge of their seats during a lottery that will determine who gets the educational equivalent of a "get out of jail free" card, we also watch the crestfallen faces of those who don't draw the magic numbers for decent schools, a better education and, thus, a hope for the future. Is this how a poor child's destiny should be decided, by lottery?

President Obama, of course, along with almost every other Democrat in Washington, sends his children to private schools like Sidwell Friends, but then they can afford the $31,069 tuition. Most parents can't.

Thomas continues:

During a recent appearance on the "Today" show, a woman in the audience asked President Obama why he selected a tony private school for his daughters over D.C. Public Schools.

He said Sasha and Malia could not receive the same level of education from D.C. Public Schools that they get at Sidwell Friends.

The president said because of his position "we could probably maneuver" to get them into one of the better public schools, but he said the "broader problem" is that parents without "a bunch of connections" don't have such options.

Nice try, but if he wanted to place his daughters in a public school, no connections would be needed. Jimmy Carter sent his daughter, Amy, to a public school when he was president. The issue for the Obamas and everyone else with school-age kids is which school provides them the best education?

The poor do not have a choice, other than a lottery. This is immoral.

Indeed it is, and it's also ironic. Democrats stand foursquare for choice when it comes to giving a woman the right to kill her child, but they're foursquare against choice when it comes to giving a woman the right to give her child a decent education.

Thomas compares Dems to modern day George Wallaces. Wallace, you might recall, was the Governor of Alabama in the 1960s who stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to keep black kids from entering the school:

Members of Congress -- mostly Democrats -- are channeling the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who in 1963 stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to prevent blacks from entering. Today, certain members of Congress are metaphorically standing in schoolhouse doors, preventing the poor from leaving.

The mystery is why the poor continue to believe that the Democrats are the party looking out for their interests.

Looking for Revenge

Evidently, Iran is convinced that the U.S. and Israel are behind the widespread Stuxnet malworm infection that has slowed their nuclear weapons program to a crawl, and debkafile thinks that the Iranians are preparing to retaliate militarily:

Tehran is bent on military action to settle scores with Israel and the United States whom it suspects of planting the malignant Stuxnet cyber worm in the computer systems of its nuclear, military and strategic infrastructure, debkafile's military and US sources report. The timeline of this attack revolves around the state visit to Lebanon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has scheduled for Oct. 13-14, during which he will tour the Israeli border. Preying heavily on Iran too are the personal sanctions the United States has just imposed on its top military brass and ministers.

This last development is also interesting. It seems to have been timed to coincide with the chaos being produced in Iran by Stuxnet:

President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on eight top Iranian officials, accusing them of serious human rights abuses, including the killing, torture, beating and rape of Iranian citizens since the country's disputed 2009 presidential election.

This was the first time Washington had singled out top Iranian military and security figures for personal penalties:

Obama only signed the sanctions order this week, whereas the eight officials' crimes occurred more than a year ago in the wake of their crackdown on political opponents who charged the regime with falsifying the election. It would seem therefore that the US president acted with the intention of further dividing Iran's leaders and adding to the perplexity and demoralization besetting them over their powerlessness to bring the destructive cyber worm under control.

I find it difficult to believe that Iran would be so foolish as to launch overt military strikes, even through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, when such strikes would provide just the pretext needed by Israel and/or the United States to take out the Iranian nuclear program altogether. On the other hand, the Iranians may be in a panic, and panicked men do foolish things.

Re: Why They're Leaving

A few readers think I overstated the problems with public schools in a couple of posts I did this past week (See here and here). Many more readers, though, shared experiences that confirmed my fears that taxpayer subsidized schools are on a downward trajectory that's going to result in an increasing number of students looking for alternative educational opportunities. I don't think the numbers of such students will be high in affluent districts, of course, but I do think they'll be significant in predominately middle and lower class communities.

Here's another story of one family's personal travail with school administrators who seem from this account to be about as obtuse and bereft of common sense as anyone could possibly be:

I grew up in a small public school (I graduated with 75 students). Although my high school education was better than most, with teachers that required college level work and advanced classes, it still wasn't the "ideal" environment. My school had a zero tolerance fighting policy. One would think that to be a good thing, but not when it is taken to the extreme.

When I was in ninth grade a girl tried to start a fight with me after school. I walked away, so she grabbed my hair. She threw me to the ground and proceeded to kick and punch me. I have Spina Bifida, and was always weaker than the other kids growing up. My father always told me not to just stand there and take it, but to fight back. I hit that girl hard enough that day that she let go of me, and I got up and walked away.

The next day I was called to the principle's office. He let me off reluctantly with an administrative detention. The other girl received the same punishment. My father fought this, but was simply told that there was no tolerance for any fighting. When he wanted to see the video from the hallway camera, the administration was forced to admit that the cameras were just there to "scare students," not to actually record anything.

Last year my younger brother was also involved in a "fight" during his senior year. He didn't fight back, but let the kid punch him repeatedly while walking down the hall (which I'm sure was quite humorous as my brother is 6'2" and 250 pounds).

One of the teachers saw this and reported it to the principle. My brother and the other student involved received 3 days in-school suspension. When my father approached the principle this time, he was told the same thing, "no tolerance." The teacher involved apologized to my brother for reporting the incident. She also approached the administration asking why he was being punished for nothing. In anger, she asked if a student just stood in front of their locker while someone punched them, would they still be punished. The answer was yes.

So what lesson did these administrators and their ridiculous "no tolerance" policy teach students? It's this: If you're the innocent victim of an assault you're just as guilty as the aggressor. I wonder if this "logic" would be extended to female students who were victims of sexual assault? Would the administrators give them the same punishment as their assailants received?

When I think of the perverse concept of justice that this school is teaching it's students I have to wonder how people with advanced degrees could be so dull-witted.

Good Trade

Have you wondered why Democrats are not campaigning on the one accomplishment that they can boast of having achieved since they've been in power, i.e. passage of health care reform? Maybe their reticence is due to their awareness of how unpopular that legislation is with voters. The reason it's unpopular, of course, is that according to every study I've seen it'll result in higher costs to consumers and reduced access to care. One way the "reform" will reduce our access to quality health care is by exacerbating the impending shortage of physicians. Reuters has a report on a recent study that shows this dispiriting outcome to be hovering in the near distance:

The U.S. healthcare reform law will worsen a shortage of physicians as millions of newly insured patients seek care, the Association of American Medical Colleges said on Thursday. The group's Center for Workforce Studies released new estimates that showed shortages would be 50 percent worse in 2015 than forecast.

"While previous projections showed a baseline shortage of 39,600 doctors in 2015, current estimates bring that number closer to 63,000, with a worsening of shortages through 2025," the group said in a statement.

"The United States already was struggling with a critical physician shortage and the problem will only be exacerbated as 32 million Americans acquire health care coverage, and an additional 36 million people enter Medicare."

Doctors will be caught in a squeeze between caps on what they can charge their patients and the increasing cost of their own education. When medicine is no longer as profitable as it used to be fewer people will be attracted to the field. This is simple common sense, but it's apparently arcane enough to have eluded the grasp of the Democrats who voted for the bill.

We can console ourselves, though, with the realization that many more Americans will have medical coverage. They may not be able to find a doctor, but they'll have coverage. That probably seemed to the Democrats who passed this legislation like a good trade.

Cheers.

More on Stuxnet

DEBKAfile has a report on the panic and havoc in Iran's military-industrial complex that's apparently being caused by the Stuxnet worm. The story opens with this lede:

Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers. Debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside help after local computer experts failed to remove the destructive virus.

None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because Tehran refuses to provide precise information on the sensitive centers and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations where they would need to work. They were not told whether they would be called on to work outside Tehran or given access to affected sites to study how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them.

The Iranians seem to be desperate and helpless to stop the worm's ravages. It's not only destroying industrial machinery it's also apparently stealing classified military information. The story concludes:

While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to 45,000 industrial units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure much higher, in the region of millions. If this is true, then this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.

This seems to me to be the international news story of the year and I'm surprised it's not getting more coverage in the press than it has.

Gliese 581G

The Washington Post has a story about the discovery of a planet orbiting a star some 20 light years from earth that seems to be about the same size as the earth and about the right distance from its star to qualify as a "Goldilocks" planet - neither too far from the star nor too close to prevent simple life forms from existing on it. From these meager facts about the planet, named Gliese 581G, some media commentators have concluded that the planet is just right for life.

This is certainly a premature claim and goes beyond what the scientists themselves are saying.

The planet hasn't actually been seen, rather its presence is inferred by detecting slight wobbles in the star it orbits. From these it is deduced that there must be a planet of a certain mass and distance from the star. Scientists deduced a few other things as well. For instance they believe the planet always has one side facing the star and one side facing away, a condition called tidal lock, which means that whatever life might exist there must be restricted to a narrow band where the lit portion fades into darkness and the temperature is not too high nor too cool.

But there's much more to being a life-sustaining planet than just having the right temperature, and it's not known whether the new planet possesses any of these other necessities. For example, in order to sustain life of any kind, much less complex life, a planet needs to have water, a stable atmosphere, plate tectonics, a large moon, and a magnetic field. It also must be shielded from radiation and incoming meteorites. It also needs to have a rich supply of available oxygen, carbon and other elements, and the star itself must have an orbit that does not take it into the galaxy's spiral arms where life would be prevented or extinguished by violent collisions and radiation.

That planets of roughly the mass of the earth exist in the habitable zone of stars is not surprising. That any would be found that would possess all the conditions necessary to allow for life to emerge and survive would be. As Ward and Brownlee conclude in their book Rare Earth the conditions for life are so many and so rare that the earth may well be the only planet in the entire universe which possesses them.

The Worm Turns

The Iranian computers used in their nuclear weapons production program have been mysteriously hit by Stuxnet, a computer worm of enormous sophistication and lethal capability. New Scientist has some very helpful background on how the worm operates and why it represents a quantum leap in terms of the potential hazard.

The fact that this worm seems to be concentrated in Iran and has infected their nuclear program naturally raises a lot of questions. For instance:

Who designed this worm? It seems to require resources that only a national organization could command. Is this a strategy initiated by the U.S. or Israel to compromise the Iranian nuclear program without having to launch military strikes or is there some other player involved (Some have suggested the Chinese)? If so, will it work, and how will Iran respond? Will they launch a cyber attack against whomever turns out to be the source of the worm?

Stay tuned.

Why They're Leaving

The other day we commented on the increasing number of parents who are choosing alternatives to public education for their children. A reader writes to share his experience and why he left the public school system:

I had an experience dealing with administration shortcomings and failures in the public school setting. During my sophomore year of high school I had an issue happen where I became a personalized victim. One day after being in the wrong place at the wrong time (ironically this meant standing at my locker collecting my books before heading to the bus to go home), I was assaulted. A teenager snuck up from behind and tackled me to the ground and beat me. Thankfully I was not badly hurt other than a couple of bruises and scrapes. However, I was caught totally off guard.

Not knowing what to do past that, I went on the bus and traveled home. Of course, when I got home my parents were furious and called the administration as soon as possible trying to get this matter resolved. Unfortunately, the administration did nothing other than suspend the boy for a couple of days, pat me on the shoulder telling me it was okay, and send both of us on our ways.

However, that did not stop or change the situation. Apparently, what had happened was I was wrongly confused with another person who had turned this man (as well as a group of students) in to the administration the previous year for selling marijuana on the school grounds. Completely unaware of the reason this happened, I was flabbergasted to find out that I was the target of some of those people who were suspended. They were trying to teach me a lesson that those who snitch will get punished.

Ironically I was very quiet in high school and tried my hardest in everything to mind my own business. However, somehow I was mixed up in this problem. Eventually it got so bad that I had to pull myself out of that high school and transfer to a private, Christian school. The administration did practically nothing despite threats, warnings, and even legal action. I was left to fend for myself in a situation I had nothing to do with and had no control over. Even getting the parents involved with this matter did not resolve the problem. In the end I was forced to abandon the life I had come to know at my public school.

This sort of story saddens me because I know from personal experience that there are a lot of fine schools out there staffed by many outstanding teachers, some of whom are personal friends and relatives. Yet, one wonders how long such schools and teachers will remain in the majority and whether there's a day coming when they become the exception.

Until administrators get serious about making schools safe for their students, until they get serious about culling from their student bodies the sort of thugs and riff-raff that populate too many public school hallways and classrooms, the best and the brightest will continue their exodus. Eventually, all that will be left will be those students too poor to afford an alternative and the punks and goons who prey upon them.

Mr. Wallis Please Call Your Office

The other day we noted Jim Wallis' call for a more civil political discourse this election season. It was a call that we are firmly behind, but I think Jim's plea has fallen on deaf ears among his friends in the Democratic party. Take Florida congressman Al Grayson, for example. Grayson, an incumbent running against a Republican named Dan Webster, has sponsored what is probably the most dishonest, sleaziest political ad since the Democrats tried to connect George Bush to the murder of a black man in Texas back in the 1990s.

Here's Grayson's ad:

To see how dishonest this is compare it to what Webster actually said:

It's clear that Grayson is portraying Webster as having said exactly the opposite of what he did say. This is not the first time Mr. Grayson, one of the left-most members of congress, has used such tactics. He had earlier accused Mr. Webster of being a draft dodger when it turned out that Mr. Webster, who had served four years in an ROTC program was turned down for active duty because of a medical condition.

It would be a real shame if Grayson were reelected to office. I hope Wallis publicly takes him to task for so despicably corrupting the political debate. We'll see.

Adult Conversation

It's hard to edify the public about the issues we face when one party in a discussion insists on misrepresenting the position of the other. Take, for example, this exchange between Democrat congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Republican congressman Paul Ryan:

Congresswoman Wasserman-Shultz is actually misrepresenting Congressman Ryan's plan. He has not suggested "pulling the rug out from under seniors." What he has proposed is giving people under the age of 55 the option of investing in the stock market a part of their income that would otherwise go to Social Security. Ms Wasserman-Schultz surely knows this, but she obfuscates the truth as though she doesn't want people to hear it for fear they might like the idea.

I wonder why it is that Ms Wasserman-Schultz, and most of her Democrat allies, are appalled by the idea of giving people the option of investing their own money in ways likely to produce the greatest return. Every retirement system in the country, except Social Security, is invested in the stock market. Could it be that Democrats don't like this idea because it would mean that revenue that would otherwise be available to them to spend on, say, bailing out union pensions, would no longer be there for them?

Who do you want to have to depend on for your retirement: the stock market or a government that is so far in debt that by the time you retire it'll no longer be able to meet its obligations to retirees? Wouldn't you like to be able to decide that question for yourself? People like Ms Wasserman-Schultz don't want you to have that choice.

Wave of the Future

A lot of people are taking their children out of public schools and are frustrated enough with the local school system that their investing the time and resources into teaching their kids themselves. It's a Tea Party movement, of sorts, for education.

They're tired of apathetic teachers, crowded and rowdy classrooms where nothing much gets accomplished, unchallenging curricula, and a moral climate in the halls and cafeterias that can best be described as debauched.

They feel helpless against administrators, courts and politicians who seem unwilling or unable to do much about the problems and they figure that they can do at least as good a job as the schools are doing and provide a better environment for their child while doing it.

And their numbers are exploding:

Texas Home School Coalition, an advocacy organization, said an estimated 120,000 families statewide opted to home-school 300,000 children this school year, an increase of about 20 percent over the past five years.

About 4.5 million Texas children attend schools in the public school districts.

I've had a lot of students who were home-schooled take the college classes I teach. Many of them are still in high school, but they're taking college courses and are usually at, or near, the top of the class. I recently had one home-schooled student, still in the equivalent of high school, take three different philosophy courses from me while also at the same time studying Greek and Latin at another nearby college. My point is that home-schooled kids are often very bright and highly motivated students, and they're giving up on the government schools.

Maybe this article (also see previous post) in the Wall Street Journal on the sort of books public schools are using to try to get young boys to read gives us a hint.

I suspect that home-schooling will be the wave of the future unless the government panics and steps in to make it impractical. That's a possibility and it's another good reason to vote against candidates and parties that stand against individual freedom.

How Not to Close the Gap

Thomas Spence, in a column at the WSJ, observes that there's a growing literacy gap between boys and girls. The good news, he says, is that influential people recognize the problem. The bad news is that their solutions are just awful.

A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.

For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."

So, the solution our pedagogues have come up with to getting reluctant boys to read is to teach them to be boorish, moronic slobs. Sounds like a great plan.

Spence adds that:

Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."

"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."

The idea that we have to cater to the young savages' penchant for the prurient is an abdication of one's role as an educator. What's next? Teaching arithmetic by counting the number of chocolate bars floating in the toilet bowl?

The problem, as you probably guessed, is that young boys spend a lot more time than girls with electronic amusements of one sort or another. The solution, Spence rather reasonably insists, is to severely curtail their access to these nefarious devices, and then ply them with good books.

I think he's right. Reading is not an enjoyable activity for many young boys. They'd rather be creating mayhem on the video screen. But just because civilizing males is not an easy task is no reason why parents and public schools should shirk the job of doing it.

Check out Spence's essay, especially if you're thinking about going into middle school or elementary ed. He makes a lot of interesting, and important, points.

Destroying Health Insurance

Throughout the debate over health care reform last winter and spring numerous critics argued that the package being voted on by the House and Senate was going to make health care more scarce and less affordable. Nancy Pelosi did little to reassure us that Congress knew what it was doing when she announced that we had to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it (and liberals mock Christine O'Donnell for being empty-headed?).

Well, now the bill has passed and we're starting to learn what's in it, and what's in it is going to make a lot of people very unhappy. National Review focuses on just one item: child-only policies. These are policies written specifically to cover children, and they're relatively inexpensive because the policy doesn't have to cover items, like colonoscopies, prostate exams, mastectomies, etc., that children would never be expected to need.

It turns out that one of the many unintended consequences of Obamacare is that insurance companies are going to have to stop offering these policies. National Review's editors explain why:

Health-insurance giants Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, and UnitedHealthCare have stopped writing child-only policies in those jurisdictions where they are able to do so. The reason for this is obvious: Because Obamacare forces insurance companies to accept children who are already sick with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as healthy children, parents now have a strong incentive to wait until their children are sick to buy child-only policies, making the products a guaranteed money-loser for insurers, which are not in the business of guaranteeing losses to their investors and employees.

Those losses would be passed on to health-care consumers in the form of higher premiums and reduced benefits, meaning that the mandate to cover those with pre-existing conditions will function as a tax on other insurance consumers, and those who were responsible enough to buy insurance before they got sick will be punished to bail out those who were not similarly responsible.

The requirement to accept patients with pre-existing conditions essentially guarantees that a lot of people simply won't be buying insurance until they need the coverage. The insurers will have much less money coming in and much more money going out. There's no way a company can survive such mandates, which may actually be President Obama's plan. One way to achieve his goal of having a single-payer system where the government is the single-payer is to drive insurance companies out of business, and one way to do that is to make their coverage so expensive that fewer and fewer Americans can afford it.

If that's not his deliberate plan it is nevertheless what his plan may well achieve.

Are We A Simulation?

A post by Nullasalus at Telic Thoughts caused me to reflect on what I think is an interesting development in the battle over Intelligent Design as an explanation for both the highly ordered precision of the universe and the complexity of living things.

There seems to be a growing tendency among naturalists to tacitly acknowledge that the universe is quite probably designed by an intelligent agent of some sort even as they refuse to consider any non-natural agent as the designer. We talked last week about John Gribbin's hypothesis that the universe was designed by super-intelligent beings like ourselves, only much more advanced, living in some other universe.

Nullasalus also jogs our memory of a proposal by Nick Bostrom, made about a decade ago, that we are actually living in a computer simulated world designed by a civilization that has evolved from us. This civilization has an enormous amount of technological power at its disposal and has chosen to construct a simulation of its evolutionary past. Since we are part of that past, even though we seem to be real we're really just a sophisticated form of Sim City.

The world that we inhabit, according to this theory, is not real. It's like the Matrix designed by beings living in the future, our descendents. Bostrom, believe it or not, actually constructs a pretty interesting argument for this belief and claims that it's much more likely that we really are a sim than that we're not.

Whatever the case, I have three thoughts:

1) As I said in the post on Gribbin I find it amusing the lengths to which naturalists will stretch their imaginations in order to avoid having to say that maybe a God did design the world after all.

2) It also seems that given the expanding number of potential naturalistic designers it's time to tow the old clunker of an argument that ID is a necessarily religious hypothesis, a gussied up version of creationism, out to the junkyard of broken down ideas.

3) I have no problem with the notion that we are living in a simulation and in fact wrote a post suggesting something somewhat similar to this about four years ago. The difference between what Bostrom and I imagine, however, is pretty stark. It's the difference, really, between naturalism and theism.

Check it out.

Can't We All Just Talk Nice

Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine recently issued a plea for civil discourse in the upcoming election season.

Let’s try it. For the next six weeks before the election, let’s focus on truth and civility.

Why? Because it’s getting worse. With the campaign season in full swing, the level of our public discourse has hit new lows. From politicians to commentators, I keep hearing the same thing, “We’ve never seen it get this bad.” And some of them are clearly helping to make things worse.

Except for the part about it never having been this bad before - it was much worse, in my opinion, when George Bush was president, and Barack Obama hasn't been subjected to anything close to the horrendous treatment dished out to Bush or to Sarah Palin in the last campaign and its aftermath - I totally support what Wallis is asking for. Our public discourse is often abominable and degrading.

As an example here's Ed Shultz, one of MSNBC's stable of liberal talk show hosts, who doesn't seem to have gotten Wallis' memo. Shultz is referring to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in this video. The relevant portion starts at the 2:00 minute mark:

Wow, that was a persuasive argument Ed made there, don't you think? I was feeling pretty good about Christie until I heard Ed's analysis of what's wrong with him. Now that I know that Christie's just a "cold-hearted fat slob" I've changed my mind completely about the Governor. Now I want him to run for president in 2012 instead of 2016.

Seriously, personal insults, misrepresentations of opponents' positions, and baseless accusations of malicious motives, should have no place in our public discourse. We should be better people than this. Let's show each other some respect, especially when we disagree.

Saved by Camus?

Rob Moll at Christianity Today recounts some of the influences that led him as a college senior back to the faith of his childhood. Surely the most unlikely of the influences Moll discusses was his reading of Albert Camus' novel The Plague. I say this is unlikely since Camus was an atheist and the hero of The Plague is also an atheist. Indeed, the only Christian in the novel, a Father Paneloux, is something of a buffoon.

Anyway, here's the heart of Moll's account:

[T]he biggest influence on my spiritual journey was the novels and philosophy of Albert Camus, a French existentialist of the 1940s and '50s—and an atheist. C. S. Lewis warned, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." Camus should have been safe territory for me, but as I like to say now, I was saved by an atheist....

The world, as Camus found it, is absurd. Humans yearn for meaning, yet life offers none. God is absent. But Camus argued against the nihilism of his fellow Europeans who found life meaningless and therefore flocked to totalitarian, fascist, or communist philosophies. "I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it," Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, his argument against suicide. "But I know that I do not know that meaning." Rather than take a leap of faith, Camus sought to "know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone."

He illustrated his philosophy of creating meaning in the face of meaninglessness in the novel The Plague. When the city of Oran is struck by disease, officials quarantine the city. The main character, the physician Rieux, chooses to stay, throwing himself into caring for the sick. This is how one creates meaning amid the meaninglessness of the sudden outbreak of plague. And life is no different, Camus believed. We are to work against wrongs and injustice, with humility, trying to aid others in small ways.

Rieux....realized that "I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed ... I was fighting it." Not only that: "I have realized that we all have plague."

Camus was right, and I, too, had plague. I was sick and in need of a Physician. Camus' willingness to accept the truth that humans are fallen allowed me to do the same. Camus held a mirror to my face—in a way that no pastor, preacher, or professor had—and I knew I needed salvation.

There's much more in the essay that makes it worth taking five or six minutes to read. Indeed, there's much in others of Camus' works that's worth reading, not just in The Plague but also in his other famous novel The Stranger. Camus doesn't shrink from portraying the awful emptiness of a life lived in the absence of God. To repeat Lewis' words, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."

Disincentives to Crime

Caleb passes along a report released by the NRA based on recently released FBI crime statistics. The report points out that over the last two decades violent crime has been decreasing as private gun sales have been increasing. I think we have to be careful about drawing a cause and effect relationship, though all the trends are certainly suggestive of one, but we need not be coy about declaring that predictions that more guns would result in greater crime rates have been pretty much discredited.

The NRA summarizes their report in this paragraph:

Coinciding with a surge in gun purchases that began shortly before the 2008 elections, violent crime decreased six percent between 2008 and 2009, including an eight percent decrease in murder and a nine percent decrease in robbery. Since 1991, when violent crime peaked, it has decreased 43 percent to a 35-year low. Murder has fallen 49 percent to a 45-year low. At the same time, the number of guns that Americans own has risen by about 90 million.

Predictions by gun control supporters, that increasing the number of guns, particularly handguns and so-called “assault weapons,” would cause crime to increase, have been proven profoundly lacking in clairvoyance.

Documentation is provided at the link. Perhaps criminals perform a subconscious calculation, pondering the chances that an intended victim may be armed and proceeding accordingly. As gun ownership has increased, the likelihood of encountering an armed victim increases apace, and the thug's crude cost-benefit analysis weighs heavily against an assault.

This stands to reason, especially in crimes like rape or robbery. If most potential robbers thought their intended victim was likely to produce a weapon instead of a wallet it could make the crime decidedly unprofitable and just not worth the risk.