Ben Stein

The following piece by Ben Stein, who writes for The American Spectator and who appeared on Win Ben Stein's Money and in small roles in numerous movies, sums up the feelings of so many of us that I thought I'd share it with Viewpoint readers today.

Note: The restaurant Stein refers to, Morton's, is a high end eatery in L.A. For many years he has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's", but he's now terminating the column to move on to other things:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World? As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonline FINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament, the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive, The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero. We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters.

This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard-or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them. But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Ben Stein

To which the only thing left to be said is "Amen."

Real Reform

Joanne Jacobs at Joanne Jacobs.com specializes in education news. Her site has this intriguing report on the relationship between immigrants and their academic performance. An excerpt:

According to the National Foundation for American Policy, which backs employment-related visas, 60 percent of the finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search, 65 percent of the U.S. Math Olympiad's top scorers and 46 percent of U.S. Physics Team members are the children of immigrants. "Seven of the top 10 award winners at the 2004 Intel Science Talent Search were immigrants or their children. In 2003, three of the top four awardees were foreign-born."

It often astonishes educators that children who have to overcome serious linguistic and other cultural hurdles to learn frequently outperform those who face no such impediments. It is also worth pointing out that these children often succeed in the same schools that are said to be failing so many children of our native-born population.

One would think that ascertaining the reasons for this would be a top priority in the Department of Education since it would be crucial to improving education in this country. I suspect, however, that it's not a priority for a simple reason.

Children of immigrants don't always do well. Generally, it is the children of Asian and Hindu parents who excel most frequently. And when they do, it is because their families are usually tightly-knit and very religious, they value education, respect, and self-discipline. The parents themselves are often professionally successful, they're oriented toward the future, not the present, and they often have not yet bought into the more dysgenic elements of American culture. These are, of course, the same reasons why children of non-immigrants also do well in school, when they do. Parents, whether immigrants or not, who lack any single one of these qualities may well produce high achieving children, but the more of these qualities they lack the less likely it is that their children will excel in the academic sphere of their schooling.

There's little interest in political circles in stressing this because if it is true, the key to school improvement lies in reversing the deterioration of the family, and this is an area where the only role government is willing to play is negative. For close to two generations government policies have been undermining the bedrock supports of family structure that many immigrants bring to this country. No fault divorce, promiscuous welfare benefits, abortion on demand, increased secularization of the public square, and now gay marriage rights, all have a corrosive effect on the values many immigrants cherish.

Moreover, improving our childrens' educational performance would take a conscious repudiation of the entrenched cultural relativism that many in government embrace. The view that different societies have different ways of doing things and hold different values, but that no one's values are any better or more corect than anyone else's is philosophically inane, but is, for all that, still part of the psychological furniture of many public servants today.

Add to the structural exacerbations of government policies a highly seductive pop culture which celebrates sexual infidelity, drugs, rebellion, and other expressions of short-term hedonism, the very opposites of the values which make for academic success, and it is not difficult to understand why the "immigrant effect" wears off after a generation or two.

It's also not difficult to see why government is not interested in focussing on these factors. It's much easier to blame failing schools than to muster the political will, courage, and consensus necessary to do something meaningful to reverse the academic trendlines. So politicians and other bureaucrats content themselves with attacking the symptoms rather than the problem. The decline of American education is a concomitant of the deterioration of faith, family, and pop culture, and there's no inclination in government, particularly not on the political left, to do anything at all about that.

God and Evil

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future, that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future, it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil. Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

This is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wanting to prevent evil but for some reason he chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility but, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers, if he could do something to stop it? No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God the theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork. First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist might say here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having said this, let's look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that it is within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in a future post.

The argument that many Christian theologians have put forward goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it. This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it. On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him strikes me as very plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning. Let us assume that it is possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create. Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation. He has an image of every world he could possibly make in his mind. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created. At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't. Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often.

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell. People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out, or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right, or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure how man would choose to use his gift of choice. Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed them worth it.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create some other world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it. Some have even called proponents of the "Open Future" idea heretics. I myself am open to the argument but am sympathetic to the objections of the traditionalists. Perhaps, readers can shed some light here. I invite anyone who's interested in pursuing it to contact us through our Feedback option.

The argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc. These will be discussed in another post.

Dr. Strangelove

Here's interesting news. Apparently deployment of our missile defense shield has begun. Perhaps this will cause the chuckleheads in Pyongyang and Beijing to think twice before they decide to launch offensive nuclear missiles.

Of course, there are those who are skeptical about whether the missile defense system can actually perform as it's supposed to, and for all I know their doubts may be warranted, but this particular argument strikes me as silly:

The interceptors have not proven their reliability, hitting targets only five times in eight tests, said Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. He said they failed even when using advanced information "an enemy would never give us," including when they were launched.

Coyle's objection seems to be that since this first generation of missiles can only succeed against 60% of incoming ICBMs that therefore the system is useless. I don't think he would say that if North Korea launched a ten missile attack against the West Coast and Coyle happened to be living in one of the six target cities that was spared because of the deployment of a less than perfect defense system.

In fact, though, the system doesn't have to work perfectly to be useful. Merely the uncertainty it creates in the minds of the war planners on the other side is itself a deterrent, a deterrent that one cannot put a price tag upon.

Coyle goes on to pile another strange argument atop his previous effort:

"It's not something you want to depend on in real battle," said Coyle, now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "It's also misleading to say we don't have any defense now." If U.S. troops saw a "country building a missile, they would blow it up on the ground. They would never wait to see if it was launched."

Is Coyle saying that we're better off depending solely upon a preemptive strike than we are by having a backup option? Furthermore, haven't North Korea and China already built several dozen missiles? Did Coyle call for us to bomb them when they were being built? Should we do it now?

Moreover, these missiles are not usually constructed out in the open with bullseyes painted on them. To preemptively destroy them, assuming that were politically feasible, would require inserting ground troops, which would doubtless precipitate an all-out war. Nice alternative. What think tank is this guy with?

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip on the story.

Sharing the News

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has some interesting thoughts on Christian evangelism. Reading it, I wondered how many people accept the Gospel because someone just walked up to them and invited them to give their life to Christ? I suppose it happens and I suppose some of those commitments are enduring, but I still wonder even so if, on balance, that approach is more often seen by the "target" as insulting and simple-minded.

I think Carter is exactly right when he says that:

Our evangelistic mission, therefore, is simply to share with others the "good news" that they too can know what we know. Sometimes this will require us "sharing our faith" by telling others about our own experiences. Other times it can mean removing the "worldview underbrush" that prevents them from seeing clearly what they, by disposition, can and should know. Most times, though, it will simply mean living as if we really believed that the gospel truly is good news for believers right here, right now, and not just in the hereafter.

His tongue-in-cheek conclusion also resonates:

While I believe some forms of evangelism are ineffective if not downright counterproductive, I don't want to presume to say how God can or cannot spread the "good news." It is quite possible that He could use such methods as prayer cards or religious tracts to bring the lost to salvation and redemption. In fact, I believe that it's even possible that he might be able to use evangelical Christians to further the work of his Kingdom. Not likely, perhaps, but possible. The Lord can, after all, work miracles.

Good stuff.

Rule Britannia

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well, guess.

Rule Britannia

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well...guess.

The Media as Wil E. Coyote

Despite a heavy barrage of media criticism of President Bush's claim that there were connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, the president and Vice-President Cheney have remained adamant in their defense of their claims. The president seemed to back off a little but not much and the vice-president has insisted that the media criticism has been unfair on this as well as other matters.

When the preliminary 9/11 Comission staff report was released last month the media jumped all over the statement that there had been no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaida and accused the president of misleading the nation into thinking there was. Bush, however had only claimed that there were ties between the two, not that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 or any other terrorist act against the U.S. Now the full report is out and the media has egg on their faces yet again. Like the coyote trying to snare the road runner, every stratagem they employ to discredit Bush simply backfires.

Byron York has done the pick and shovel work, digging through the voluminous product of the Commission's efforts to bring us their findings regarding Iraq's links to al Qaida. A couple of excerpts:

Now, with the release of the commission's final report, it is clear what Hamilton and Cheney were talking about. The final report details a much more extensive set of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda than the earlier staff statement. It also modifies the original "no collaborative relationship" description, now saying there was "no collaborative operational relationship" (emphasis added) between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And it suggests a significant amount of contact and communication between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden.

The details found in the report - which in footnotes are attributed to a variety of secret U.S government intelligence documents - suggest a new way of thinking about Iraq and al Qaeda. Bin Laden had been forced out of Sudan and into Afghanistan. When it appeared he might have trouble with the Taliban, he looked to Iraq as a possible source of assistance. Iraq, at the time interested in closer ties with the Saudis, said no. Later, as his troubles with the United States grew, Saddam reconsidered, and offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq. This time, bin Laden turned Saddam down, not because of any conflicts with Iraq but because he thought he had a better deal in Afghanistan.

With that background in mind, the reasoning employed by American policymakers in early 2002 as they planned the next step in the war on terrorism, comes into clearer focus. The U.S. had toppled the Taliban but had not caught bin Laden and some of his top aides. Without a friendly regime in Afghanistan to protect al Qaeda, where might bin Laden and his band of terrorists go next? One possibility - a quite reasonable possibility - would be a place that had offered them haven in the past: Iraq.

For the details behind this summary, and the evidence of the connection between bin Laden and Hussein, read the whole column. No one interested in Bush's justifications for OIF should miss it.

Viewpoint is thinking of taking up a pool, the proceeds to go to the reader who correctly guesses how long it will take for the media to apologize for treating the president as if he had the integrity of a Kerry foreign policy advisor.

The Company We Keep

Go here for an outstanding piece in the New York Sun on Sandy Berger's role in the Clinton White House and national security. Some excerpts:

In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times - Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.

That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator's judgment.

Neither Mr.Berger nor any other American is to blame for the deaths of Americans on September 11, 2001. The moral fault lies only with the terrorists, not with the victims.With the war still on, one can't help but to ponder who might best defend the country going forward, and how.

The last sentence reminds me of Machiavelli's caution that a Prince should be judged by the quality of the people with which he surrounds himself. Three of John Kerry's foreign policy advisors, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, and Sandy Berger have all been shown in recent weeks to be either dishonest or lacking sound judgment, or both. As the Sun asks, what does that tell us about Kerry?

Nuclear Iran

Charles Krauthammer gives us a glimpse into what will almost certainly be one of the first matters the Bush administration will have to address if it is reelected in November: What to do about Iran.

A question Viewpoint wishes someone would ask John Kerry is what, exactly, he proposes be done about a state which supports terrorism, is exceptionally hostile to the United States and Israel, and which is, by its own admission, soon to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Kerry can't fall back on some vague mumblings about a multilateral approach and involving the U.N. since that's what the Bush administration is trying now with notable lack of success.

Kerry's realistic choices seem limited to attempting to ignite a revolution, military preemption against Iran's nuclear facilities, or doing nothing. The first doesn't seem as likely to succeed as we had hoped last spring, the second is pretty much what Kerry has been criticizing Bush for over the past two years, and the third puts the world at a risk that we simply can't accept.

Krauthammer's analysis of the problem is very good. Some excerpts:

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time - rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction - instead of one.

Two years ago there were five countries supporting terror and pursuing WMDs -- two junior-leaguers, Libya and Syria, and the axis-of-evil varsity: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has just eliminated two: Iraq, by direct military means, and Libya, by example and intimidation.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ``Great Satan'' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive strike. Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away - in Iraq.

Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. If people like John Kerry had had their way in the spring of 2003 we would be in a far weaker position today to do whatever it is that needs to be done to prevent it, and if John Kerry has his way in November what needs to be done probably won't be.

God and Time

One of the questions that arises among people who enjoy talking about the philosophy of religion concerns the relationship between God and time. Does God exist in our time? If not, is He outside time altogether or does He exist in his own, supernatural, temporality? I thought of this as I read an excerpt from a book by Kitty Ferguson entitled The Fire In The Equations: Science, Religion and the Search For God. at Belief Net.

Since our time is part of the creation and coterminous with it, and since God transcends the creation, it seems likely that although God may enter our time, He is not restricted to it or constrained by it. We may deduce that our time, cosmic time, is part of creation, i.e. the cosmos, by asking this: If there were no motion and no matter to move, if there were no thing at all, could cosmic time exist? If so, what, exactly, would it be that is existing? How would its existence be discerned? Since it's difficult to imagine time apart from matter in motion, or some sort of change, it seems reasonable to suppose, although it can't be proven, that our time came into being when space, matter, and energy did. Thus scientists talk about the "space-time" universe.

If we assume, then, that God is outside our time then we might ask further whether God is cognizant of our past, present, and most intriguingly, our future. Many theists hold that the concept of omniscience imputed to God entails that God must know the future, but if so, can humans have free will if God knows what they will choose?

We can frame the question in the form of an argument:

1.God knows today that I will do X tomorrow.

2.God is omniscient and therefore cannot be mistaken.

3.Therefore, I must do X tomorrow. I am not free to do Y.

When put this way it certainly seems as if God's knowledge of the future determines my choice, since I cannot be free to do Y if God knows I am going to do X. But there is something odd about this. Certainly, if God knows I will do X then I will do X , but it doesn't follow that God's knowledge determines my choice. Might it not be that my choice determines God's knowledge?

Consider the following propositions:

1. I am free to choose X or Y tomorrow.

2. God knows today which choice I will make tomorrow.

Let's stipulate that I freely choose X tomorrow.

This set of propositions is logically coherent, that is none of them is logically incompatible with any of the others, as far as I can tell. The conclusion which follows from them is simply that:

3. God knew today that I would freely choose X tomorrow.

Put this way there's no contradiction between my free choice and God's foreknowledge. In fact, God's foreknowledge may be seen as a consequence of my choice rather than my choice being an inevitable consequence of God's foreknowledge. Since it's possible to frame the argument this way it's at least possible that there is no contradiction between God's omniscience and human free will.

This does not satisfy some who can't shake the notion that if God knows X will happen, then X has to happen. It is certainly true that if God knows X will happen then, of course, X will happen, but confusion settles in because we tend to think of God as existing within our temporal frame of reference, but because God is outside our time it could be, as I've said above, that the event X causes God's knowledge, not the other way around.

If this is difficult to grasp think about it this way: Each of us knows what other people did yesterday, but we don't think our knowledge determined their behavior. Their behavior was chosen by them yesterday and the choice was unaffected by the fact that we know about it today. So knowledge of a choice doesn't necessarily determine the choice. The problem is that knowledge of a choice prior to its occurrence is different in kind than knowledge of a choice after it has occurred. This is true of us, embedded as we are in cosmic time, but if God is outside of cosmic time, it may not be true of Him.

If God is outside of our time, past and future are all in His present. Our past and future may well be temporally the same to God. Whether He is looking "back" at the past or "forward" into the future, it's all "present" to Him. Thus, if looking "back" doesn't determine what people chose in the past, looking "forward" may not determine choices either. In other words, It's possible that the choices God sees us make determine the content of His knowledge, His knowledge doesn't determine our choices.

For some theologians, however, the whole question of God's foreknowledge is moot. They argue that to say that God is omnipotent is to say that God can do everything that it is logically possible to do, but one thing that may not be logically possible is to know with certainty today what a free agent will do tomorrow.

This view is not very popular among orthodox theists, especially evangelical Christians, among which group I count myself, because it seems to diminish to too great an extent the sovereignty of God, and it is also difficult to reconcile with Scriptural passages which manifestly foretell choices which people will make centuries later. Few Christian thinkers, particularly evangelical thinkers, wish to sacrifice their belief in the Divine inspiration of the Bible on the altar of a philosophical speculation.

Advocates of the "Open Future" hypothesis reply to these concerns by asking how God can possibly know what someone will choose to do in the future unless their behavior is somehow determined? How can God know an indeterminate future that has yet to occur? If God knows the future doesn't that imply that the future somehow exists? If so, where, exactly, does it exist?

I confess I have read no fully satisfying answer to these questions. I also confess that, although I tend to hope that God does know the future, I find a certain allure in the notion that He does not. The reason for the attractiveness of this view for me is that it offers a possible answer to one of the most vexing of apologetic questions. The troubling question arises out of attempts to reconcile God's goodness and power with the existence of evil in the world, but a discussion of that topic will have to wait a couple of days.

Kofi Fiddles, Sudanese Burn

How many have to die before the U.N. acts? The Sudan is Rwanda all over again and, as then, Kofi Annan dithers. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to do something to stop the killing of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, but the usual suspects are thwarting our efforts once more. From the article:

One problem is strong lobbying by the Arab League and others against any kind of sanctions or military intervention. The United States has had difficulty getting a resolution adopted that would threaten a travel and arms ban within a month if Sudan did not comply.

Of course, the United States could act "unilaterally", but the domestic secular left, which cares little about the suffering of black Christians in Africa but cares enormously about rendering America militarily impotent in the world, would doubtless make this very difficult politically. Add to the political difficulties the U.N.'s hurt feelings over Iraq which evidently trump the moral imperative to do something to bring relief to the suffering in the Sudan, and you have a recipe for inaction.

"We are still dealing with Iraq. We are not out of Iraq yet," Annan said.

So there the delegates sit, arms folded, a scowl on their faces, adamantly refusing to protect tens of thousands, even millions, of starving, disease-ridden women and children because the United States grew weary of their failure to do something about the horrors occurring in Iraq (and Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda) and finally did it ourselves.

"Any discussion of intervention in Sudan would be looked at very carefully by governments and I am not sure how quickly and how enthusiastically one would get support for that initiative. We have to be very clear on that," Annan said.

In other words, not enough Christians have died yet for the secularists and Muslims in the General Assembly to regard this as worth getting serious about. In a response to a question about the possibility of military intervention to stop the butchery of thousands of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, Annan displays in a single sentence the complete irrelevance of the United Nations, the absurdity of the Democrat criticism that George Bush failed to get U.N. permission to depose Saddam Hussein, and his own nincompoopery:

Annan said Sudan had been warned not to [use Janjaweed members as policemen]. "It is a 'no-no' for them to induct Janjaweed into the police force,"

A "no-no"?! I guess that will make the thugs in Khartoum think twice about helping the militias commit their genocide. Next Kofi will make them sit in a corner for a time-out. No wonder Saddam was so contemptuous of U.N. resolutions. And this is the body to which the Democrats want the United States to subordinate its national sovereignty and interests?

Intelligent Design

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting debate going about Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism for those Viewpoint readers with a philosophical turn of mind who are interested in the question of how life arose. Warning: Some of the comments are pretty technical but Joe's arguments are relatively brief and easy enough to understand by a non-specialist who has read a little bit on the topic.

A Force For Evil?

According to this Fox News report 40% of Canadian youth think the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. Youth can be forgiven their stupidity, but the Canadian media and educators who instill this nonsense into callow minds cannot.

If Canada's youth wish to see real evil in action they might simply read this news report. The United Nations, determined to show the U.S. why it should withdraw from this tawdry organization forthwith, voted 156 to 6 with ten abstentions to approve a resolution calling upon Israel to heed an International Court of Justice ruling that called upon them to tear down the barrier that has reduced terrorist attacks by 90% and saved the lives of countless Israeli women and children.

Unfortunately, the spared lives are evidently of no moment to the august delegates in Manhatten, who voted, in effect, to have the murders resume. Their rationale was that the wall is working a hardship on Palestinian landowners in some regions, but one would think that if that were really their concern the U.N. could bring other resources to bear to mitigate the hardship. Instead, the U.N. prefers to salve the suffering of the Palestinians by adopting measures that can only insure that more Israelis will die.

Only Israel, the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voted against this odious resolution. Where was Canada? Canada was too busy teaching its youth that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world to vote against a resolution which would deprive Israel of any means of protecting its citizens from the savages who wish to blow them to bits. In a display of moral courage they abstained.

Isn't it past time that the United States washed its hands of this absurd institution? America should join together with those nations which pledge themselves to the values of equality under the law, freedom of religion, press, and speech, representative government, free and open elections, and establish an alternative to the United Nations. The U.N. is little more than a bunch of thugs masquerading as statesmen and we should no longer be party to the charade.

Wilson, Berger, and Chirac

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief at The New Republic has some thoughts on a variety of matters including the Joe Wilson and Sandy Berger affairs as well as the attitude of the French toward their own Jewish population. About the Wilson episode he says this:

[I]n a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

Regarding Sandy Berger he asks:

So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really.

Perhaps another question Mr. Kerry might wonder about is this: Evidently Bill Clinton knew that Berger, an important advisor to Kerry, was under investigation, so why didn't he tell Kerry about it?

On the French, Peretz notes this troubling anecdote:

[Chirac} demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ... Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen." Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too. A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.

There's more at TNR Online.

Nukes Found in Iraq?

I don't know if this UPI story is true, but if it is it could change the entire course of the presidential campaign. It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats and the media handle this report if it is confirmed.

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

Several weeks ago Viewpoint suggested that the array of individuals supporting John Kerry should give others leaning in his direction pause. We wrote that:

Undecided voters who might be considering a vote for John Kerry in November should ask themselves what it is about the Massachusetts senator that has won him the support of pornographers like Howard Stern and Larry Flynt, Hollywood ditzes like Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore, raving wild men like Al Gore and Howard Dean, the Communist Chinese, North Korea, Vietnam (Hanoi), and the French. What do they all know that maybe the rest of us should?

Now we can add to this list of disreputable characters the names of Joe Wilson, a Kerry advisor, and arrant slanderer, Whoopi Goldberg, whose sleazy put downs of the president were so offensive and vile that her corporate sponsor, Slim-Fast, dropped her from its celebrity endorser list, and most recently Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor under President Clinton and, until last night, current advisor to Senator Kerry, who purloined documents dealing with matters of national security by concealing them in his pants and socks.

Berger calls his behavior an honest mistake. He inadvertently left the archives, he claims, with documents stuffed in his socks and down his drawers. The Dems want to laugh all this off, but they would be howling in outrage had it been a Bush administration official who stole the papers. Not only does their reaction to this incident, or rather their lack of reaction, evince a deep hypocrisy in the Democrat party, it also suggests that we may infer that this sort of behavior falls within the bounds of the Democrat standards for honesty. Berger is like a shoplifter with merchandise stuffed in his socks, trying to convince the police that he inadvertently left the store with the items, that he certainly didn't intend to steal them, and the Democrats seem to be okay with that.

Rather than expressing dismay that so many of their friends and political allies seem grossly deficient in either taste or integrity, they respond to this last incident by fretting instead about the "timing" of the revelation about Berger's conduct, as if that somehow is more nefarious than the conduct itself. It's no wonder the Democrats insist that character doesn't matter for public servants. If it did, a sizable number of them would be rendered ineligible.

George Bush can take comfort that people like these hate and oppose him, because people have always despised those who are morally superior to themselves. He can take comfort that so many feel impelled to lie about him, to utter the most mean-spirited and vile slanders about him. People do this because they know that they can't merely tell the truth about the man since the truth is not going to alienate voters from him.

People often feel indicted by another man's strength of character, by his integrity. His virtue is a mirror that constantly reminds them of their own inferiority, and they detest not themselves for being less, but they detest him for being better. Their jealousy doesn't motivate them to rise to his level, but rather it motivates them to drag him down, to discredit him, ruin him.

Destroying a man is one way to exert power over him and the exercise of power is the only way some people know to compensate for the character they themselves lack. If a man is better than they, they wish to destroy him. They can't tolerate a man whose very existence condemns them. They will project their own pathologies onto him in an attempt to prove that he's not really as virtuous as he seems. Thus they accuse Bush of lying to the world about Iraq when, in fact, the only evidence that people have lied points back to them. This is a sickness, a depravity which seems to reside deep in the human heart, and it's the root of so many of our social and political ills.

Terror and Liberalism

One of the silver linings of vacationing in a Central American country during the rainy season is that there is ample time to read. Having spent the last ten days in Costa Rica where it rained fairly often I had the good fortune to have along a copy of Paul Berman's best-seller Terror and Liberalism which does an outstanding job of helping the reader understand the nature of the battle with the forces of radical Islamism in which we are currently engaged. Berman's book is interesting, easy to read, and all the more compelling because Berman himself is a man of the left who is dismayed by the reaction of most leftists, both here and in Europe, to the war against terror. He notes in his preface the irony of millions of leftists marching in the largest mass demonstrations in history two years ago in an effort to prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrannies of the modern age. Even more incongruous, he adds, is that deterring the U.S. from deposing Saddam Hussein was seen as "the correct stance for every true friend of the downtrodden."

Berman himself is, in his words, one of maybe fifteen or twenty people in the country who are both pro-war and left-wing, and much of his book is given to explaining how the bulk of the ideological left, which began as a champion of the poor and oppressed, came to so passionately defend the most brutal of tyrannies, not just in Iraq, but in earlier times, also in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany.

Berman's argument is complex and I will scarcely be able to do it justice, but it distills to this: There is in the human heart an impulse to rebel, to rebel against God, to rebel against authority. That impulse led millions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into mass movements of rebellion, such as communism and fascism, which evolved into totalitarian tyrannies and ultimately into cults of death. He argues that this sociopathological pattern is universal and expresses itself in cultures other than the European. What we're seeing in the Muslim world is an Islamic version of the European model.

Berman traces the evolution of the Baathi and the radical Islamists, two separate but parallel expressions of the totalitarian impulse, to the writings of Muslim scholars like Sayyed Qutb in the 1950s. He shows how both of these versions of Muslim totalitarianism have followed the logic of Qutb's thinking to become mindless, irrational mass movements drenched in blood and terror, and implacably hostile to the liberal values of the West. Following the trajectory of the earlier European movements, contemporary Islam, or at least a major portion of it, has become obsessed with killing and death.

In a chapter titled Wishful Thinking Berman explains why liberalism has been so blind to the threat these murderous totalitarianisms have posed in both the past and the present. He suggests several reasons. One is that liberals simply cannot believe that millions of people could possibly choose such an irrational path. Perhaps, they convinced themselves in the 1930s, the media was lying about Hitler, or the Bolsheviks. Perhaps today the media is being duped by corporate interests, and the jihadis are really not the threat that they are being made out to be. Perhaps if we could talk with them, understand their grievances, aid them in overcoming their suffering instead of threatening them, they would gladly lay down their arms. Surely, these people don't really despise the values we cherish: individual freedom, equality under the law, tolerance, separation of church and state. Surely they are not so unreasonable as to wish to kill us just for the pleasure of killing us. And so on.

In other words, although Berman doesn't put it quite this way, the left is convinced of the truth of the secularist assumption that man does indeed live by bread alone and that if only material conditions were optimal people would behave rationally. Put another way, the left has for at least eighty years been in denial about the low appeal for most of the world's peoples of the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and rationality. They have been in denial about the true nature of the human heart and the power of the non-rational compulsions, convictions, and obsessions which drive men all over the globe to commit genocide. Liberals, having long ago abandoned religion, cannot bring themselves to believe that evil actually exists, except perhaps in the Republican party, and cannot understand the hold that religious beliefs and motivations have on millions of Muslims.

What is worse, in my view, is that liberals tend to see the real enemy as anyone who possesses a realistic understanding of the nature of those who wish to do us harm and who are willing to fight to prevent it. This behavior horrifies the left because they are like the fellow in school who lives in fear of the tougher kids and who resents, even hates, any of his peers whom he thinks might provoke the bullies to start throwing their weight around. Like herd animals resigned to having the wolves now and then take a few of their number from the margins of the flock, they hope that by making themselves inconspicuous the predators will leave them alone.

If that doesn't work perhaps the wolves can be appeased somehow. Maybe if we disarmed and showed them we mean them no harm their hatred for us would be mollified. The left, in its naivet�, is completely oblivious to the utter contempt this response engenders in the mind of the wolf. The wolf simply sees all of it for what it is, an acknowledgement of weakness and a confirmation of the rightness of their cause and their strategy.

Bush and Blair have refused to go along with this politics of fear, instead they have swatted the Islamist hornets' nest with a stick, and the left at home and abroad loathes them for it. "Look what you've done!" they protest, "Now the wolves will really hate us!" In a strange, neurotic twist of an old aphorism, the left declares the enemy of my enemy to be my enemy. Thus it despises anyone who actively opposes the Islamist cult of death. It despises anyone who would seek to liberate millions of people from savage oppression if by doing so we risk offending those whose sole ambition in this life is to destroy America.

The Jews, the Americans, and anyone else they think the Islamists hate, the left also hates in the hope of ingratiating themselves with those who are eager to slaughter them. The left, Berman writes, has undergone a strange transformation. "They had begun [In the 19th century] as defenders of liberal values and human rights and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder." They started as liberal democrats and themselves became allies and de facto sympathizers with fascists.

Berman gives many examples of this phenomenon, but one in particular stands out. He describes an episode at the 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference in New York where a substantial crowd listened to an Egyptian novelist defend a female Palestinian suicide bomber who had recently committed mass murder by blowing herself up in a crowd. When the novelist was finished praising the young woman the audience burst into applause. Applause for such a horrible crime is a symptom of a deep-seated sickness of the soul, but as Berman, citing Camus, points out, the left has always had a strange fascination with, and attraction for, violence, at least as long as it is not directed at them.

Berman's book is a powerful indictment of the modern left's hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy as well as a lucid presentation of the historical evolution of radical Islam. I urge anyone who is interested in trying to gain a better grasp of either of these to read the book in its entirety. Every page is enlightening, although his gratuitous plinking at George Bush at the end of the book is an unfortunate and transparent attempt to reaffirm his leftist bona fides. Nevertheless, both conservatives and liberals will profit from reading this work. You can obtain a copy of Terror and Liberalism by contacting our good friends at Hearts and Minds Bookstore here.

The Good News Continues

Anyone who would like an update on the progress the new Iraq is making on its road to viable nationhood should check out the very comprehensive research done by Chrenkoff, an Australian blogger who has been posting updates on the good news from Iraq every two weeks for several months now. Chrenkoff's labors, he tells us, are motivated mostly by frustration with a press that seems to find only bad news to be newsworthy. His reporting is yet another example of the kind of analysis that the mainstream press should be providing but chooses not to, evidently preferring to continue its slide into irrelevancy.

NorthWest Flight 327 Update

Annie Jacobsen has an update on her report Viewpoint recommended to its readers two days ago. Apparently the national media are on to the story, but nothing has come out yet.

For those who might have missed it, Jacobsen was on a NorthWest Airlines flight that was also occupied by fourteen Syrian men whose behavior onboard raised very deep concerns and considerable fear. Jacobsen's description is riveting and if you haven't read it, you should. You can find it here.

Some commentators have dismissed Jacobsen's experience as nothing to worry about, but, as Jacobsen reports in the current update, a number of airline officials and pilots say that there is a strong likelihood that the Syrian passengers were making a terrorist practice run.

Read both columns for yourself and let us know what you think.

Liar, liar...

Yesterday Viewpoint carried a piece based on a Fox News story supporting the veracity of president Bush's claims that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Niger for use in nuclear weapons production and suggesting that Joe Wilson, who had been vociferously accusing Bush of lying about this, had himself been lying.

Mark Steyn has a fine piece on Wilson's prevarications in the Chicago Sun Times, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review refutes a couple of Wilson's lame attempts to defend himself in the Washington Post.

The important question is how Kerry will respond to this development. Kerry's campaign sponsers Wilson's web site and Wilson has been campaigning with Kerry, calling Bush a liar at Kerry campaign events. Doesn't Kerry owe Bush an apology?

Steyn writes that this isn't going to happen. Wilson was useful in discrediting Bush, whether his allegations were truthful or not, and now that his usefulness has expired he will be quietly allowed to fade into the oblivion of media amnesia.

Steyn puts it this way:

It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose - he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq - and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.

Read the whole piece. It's worth it.

Nukes

NewsMax.Com has a couple of sobering reports today. The first claims that it is a widely shared opinion in Washington that an Israeli airstrike/ special operations effort is in the works for Iran's nuclear facilities. The only question seems to be whether it will be timed to take place before or after the November election. The article offers some speculation as to how Iran might retaliate should such an attack occur.

The second piece is even more disturbing. Apparently there is some evidence that al Qaida has obtained as many as ten suitcase-type nuclear weapons each powerful enough to level half of Manhatten. There is concern that at least some of these may have been smuggled into the U.S. with the intention of detonating them in either Boston or New York during the political conventions soon to be held in those cities.

Let us pray to God that our Homeland Security Department is better than its critics have been telling us.

A Legacy of Freedom

Nikita Demosthenes has an interesting observation on the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush:

In the encyclopedias and history books on the shelves 100 years from now, Bush will be rightly seen as being the one to finally turn the tide of tyranny and intolerance in the Middle East toward democracy and freedom. With more freedom in the Middle East, the terrorist groups will slowly decline as their potential members get real jobs and real careers.

This has always been the answer to Middle East unrest - which the left almost never admits: we don't need to throw money at existing dictatorships, we need to foster democracy.

One hundred years from now the left will be seen to have missed the boat on this issue just like they missed the boat on Ronald Reagan's courageous stand resulting in the demise of Soviet communism.

When it comes to the actual number of people freed from tyranny, the records of President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush are unmatched in world history. President Reagan's stand against Soviet communism led to the freedom of over 700 million people behind the Iron Curtain. President George W. Bush's stand against Middle East tyranny has already resulted in the freedom of over 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Almost a billion people have tasted freedom for the first time due to these two American Administrations. When is the last time your heard an American network anchor - or a European leader - site these numbers? They're breathtaking.

We might add that the 50 million people liberated so far is a number that may well increase in the years ahead as other Middle Eastern tyrannies, Iran, for example, begin to realize that they are on the wrong side of history and begin to move toward granting their people more freedom. Or, perhaps more likely, the people begin seizing freedom for themselves.

It should also be noted that Bush is achieving this marvellous historical accomplishment at tremendous political risk to himself. There were no guarantees that the military operation in Iraq would be a success, and the outcome of that undertaking is still uncertain. Bush didn't do this because it was politically popular or expedient. He did it because he believed it was right, and if doing what was right costs him reelection then he is prepared to suffer that consequence.

This is one of the things about him that I personally find so admirable, and it certainly distinguishes him from the current challenger and any number of other focus group politicians for whom the phrase doing what's right is synonomous with doing what'll get me elected.

<i>Who </i>Lied?

According to a story at FoxNews.com it's beginning to look like George Bush told us the truth after all about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger and that Joe Wilson, winner of The Nation's truth-telling award, lied. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Apologies are expected to start pouring in at any moment from all those who have been insisting for the past year that Bush lied to us about Iraq's attempts to obtain nuclear fuel.

Northwest Airlines Flight 327

Back from ten days in glorious Costa Rica! Many thanks to Bill () for his provocative pieces on the gold standard and economic policy in general in my absence.

I didn't look at a newspaper the entire time I was gone so I suppose I have some catching up to do on what's going on in the world. For example, this astonishing story may have been featured prominently in the news. If so, please forgive me for calling it to your attention here. In case it wasn't, however, don't miss this article. If you're a flier, or even if you're not, it'll give you a knot deep in your stomach. One wonders how the FAA can justify passenger screening procedures that elevate an incredibly stupid adherence to political correctness above the safety of those who travel by air.

Unless the Bush administration shakes itself free of the ridiculous pretense that ethnic profiling is somehow sinful and wakes up to the fact, obvious to all but the most rationally impaired bureaucrats in the upper echelons of the Department of Transportation, that the threat to the lives of our loved ones and ourselves is primarily a threat posed by swarthy Islamic Middle Eastern men, and unless it determines that people fitting this description should come under extra scrutiny from airport security, there is almost certainly another horrific episode aboard an American airliner in our future. Surely the Islamists haven't given up trying.

If this story hasn't broken yet I'd like to know why. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the tip.

Ok, just one more post...

In A Primer - Part V, I talked about the fiscal irresponsibility of governments once they have the freedom to inflate their currency and spend with abandon, placing the burden of the consequences on the next generation.

I just came across this link to Running On Empty by Mr. Pete Person that speaks to the subject. What I find refreshing is that he is someone from the Republican Establishment, Nixon Secretary of Commerce, a personal friend of the Alan Greenspan, secretary Snow and others and yet he has the integrity to articulate and explain the very dangerous road we are on, i.e. a $44 trillion debt in unfunded liabilities. His motivation for writing the book was "to protect our children". I don't know about you but that catches my attention.

He holds the Republican and Democratic parties equally responsible yet I wonder if, like Mr. Kotlikoff who wrote The Coming Generational Storm, Mr. Peterson isn't just another "voice crying in the wilderness".

And isn't it interesting that you don't hear about this crisis in the popular media.

WSC

A Primer - Part VII

In Closing...

I have enjoyed this opportunity to post some of my thoughts regarding the importance of gold to all Americans but my time is running out and I concede I haven't exerted the effort the topic deserves. I had little notice to adequately prepare and my thoughts were hastily written for which I apologize. The articles were somewhat disjointed and lacked continuity. I'm not a writer, I'm a software engineer.

But I'd like to leave you with one more thought: The Lord admonished the Hebrews to always maintain honest weights and measures. I believe he did this because, in his wisdom, he knew that any system that was based on dishonesty of economic standards was destined to become further corrupted morally and ethically and lead to its eventual downfall.

Fiat currency is the antithesis of honesty.

Today, the Arab world is moving toward commerce and settlement in the Islamic dinar, a gold coin, in there attempt to break away from the U.S. dollar hegemony even as the U.S. demonstrates via Iraq how such efforts will be met. Europe had a chance to do likewise but they decided on just another fiat currency, the euro. Yet these developments bring us ever closer to the possibility of a universal currency.

From the link below...

"For a half-century, the Keynesians have harbored a Dream. They have long dreamed of a world without gold, a world rid of any restrictions upon their desire to spend and spend, inflate and inflate, elect and elect. They have achieved a world where governments and Central Banks are free to inflate without suffering the limits and restrictions of the gold standard. But they still chafe at the fact that, although national governments are free to inflate and print money, they yet find themselves limited by depreciation of their currency. If Italy, for example, issues a great many lira, the lira will depreciate in terms of other currencies, and Italians will find the prices of their imports and of foreign resources skyrocketing.

What the Keynesians have dreamed of, then, is a world with one fiat currency, the issues of that paper currency being generated and controlled by one World Central Bank. What you call the new currency unit doesn't really matter: Keynes called his proposed unit at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, the "bancor"; Harry Dexter White, the U.S. Treasury negotiator at that time, called his proposed money the "unita"; and the London Economist has dubbed its suggested new world money the "phoenix." Fiat money by any name smells as sour."

www.mises.org/econsense/ch76.asp

Then consider this quote from one of history's most notorious bankers...

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
Mayer Amschel Bauer (Rothschild)

It may not be a one world government we have to fear, but rather a one world currency.

The good news is that, today, gold is readily available to those interested in purchasing it. I list numerous sources for investment in gold bullion, gold mutual funds, and gold mining stocks at my Gold Page.

In closing, I would like to add this piece of information as illustrated by the last two graphs at the bottom of the page of the previous link.

It shows the value of the gold vs. the value of the dollar since the year 2000. Note that my comment there is that while it appears that the price of gold is going up, actually, it's the purchasing power of the fiat U.S. dollar that is declining...govern yourself accordingly.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you, our viewpoint readers, and sincerely hope you found the topic interesting but the time has come to turn the helm over to who should be returning on or about the 16th.

Thanks for reading...

A Primer - Part VI

Who is John Galt?

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is Alan Greenspan...arguably the single most powerful man on the planet as he directs the monetary policy of the United States. Historically, the official reserve currency throughout the world has been gold since most if not all countries settled their trade accounts with gold. In other words, if country "A" imported more goods from country "B" than it exported, then country "A" paid the balance to country "B" in gold.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in a previous post, President Nixon terminated the Bretton Woods Agreement by reneging on the redeemability of dollars for gold in 1971.

Today, countries have accumulated huge numbers of dollars with which to settle their trade accounts but the dollar is reaching the end of its time line. As Voltaire said: "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero."

Visit Gold and Economic Freedom to see what Mr. Greenspan thought of gold and those who print paper money. Given Mr. Greenspan's eloquent dissertation on the subject, I can only see two possible conclusions, either Mr. Greenspan has sold out and become one of the very statists he railed against in his now famous speech at the link above or he sees himself as Ayn Rand's hero, John Galt, who's mission it was to stop the economic engine of the world and thereby forcing everyone to come to their senses.

Time may tell.

A Primer - Part V

The War Enabler...

When country "A" decides to declare war on country "B", its ability to do so is directly correlated to its ability to pay for its war machine. Troops, tanks, guns, an air force, bombs, a navy, and on and on.

When a country's currency is tied to a real asset such as gold and there isn't enough gold in the treasury, it simply can't pay the expense of waging war and alternative solutions are found.

A country on a fiat currency system has no problem printing the money to pay for the war machine so war it will be. For example, some say the US government has already spent $100 billion on the war in Iraq. Additional costs are estimated to be anywhere from another $50 to $200 billion. Where does all this money come from?

The simplified answer is probably something like: The U.S. Treasury prints paper Treasury Bonds that they "sell" to the Federal Reserve which prints the paper dollars required to pay for the T-Bonds. Now the government has the dollars to pay for efforts in Iraq and the Federal Reserve uses the T-Bonds as an asset against which they can print many more dollars (principal of fractional reserve) to be lent to banks across the country.

See this link for a graphic flow chart of the process:

Perhaps the most dramatic example of what this can lead to is from the Weimer Republic after World War I. It's instructive to realize that in the beginning, the Weimer Republic's currency was the 20 Mark gold piece, a coin about the size of one of our quarters. After World War I, the Weimer Republic was decimated and they fell into the trap of embracing a fiat alternative to honest money, the new currency became the 20 Mark paper note and as could have been predicted, the inflation began.

This was no ordinary inflation though, as the original 20 Mark paper notes eventually inflated to 4,000,000,000,000 Marks. That's 4 trillion Marks to buy what the original 20 Mark gold piece would buy only several years earlier. I have seen pictures of women loading wheelbarrows of paper Marks into the fireplace to burn for heat and cooking because they were worth less than wood. The government was printing them so quickly and in such numbers that, to conserve the ink, they only printed one side of the paper note.

I am reminded of an exchange with a women who lived through those times in the Weimer Republic after World War I in which she was asked, "how could you possibly support someone like Adolph Hitler through his rise to power?" The lady's response to the question put to her was quite simple, "when you have to catch rats to eat for food, any alternative appears more attractive."

I'm not saying this will be the fate of America, but visit this link for a candid assessment of the state of matter today. This article sheds some light on the financial mess our politicians have created:

The $44 Trillion Abyss

Scroll down to 12/13/2003 Interview on the left of the page for the Real Audio and MP3 links to listen.

A Primer - Part IV

Dollars, Oil, and the Euro...

One of the keys to the success of the dollar is that all OPEC oil transactions must be denominated in U.S. Dollars. This creates an enormous demand for dollars as any country in the market to buy oil must sell their currency in exchange for dollars with which to buy the oil they need.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.html

From the link...

"But the need to dominate oil from Iraq is also deeply intertwined with the defense of the dollar. Its current strength is supported by OPEC's requirement (secured by a secret agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars. This requirement is currently threatened by the desire of some OPEC countries to allow OPEC oil sales to be paid in euros."

and...

"The United States has at present little reason to fear a challenge to the dollar from Malaysia. But Malaysia is an Islamic country; and the US has every reason to fear a similar challenge from the Islamic nations in OPEC, were they to force OPEC to cease OPEC oil sales in dollars, and denominate them instead in euros."

And here's another discussion on the threat to the relationship between the Dollar and Oil.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/opec_iraq_euro.htm

A Primer - Part III

Larry Summers and Gibson's Paradox...

For some background information on Gibson's Paradox, go to The Golden Sextent and scroll down to the Essays section. There you will see a link to Gibson's Paradox Revisited: Professor Summers Analyzes Gold Prices.
Then visit this article which brings it all together...

Taylor On US Dollar & Gold

From the link...

One very influential person in the Clinton Administration was very much aware of Gibson's Paradox, which Keynes noted was one of the best documented relationships in all of economics. Gibson's Paradox stated that if "real" interest rates decline, the price of gold will rise vis-a-vis the currency. BUT THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION KNEW FULL WELL THAT A RISING GOLD PRICE WOULD HURT THEIR ABILTY TO LEVERAGE AMERICA'S FUTURE FOR THEIR OWN POLITICAL GAINS. Hence, the Clinton Administration began to intervene in the gold market to "cap" the price of gold, just as Lawrence Summers clearly noted they must do in a paper he co-authored while a professor at Harvard in the late 1980s.

A Primer - Part II

Roosevelt 1933...

Going back to pre-1933, we find the ubiquitous $20 gold piece (consisting of 1 ounce of gold) with a value of...$20 dollars of purchasing power.

The US was in trouble due to the Great Depression and the economists of the day were at a loss to solve the problem so it was decided the government had to "finance" the recovery by printing massive amounts of dollars. (Actually, one must wonder what type of solution this actually is since it's simply a hidden tax on everyone through inflation and increased taxes never help to pull an economy out of a recession / depression.) The problem was that gold was a reliable barometer for measuring inflation and if inflation was perceived to be on the rise (which it surely would) everyone would cash in their paper dollars for gold. So in the wisdom of the government, the decision was made to outlaw gold ownership by U.S. citizens.

Check out The Gold Confiscation Of April 5, 1933

It became clear to governments that they could not afford to allow people to own and keep their gold. Murray Rothbard explains

"Government could never cement its power over a nation's currency, if the people, when in need, could repudiate the fiat paper and turn to gold for money."

After the gold confiscation, the U.S. government immediately revalued gold at $35 per ounce. So that same $20 gold coin that was just relinquished by the good, law abiding citizens would now cost $35 dollars to repurchase...if it were legal to do so.

See this link for a detailed explanation:

Whatever Happened to Sound Money?

From the link...

"As James Bovard observes, "citizens had accepted a paper currency based on the government's pledge to redeem it in gold at $20 per ounce; then, when Roosevelt decided to default on that pledge, he also felt obliged to turn all citizens holding gold into criminals." [10] Roosevelt also condemned them as selfish traitors.

One day later Roosevelt reduced the gold content of the dollar by 41%, raising the price of gold from $20.67 per ounce to $35.00 an ounce. The devaluation resulted in a $2.8 billion "bonus" for the government." An especially tidy sum in those days.

This is clearly on of the most blatant and manipulative examples of the U.S. government reneging on a promise to it's citizens.

And, by the way, today that one ounce of gold in a $20 gold piece is worth about $400. It's interesting to note that, in the early 1900s, one could by a nice dress suit with that $20 gold piece and today they still can get a nice dress suite for the value of that $20 gold piece or $400. So gold hasn't gotten more expensive, rather the purchasing power of the dollar has declined...dramatically, thanks to the Federal Reserve.

Ann Coulter speaks out...

Interesting article by Ann Coulter on the Kerry pick for vp, John Edwards.

From the link...

Despite the overwrought claims of Edwards' dazzling legal skills, winning jury verdicts in personal injury cases has nothing to do with legal talent and everything to do with getting the right cases - unless "talent" is taken to mean "having absolutely no shame." Edwards specialized in babies with cerebral palsy whom he claimed would have been spared the affliction if only the doctors had immediately performed Caesarean sections.

As a result of such lawsuits, there are now more than four times as many Caesarean sections as there were in 1970. But curiously, there has been no change in the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy. As the New York Times reported: "Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins." All those Caesareans have, however, increased the mother's risk of death, hemorrhage, infection, pulmonary embolism and Mendelson's syndrome.

WSC

A Primer - Part I

Over the next week or two during 's absence, I will try to share a topic that I think every American / Patriot needs to be aware of through a series of articles. I'll break the material up into smaller posts to make it more convenient for the reader to assimilate the information at their own pace, and also to give an opportunity to research the facts I provide as time permits. I hope you find this effort to be time well spent.

One of the laws of the Human Condition is that man must be productive in order to survive. Historically, this productivity has been measured in everything from sea shells to gold and just about every commodity in between. These commodities enabled productive man to barter or exchange his wealth for other things he desired.

The problem today is that our productivity is measured in U.S. Dollars, a currency printed at will by the Federal Reserve. Originally, the currency of the U.S. was gold and silver. With the introduction of the Federal Reserve in 1913, they established a paper currency that was redeemable in gold and silver which meant that one could take their dollars to the bank and exchange them for like value in gold or silver. Whether you were a foreigner or citizen of the US, the dollar was "as good as gold". In 1933, President Roosevelt changed that and made it illegal for US citizens to own gold.

The Bretton Woods Agreement of July 22, 1944 replaced gold and established the U.S. dollar as the new reserve currency. After all, since the U.S. had literally saved the world during World War II, and was the only country left standing with a healthy economy in the aftermath, it was reasoned that the U.S. dollar (which was fully backed by gold of course) could and should serve as the reserve currency of the world.

Then in 1971, France became aware that the U.S. was printing dollars with abandon so the began to redeem their dollars for gold per the Bretton Woods Agreements that the U.S. had signed. President Nixon realized that this would be catastrophic for the U.S. as at that rate of redemption, our gold reserves would quickly be depleted so he reneged on the Bretton Woods Agreement and "closed the gold window" which meant that foreigners could no longer redeem U.S. dollars for gold. In other words, they were stuck with paper dollars they had accumulated worth nothing more than the "good faith and credit of the U.S." no longer redeemable for gold but for goods and services provided by the issuer, the United States. We, and the rest of the world were, for perhaps the first time in history, on a complete fiat currency standard experiment. As a result, it would be instructive to view a chart of the volume of dollars that have been created since then with no real backing whatsoever as it is an almost vertical graph.

It might also be interesting to note that since 1971, we transitioned from a nation with the greatest trade surplus to one with the greatest trade deficit. This is not a coincidence.

So if the Federal Reserve can print dollars with no tie to redeemability to a true asset, then the measure of one's productivity is totally arbitrary and subject to the whim and will of the Federal Reserve. Also, the freedom to print the world's reserve currency is extremely fortunate for the U.S.(France referred to it as "exorbitant privilege") as we have become the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. In the words of Dire Straits, the U.S. is getting it's "money for nothing and its kicks for free".

Think about it...

This just in...

Well, it looks like I might have to diverge from my previous comments about the nature of my posts since I just became aware of this timely article that I felt should be passed on.

Congressman Ron Paul is one of the few members of Congress I have respect for. He is a true American Patriot and his decision to vote for or against an issue is based on its ability to pass the litmus test of the U.S. Constitution. Needless to say, he votes against the vast majority of bills presented in the House as they, in fact, have no constitutional basis whatsoever.

Click here for an important issue you might be interested in.

And check out the honorable congressman's websites at: www.house.gov/paul/ and www.house.gov/paul/tst/.

WSC

While is away...

Clearly it would be folly for me to attempt to maintain the level of excellence RLC contributes to viewpoint so instead I will post some articles that have more of an economic / financial flavor hoping to challenge the reader to consider important issues in these areas that are typically below the radar of the popular media.

Originally, I named the viewpoint website "Patriot". I thought this was a name that spoke to the content found at viewpoint. After some discussions with RLC, it was renamed "Point of View" (after all, it is his website), but it finally evolved into viewpoint. Unfortunately, development of the website was well under way by this time and I simply haven't had time to update the address of the URL to reflect the latest name "viewpoint" so the address of the URL contains "pov" for "Point of View". It's a small matter though as most people will simply bookmark the URL and click on the bookmark to visit us.

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that viewpoint is an extension of www.wscleary.com, an excellent example of shameless self-promotion, if I do say so myself. Seriously though, the website serves two important purposes for me. It enables me to learn the technology necessary to have an Internet presence and it enables me to use that knowledge to make personal areas of interest available on the Internet. As a result of my efforts, I can attribute several successful job interviews directly to this experience.

Among the pages at www.wscleary.com that reflect my interests over time are the PMZone, a set of web pages that would be of interest to anyone preparing for the Project Management Institute exam for certification. It provides a study section and a test simulator. Originally, I developed these pages to assist me in acquiring the PMI certification but I took on an assignment that made it impractical to pursue the certification because of time constraints.

The Gold Page reflects my interest in what is going on in our great country regarding the Federal Reserve, the US dollar and subsequent implications to the state of the Union.

I created The Guitar Page because of my interest in Classical Guitar and provide MP3 files of beautiful classical music for download.

And, lastly, I created viewpoint to give my brother, Richard, a forum that he can use to communicate his point of view regarding important issues of the day.

In the "Coming Soon" department, we plan to offer several new pages we hope will be of interest.

You may have noticed the "Other Websites" menu option at the left that takes you to a page of links to the websites of others we think you might enjoy. This is the first of three new pages.

We will also be rolling out a "Books" page that will contain links to recommended reading that are consistent with the topics presented at viewpoint.

I intend to add a link at the "Books" page recommending "Anything by E.W. Bullinger", a prolific writer of the 19th century. Two of his works I highly recommend are The Companion Bible which may very well be the most accurate version of the Bible available today, and his Commentary on Revelation which, among other things, provides a compelling case for the pre-tribulation rapture of the Church.

And finally, a "Downloads" page of links to documents in PDF format that Richard Cleary has written over the years. These can be viewed with any PDF reader such as Adobe Reader which is available for free.

Note that the viewpoint Feedback page may not be updated in RLC's absence but if you want to respond to one of my posts, feel free to email it to pobox@bellsouth.net and I will see that your comments get posted to the viewpoint Feedback page.

Stay tuned...

Good Choice for Veep:

That we may be of service to Senator Kerry in his ongoing search for a suitable vice-presidential candidate Viewpoint puts forward the name of...Al Gore. Gore has experience, name recognition, he was a journalist in Vietnam which gives him the cache of being familiar with war without the liabilities associated with actually having participated in it, and he would bring a little vivacity to offset Kerry's somnolence. He could also be counted on to be a raging bull as a campaigner given the chance to avenge his loss to Bush in the 2000 election. The fact that Republicans could be expected to capitalize on the fact that Gore sometimes tends to act as if he's lost his mind is a downside, but nobody's perfect. Sounds like an over-all good choice to us.

Voltaire, Call Your Office!

The 18th century French writer Voltaire is famous, inter alia, for having proclaimed what is perhaps the most well-known endorsement of free speech ever uttered: "I may not agree with what you say," he wrote, "but I will fight to the death for your right to say it." Sadly, this noble sentiment has not managed to penetrate the land of unbounded tolerance for all things morally and socially exotic but where speech is tolerated, apparently, only to the extent one says the approved things. No, we're not talking about New York or Los Angeles (although the day may not be far off when we will be). We're talking about Sweden, believe it or not:

Stockholm (ENI). A Swedish court has sentenced a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, Ake Green, to a month in prison, under a law against incitement, after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon. Soren Andersson, the president of the Swedish federation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (RFSL), said on hearing the sentence that religious freedom could never be used as a reason to offend people. "Therefore," he told journalists, "I cannot regard the sentence as an act of interference with freedom of religion." During a sermon in 2003, Green described homosexuality as "abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumour in the body of society".

This is what freedom of speech looks like in Sweden. Thank God for the first amendment.