Personal Generosity

All Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times wants for Christmas is for liberals, of which he is one, to be as generous with their own money as conservatives are with theirs. Kristoff has read Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares and has seemingly had his world shaken. As we've pointed out in our own discussion (see here and here) of Brooks' research, conservatives, who the liberal media delights in portraying as a bunch of cheapskates and tightwads, are in fact far more generous in giving to charity than are those who belong to the "party of compassion."

The difference is not just financial. Conservatives are much more generous with things like blood donations. For example, did you know that if liberals gave blood at the same rates as do conservatives our blood supply would increase by almost half?

Kristoff also dismisses the objection that conservatives are generally religious and religious people give a lot to churches which just use the money to build more impressive buildings:

According to Google's figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It's great to support the arts and education, but they're not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Kristoff might also have pointed out that much of the money given to churches is actually redirected to charities of one sort or another. Most of the charities in our local communities are sustained by contributions from churches.

At any rate, Kristoff provides a public service in disabusing the readership of the Times of the notion that to be liberal is to be more compassionate and generous than conservatives. The myth may make liberals feel good about themselves, but there's no empirical substance to it.

RLC

Compatibilism

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being coerced by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being coerced by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation would be for the materialist to simply accept determinism, but not opnly does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because if it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive. So most people want to hold on to libertarianism, but they can only do so by giving up materialism. It's only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow allows for human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

RLC

Materialism and Intentionality

In the course of his ongoing debate with Dr. Stephen Novella on the topic of dualism vs materialism, Michael Egnor elaborates on the concept of "intentionality." There are different ways to think of intentionality, but basically it's the aboutness or meaning we attach to things. Egnor argues that meaning is a property of mind, not of matter and that the fact that we experience intentionality is strong evidence that there's more to our cognitive apparatus than just our material brain.

Materialist Paul Churchland sums up the materialist view that there is no immaterial component to us, no mind, this way:

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process...there seems no need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances of properties into our theoretical accounting of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact.

For materialists of Churchland's stripe mind is only a word used to describe what matter (the brain) does. It's a word that describes the brain's function, like the word "photosynthesis" is a word that describes what green plants do. You won't find in a plant any photosynthesis (PHS), you'll only see chemical reactions occurring which we label PHS.

We are merely brains, Churchland believes, and our beliefs, hopes, and experiences (which comprise our intentionality) don't really exist at all except as chemical reactions in the brain. Your belief that you are reading this is simply a product of certain combinations of atoms, like the light given off when you strike a match, and if you had a different chemical reaction when you read these words you'd have a different belief.

Egnor says that the problem with this kind of materialism (called eliminative materialism) is that it's essentially self-refuting. How, he asks, can one believe that there are no beliefs?

If eliminative materialism is true, then a discussion about eliminative materialism is merely changing chemical gradients in the interlocutors' brains. Some materialists are willing to eliminate the mind in order to deal with intentionality. For these philosophers the brain is just a computational device, like a very special kind of computer.

But meaning is not a quality possessed by calculating devices like computers. Computers don't reflect upon what their computation is about. Egnor invites us to...

Consider a simple electronic calculator. It computes, in the sense that I can enter 2...+...3...= and I get ...5. It's amazingly accurate, fast, and reliable. The reason for its accuracy is that it employs a causal string of electronic events such that pushing the '2...+...3...=' buttons causes the event '5' on the little screen. Integrated circuits, all that stuff. Of course, the calculator doesn't think (really quick) "hmmm...two plus three is....hmmm...five!" There's no thinking at all. There isn't even any 'arithmetic' going on in the little calculator. There's just causal events, electrons bumping electrons and going through gates on a circuit, structured by the program to cause 5 on the little screen when 2...+...3...= is pushed. What's going on in the calculator is a mechanism, a series of causally effective material events.

Note that the actual meaning of the numbers and arithmetic operations doesn't really matter. My toddler can push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5, without any meaning to the computation at all. 5 comes up just because it is caused materially by the physical events. My cat could push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5....the computation is completely independent of meaning.

To illustrate the lack of intentionality or meaning in a computer John Searle constructed the problem which came to be known as the "Chinese Room." Searle's illustration is as effective answer to the idea that our mental processes are just computational events such as a computer performs:

Imagine that you go to China, and get a job there. You speak only English, and don't know a word of Chinese. You work in an information booth, in which Chinese people can write questions on a piece of paper and pass the question through a slot to you inside the booth. You of course have no idea what the question is, because you can't read Chinese. However, the Chinese guys that hired you have given you a book that has written, all in Chinese, any question that could be asked, and along with it, the answer corresponding to each question. You take the question written on the paper and search through the book, until you match the Chinese characters exactly. Then you copy the Chinese answer, and return to through the slot.

The Chinese person who asked you the question believes, quite understandably, that you understand Chinese, understood the question, and were smart enough to figure out the answer. And of course, that is true of the Chinese guys who wrote the book. But it most certainly is not true of you. You don't know Chinese, you don't know what question was asked, and you don't know what the answer was.

A Chinese person outside the booth would have believed that he was interacting with a person who understood his questions and provided good answers. But what you have done is, precisely, a computation. You have mechanically matched input to output, just as a computer program does, but you have added no meaning. You understand nothing. Only the minds of the guys who wrote the Chinese book have intrinsic intentionality. Computation-by-itself does not give rise to intentionality.

Egnor concludes:

Meaning is not inherent to computation, no matter how complex the computation. Material causation - silicon-based computation in an electronic calculator, or tedious illiterate computation in a booth in Beijing, or carbon-based computation in a living brain - does not give rise to intentionality. Matter ... does not give rise to intentionality. Intentionality - meaning - is the mark of the mind.

If there is something immaterial about us, like a mind, that fact raises a host of additional questions. Where does it come from? What's its relation to the physical brain? What laws does it obey? What happens to it when the body dies? Etc. No one knows the answers to these questions, indeed it's hard to imagine how they would even be investigated. At this point, however, it's enough of a task to determine whether there are good reasons to believe that such an immaterial substance, one that plays a role in human consciousness and cognition, actually exists.

RLC

Renewal in London

Christianity is experiencing a renascence of sorts in London, long regarded as one of the most secular places in all of Britain. The focus of this renewal is an Anglican church in the upscale Kensington district called Holy Trinity Brompton which boasts a membership of 4000 and whose congregation is comprised of some of the wealthiest and best educated among London's citizens. These folks are coming to Brompton because they've realized that money and learning don't and can't provide the answers to life's deepest questions.

TIME has the story here.

RLC

Sudden Concern Over Qualifications

Couldn't Congressman Ackerman have said almost everything he says about Caroline Kennedy's lack of qualifications for a Senate seat about Barack Obama's qualifications to be president? Why do those who enthusiastically supported a blank sheet like Obama in his quest for the presidency suddenly wax all principled and punctilious about qualifications when Caroline Kennedy expresses an interest in being appointed to a vacant position? Just wondering.

RLC

Penn Jillette

Magician Penn Jillette is an atheist who has not been shy over the years in announcing his unbelief which makes this video on Breitbart quite remarkable. There is much in these few minutes that Christians and atheists would both do well to heed, especially starting at about the three minute mark:

RLC

Have Happy Friends

A brief article at Edge by two researchers named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler claims that our happiness is not only influenced by those around us but also by those who reside at up to three degrees of separation from us:

We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal that addressed these questions. We studied 4,739 people followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the famous Framingham Heart Study. These individuals were embedded in a larger network of 12,067 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends-that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.

If this is true then our happiness must also affect the happiness of thousands of people we don't even know. It's a phenomenon that ripples across entire societies.

RLC

Legal Anachronisms

Critics of the current administration have faulted the President for disregarding international law as it pertains to the treatment of captured enemy combatants and terrorists, but Clifford May, citing a National Review article by Andrew McCarthy (only available by subscription), argues that the Geneva Conventions were designed for a world that no longer exists. He maintains that modern terrorism makes the Geneva accords, at least as they are applied to modern terrorists, obsolete and irrelevant.

Here's the heart of May's column:

Andrew C. McCarthy - director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies - writes what may be the definitive rebuttal of the now dominant narrative that the Bush administration violated international law and fundamental morality by not giving captured terrorists "the privileges the Geneva Conventions grant to honorable combatants."

He notes that what we short-handedly call the war on terrorism is complicated by the fact that the existing system of laws and treaties were designed with conventional conflicts in mind. "The animating idea of the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949 after the carnage of two world wars, was to civilize warfare," he writes. "Belligerents opted into the system by conduct" - that is, by obeying the laws of armed conflict.

But members of such groups as al-Qaeda (including al-Qaeda in Iraq), Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas routinely and egregiously violate the laws of war - for example, by targeting civilians, hiding among civilians, not wearing uniforms, and not carrying their weapons openly.

McCarthy, a former U.S. government terrorist prosecutor, also notes that before Bush became president, both the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against giving such "unlawful combatants" the status of POWs. Both approved President Ronald Reagan's 1987 decision not to sign "Protocol I," an addendum to Geneva specifically designed to extend to terrorists the Conventions' prohibition against coercive interrogations.

The Geneva Conventions are treaties, and treaties apply only to states that have signed them. You can't conclude they were meant to benefit non-state terrorist organizations unless you also believe there is no meaningful distinction between al-Qaeda and the French Resistance (as some critics of the Bush administration do indeed insist).

McCarthy elaborates: "[T]errorists cannot opt into Geneva. They fall outside because, by definition, they reject its minimum humanitarian requirements. Affording them Geneva's benefits rewards their savagery and undermines the system's civilizing objectives."

It is absurd to suggest that America can prevail in a war against terrorists by prosecuting them after they carry out attacks in which they intend to die. A rational government, conscious of its duty to protect the population, must attempt to prevent and pre-empt terrorists from completing their missions. That requires gathering solid, actionable intelligence.

"The best source of such intelligence is the interrogation of captured terrorists," McCarthy writes. "Applying the steep Geneva interrogation restrictions reserved for honorable combatants would be suicidal: Life-saving intelligence would be lost and no reciprocal benefit achieved for captured Americans, whom terrorists would torture and kill in any event."

What I find most regrettable about much of the criticism of the Bush administration's handling of detainees is the self-righteous denunciations of the use of waterboarding, which causes no lasting harm to the subject, in order to extract information that might save American lives. I think every person who criticizes even the limited use of what are euphemistically referred to as "harsh measures" ought to be asked whether they would prohibit waterboarding if they had a son or daughter whose life would be saved if the technique were employed but lost if it weren't. I wonder how many of the critics would still maintain that it's use is "deeply immoral." How many of them would be willing to tell their loved ones that they would rather they be dead than that their lives be saved by the use of technique from which a terrorist would walk away none the worse for the experience?

RLC

Overview of the Bush Presidency

For those interested in such things the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have conducted a very thorough survey of public opinion on the Bush presidency. The results are discussed here.

One of the things that strikes me as peculiar about the survey is the number of people who refuse to credit Bush policies with having kept us safe from a second terror attack after 9/11. Fully 50% of Democrats said that Bush policies either did not do much or did nothing at all to protect us from terrorist attacks. I wonder what reason these people would give for why we haven't been hit again. Do they think that the Islamist extremists have just lost interest?

Another oddity is that in late April 2008, just 37% expressed a favorable view of the federal government, about half of the percentage of five years earlier, and yet by comfortable margins we elected to office the party most likely to give us a lot more federal government. Go figure.

One more thought on the survey. I think it almost politically impossible that Bush could be a popular president because to achieve popularity one has to be either a consistent conservative or a consistent liberal. Bush was neither. He was hated by liberals despite the fact that he did more to advance liberal ideas on helping the poor and oppressed and expanding government programs than did any Democrat president since FDR. Yet the left despised him because of the war and perhaps because of his Supreme Court appointments. Conservatives supported him for precisely those two reasons (plus his tax cuts) but were dismayed by all the things liberals should love him for. Consequently, because he did too much that people in both groups disliked, and because he did such a poor job of selling and defending his policies, few people on either side think of him as a good president.

Anyway, there's lots of data in the report to ponder and pore over. Most of the country, not surprisingly, thinks that Bush will be remembered as a bad president. Despite my frustration with some of what he hasn't done, I just don't see this, but time will tell.

RLC

Lost Opportunity

By now most readers will have heard of the sign placed by atheists next to a Nativity scene outside the legislative building in Olympia, Washington on which appeared this statement:

"At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

Okay. It seemed a little rude, perhaps, to place it next to a Nativity scene, but what's noteworthy about it isn't so much the message, but the reaction to it. People are outraged. They're calling the sign "hateful." They demanded that the governor of Washington have it removed. Somebody even stole it.

I think all of this suggests an insecurity concerning the beliefs of those who are miffed by the sign, and, maybe more importantly, it squanders an opportunity. Those who erected the sign are, no doubt inadvertently, offering Christians an opening to engage in a dialogue on the merits of the claims made on the sign and to show the public that each of them is either false or at least a matter of the atheist's own faith commitment to naturalism.

I think it would be wonderful if intelligent Christians posted themselves by the sign and invited passersby to consider what the world would be like were those claims widely believed to be true and engage skeptics in polite dialogue about them. Christians should use the sign as a springboard for writing well-reasoned pieces to the local papers explaining the evidence for God's existence and how Christianity, so far from being an enslaving force, has been a force for liberation throughout history, how so far from hardening hearts, it has been the greatest source of compassionate outreach to the poor, the sick and the oppressed throughout the last two thousand years. Instead of demanding that the atheists be denied the freedom to express their views Christians should seize the opportunity to show the intellectual superiority of their own view and the inadequacies of the atheist position.

Unfortunately, this takes confidence, learning, and effort so perhaps it's easier to simply demand that the other side just shut up. At least that's what a lot of people have chosen to do, and a good opportunity to defend the faith has been allowed to slip away.

RLC

Defeating the IED

American war casualties have not been much in the news lately due largely to a massive drop-off in the effectiveness of the insurgents' favorite weapon, the improvised explosive device (IED). A couple of articles at Strategy Page explain how coalition forces have managed to neutralize this devastating killer in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It turns out that it's being done largely by guys sitting at computers doing something called pattern analysis. You can read about it here and here.

RLC

How to Rehabilitate an Incorrigible Rapist

If those who would take away a citizen's right to bear arms had their way this plucky 57 year-old woman might be dead tonight:

Imagine Mr. Preyer's surprise when he broke through the door and found his intended victim confronting him with a shotgun. One wonders how many other women she saved from Mr. Preyer's predations. As it is she's lucky to be living in a state where the D.A. isn't prosecuting her for homicide. For a mind-boggling example of self-defense landing the intended victim in jail check out this unbelievable story.

AllahPundit at Hot Air mentions that Mr. Preyer had been married for four months and had eight children. Fast work.

RLC

Career Choice

Not sure what career to pursue? Forbes magazine lists the six or seven fields projected to add the most jobs over the next ten years.

Unfortunately, this study was done before our economy went into recession so that might effect the results somewhat. Nevertheless, those who are struggling to settle upon a college major or career pathway might find the article helpful.

RLC

White Privilege

I recently received a beautiful e-mail (posted on our Feedback page), from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have so little something of the abundance with which she is blessed. Her wish to help others is just wonderful, and I am deeply impressed with this young woman's commitment to the poor and marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is a common sentiment on campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She feels, or at least seems to feel, that part of her obligation to help the poor is a result of the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege." I know students are encouraged by liberal professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of undeserved privilege, but to tell the truth I think my colleagues are just plain wrong about this. The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that is too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to my student I tried to explain why I think the idea of white privilege is actually a derogation of the choices and sacrifices made by our grandparents, parents, and ourselves:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's richest blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a couple of reasons. First, your parents and grandparents worked very hard, sometimes 12 or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education. Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about. Indeed, I think it diminishes their effort to think of your status as a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

The second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high standards through your teen years, you had the wisdom to not squander the opportunities you were given.

None of this is a result of your race. I know that a lot of instructors on campus think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was to some extent true historically, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been denied opportunity in this country by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years. If people in this country languish in poverty it is because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about black privilege or brown privilege. Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard the parents of those people worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world. Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back" but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others become what you are.

RLC

More on the Egnor/Novella Debate

Michael Egnor, a substance dualist, finds himself in the midst of a fascinating debate with materialist neuroscientist Steven Novella.

Substance dualists hold that the world is reducible to at least two fundamental substances: mind and matter. Materialists belive that everything is reducible to matter and that there is no such thing as mental substance.

Novella asserts that Egnor's view that mind is an immaterial entity that plays a role in cognition and consciousness has been discredited by scientific advances in neuroscience:

[Egnor] fails to recognize that this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena...[a]s our knowledge of brain function increases, it is squeezing out any role for a non-material ghost in the machine. A non-material cause of mind is...unnecessary...

Novella believes that mind is just a word that we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach. Here is part of Egnor's reply:

There are six properties generally agreed to constitute the essence of mental states: intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, and free will. Each of these properties of the mind shares a common characteristic - subjectivity, what philosopher David Chalmers has called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. The 'easy problems' of consciousness are the kinds of problems that neuroscientists routinely deal with; for example, the determination as to which neurotransmitters in the brainstem are associated with behavioral arousal. These are 'easy' because they're tractable, although they can obviously involve some very challenging science. The Hard Problem is something entirely different; it is the problem of subjective experience, of why we are subjects, and not just objects. Why do we experience things?

Philosopher Joseph Levine has termed this epistemological gap between our subjective experience and our inability to explain it using a materialistic understanding of nature the "Explanatory Gap." Levine succinctly observes that we lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical.

The dispute comes down to this question: How can subjectivity be explained by objective matter? Subjective experience is the central dilemma in the mind-brain problem. Matter, even brain matter, has third-person existence; it's a 'thing.' We have first-person existence; each of us is an 'I,' not just a thing. How can objective matter fully account for subjective experience? If matter is the complete cause of the mind, how is it that none of the six salient properties of the mind is a property of matter? How exactly does a clump of protein, carbohydrates, and lipids (a neuron) give rise to meaning or to first person experience - using the example of pain, not merely the behavior associated with pain and the reflexes and neural correlates of pain, but the experience of it?

The mind's salient properties are all first-person, not third-person. Not a single first-person property of the mind - not intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, nor free will - is a known property of matter. No one has ever demonstrated a law-like dependence of any subjective property of the mind on any objective property of matter. How could we establish such a scientific relationship? A differential equation quantitatively relating intentionality to intracellular calcium?

Egnor poses a tough challenge to the materialist. How does matter convert photons of energy into the experience of red? How does matter convert vibrations of molecules in air to the experience of sound? Before the materialist can claim victory he needs to be able to give a plausible explanation of how material substance can give rise to the phenomena of subjective experience. Without such an explanation all claims that the issue has been settled seem grossly premature.

RLC

Wright Out, Warren In

Well, this is an interesting development. Barack Obama has selected Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration. I wonder who's going to be more confused by this, the evangelical right who voted heavily against Obama because he stands for many of the things Warren opposes, and because when they look at Obama they see Jeremiah Wright, or the left which put Obama in a position to be elected President and who sees Warren as the reincarnation of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society.

As of last report, evangelicals were still working through their confusion over what to make of this strange turn of events, but the left has lost no time in expressing their disappointment and outrage.

The Swamp has the immediate reaction of People for the American Way and they're definitely not happy. Ben Smith at Politico says that the gay and lesbian community is furious at Obama over the selection of Warren.

Barack Obama may, in the minds of some of his most ardent supporters, go from messiah to apostate even before he takes office. Of course, this might all be a political ploy to lull Christian conservatives into a sense of complacency, but we can certainly hope that it signals something a lot more significant. Maybe when Obama promised us hope during the campaign what he meant was that it was conservatives who should have hope. Right now liberals are wondering how they can still cling to the tatters of the hope that inspired them during the election.

The rather minor Warren appointment comes on the heels of much more major disappointments to the left. Obama retained Bush's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, appointed the somewhat hawkish Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State, and chose retired Marine corps general James Jones to be National Security Advisor.

From the perspective of the left this represents very little change and offers very little hope. Of course, this could all change after January 20th. We'll see.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Repeat Offenders

The same folks who sell Christmas gift certificates that can be used to pay for an abortion have been found in flagrante delicto against Indiana state law not once but twice by the Mona Lisa Project. The MLP is the work of a pair of college students who've gone undercover into abortion clinics across the country with one of them posing as a thirteen year-old girl who's conceived a child with her fictitious thirty-one year-old boyfriend. The girls secretly film their encounters with PP counselors and others and have released two of the videos so far. They're pretty damning.

The counselors in both of the Indiana tapes flout the law that requires them to report knowledge of statutory rape and encourage the girl to cross state lines to get an abortion so that her mother won't find out about it. Here's the tape of their second visit:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has much more on MLP's unfolding expos�. It'll be interesting to see if Indiana is going to prosecute Planned Parenthood. In my opinion, the way MLP is doing this, dropping the videos into the public domain at intervals rather than all at once, is going to make it harder for the authorities to just ignore it until it blows over. The more of these videos that are released, and the more widespread the abuses appear to be, if in fact they are, the harder it will be to cover it up and to contain public outrage. The harder it will also be for our legislators to continue to fund PP to the tune of $330 million of your tax dollars every year.

It's almost amusing that these expos�s come on the heels of last spring's hoax in which PP personnel were taped as they clearly encouraged a donation that would go specifically toward aborting black children because we already have "too many of them". What an organization.

RLC

Bumble Had it Right

Kitty Genovese was a 1964 New York City murder victim whose calls for help were heard by dozens of people only a few of whom responded by calling the police. Even though the apparent lack of response was overblown by the media, subsequent psychological studies showed there is indeed something called a "bystander effect" in which people will often refuse to involve themselves in situations where others are in danger.

Whether this is true of people or not, it certainly seems that the cries of the long-suffering Zimbabwean people in Africa have gone pretty much ignored by their neighbors in Africa and around the world.

The African countries of Sudan and Zimbabwe (among others) are festering boils of human cruelty and wretchedness that need to be lanced. There's evidence that other African leaders may finally be screwing up the moral courage to condemn Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe for the disaster he has inflicted on that once beautiful land but not much evidence that anyone in the West is actually going to do anything substantive about it if they don't. FrontPagemag lays out the awful facts:

The 84-year-old Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since the country achieved independence from Britain in 1980. In that time, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) has gone from one of Africa's most admired and successful nations to a failed state of enormous proportions. Now, with a humanitarian crisis raging inside the country, pressure from Africa and abroad is mounting for Mugabe to end his tyrannical reign and spare his country from further misery.

International pressure on Mugabe is long overdue. Zimbabwe's inflation rate is an unfathomable 231 million percent, while unemployment is above 80 percent. Everyone from human-rights activists to opposition-party leaders are routinely abducted and murdered. Most pressingly, a cholera epidemic is ravaging the country. The latest World Health Organization report find 14,ooo cases of cholera infection, and some 800 dead, though some critics call those numbers far too low; meanwhile, millions of sick and impoverished Zimbabwean refugees are flooding into neighboring countries. The UN estimates that this particular outbreak will ultimately kill one in ten Zimbabweans.

Even though some African leaders such as the much respected Desmond Tutu have all but called for African military intervention, other voices are more timid, cautioning against outside involvement that would stir a backlash in the region against "democracy":

The African response, moreover, still leaves much to be desired. Despite the newfound willingness of some African leaders to criticize Mugabe, some African nations are hurriedly distancing themselves from Tutu and Odinga's calls for Mugabe's resignation. Dr. Roger Bate, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is bluntly pessimistic that other African nations will follow through on their calls for Mugabe's overthrow. There is "no chance at all," says Bate, pointing out that many of Mugabe's critics have backtracked since last week's statements, including South Africa's Jacob Zuma. This is unfortunate, because if the African Union or South Africa and other neighboring states did force Mugabe out that "could have a positive effect, driving similar despotic leaders to seek elections and leave power peacefully."

By contrast, foreign [i.e. non-African] intervention to oust Mugabe could have a destabilizing effect. Bate points out that any military intervention on the part of the UN, especially one that involves American or British troops, could "encourage a backlash against democracy." Bate speculates that at some stage during such an incursion, members of the Zimbabwean army would back a breakaway faction of Mugabe's party, who would then "form some kind of power share government in exchange for aid from the West or China."

In the "old days" before we became a kinder, gentler nation much more sensitive to what the rest of the world thought of us, this situation would have been expeditiously handled by simply sending the CIA in to covertly depose the villain. Of course, we can't do that sort of thing nowadays because it would violate international law. So, we sit by and watch helplessly as perhaps millions of people die in agony and misery in order to avoid giving offense to words on paper. When the law protects tyrants and permits genocide then, as Dickens has Mr. Bumble observe in Oliver Twist, the law is an ass.

RLC

Seven Questions

John Fund suggests that had the media spent only half as much energy and resources looking into Obama's connections to Chicago's political machine as they did investigating Sarah Palin we might not have to be addressing possible scandal even before the new President has been inaugurated. Unfortunately, our major media were heavily invested in getting Obama coronated so actually investigating him was out of the question.

Now suspicions are being raised about his connection to the seamy Chicago political scene and the most transparent administration in history has suddenly assumed a Nixonian opacity. Politico states that there are at least seven questions Obama's team needs to answer, and answer soon, if their inauguration is to avoid the odor of corruption.

The seven questions follow. Their rationales can be read at Politico:

1 - Did you communicate directly or indirectly with Blagojevich about picking your replacement in the U.S. Senate?

2 - Why didn't you or someone on your team correct your close adviser David Axelrod when he said you had spoken to Blagojevich about picking your replacement?

3 - When did you learn the investigation involved Blagojevich's alleged efforts to 'sell' your Senate seat, or of the governor's impending arrest?

4 - Did you or anyone close to you contact the FBI or U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald about Blagojevich's alleged efforts to sell your Senate seat to the highest bidder?

5 - Did federal investigators interview you or anyone close to you in the investigation?

6 - When did you and Blagojevich last speak and about what?

7 - Do you regret supporting Blagojevich?

Obama could stonewall, of course, but that would hardly represent the sort of change most of his admirers voted for him to bring to Washington. We'll see by the end of next Wednesday whether Obama is going to really be a different kind of politician or if he's going to be just more of what Chicago often produces.

RLC

Sounds Like a Plan

Bankruptcy is the best option for the Big 3 auto manufacturers and law professor Todd Zywicki explains why in a Wall Street Journal column. He argues that management, labor, and politicians each oppose bankruptcy for all the wrong reasons.

The heart of Zywicki's brief is this:

Chapter 11 exists to allow [a corporation] to continue in business while reorganizing. Reorganization arose in the late 19th century when creditors of railroads unable to meet their debt obligations threatened to tear up their tracks, melt them down, and sell the steel as scrap. But innovative judges, lawyers and businessmen recognized that creditors would collect more if they all agreed to reduce their claims and keep the railroads running and producing revenues to pay them off. The same logic animates Chapter 11 today.

General Motors [is] ... in need of reorganization not liquidation. It needs to shed labor contracts, retirement contracts, and modernize its distribution systems by closing many dealerships. This will give rise to many current and future liabilities that may be worked out in bankruptcy. It may need new management as well. Bankruptcy provides an opportunity to do all that. Consumers have little to fear. Reorganization will pare the weakest dealers while strengthening those who remain.

So why do the Detroit Three managements and the UAW insist that "bankruptcy is not an option"? Perhaps because of the pain that would be inflicted upon both.

The bankruptcy code places severe limitations on the compensation that can be paid to a manager unless there is a "bona fide job offer from another business at the same or greater rate of compensation." Given the dismal performance of the Detroit Three in recent years, it seems unlikely that their senior management will be highly coveted on the open market. Incumbent management is also likely to find its prospects for continued employment less-secure.

Chapter 11 also provides a mechanism for forcing UAW workers to take further pay cuts, reduce their gold-plated health and retirement benefits, and overcome their cumbersome union work rules....

Those Washington politicians who repeat the mantra that "bankruptcy is not an option" probably do so because they want to use free taxpayer money to bribe Detroit into manufacturing the green cars favored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, rather than those cars American consumers want to buy. A Chapter 11 filing would remove these politicians' leverage, thus explaining their desperation to avoid a bankruptcy.

So, if Zywicki is correct, management doesn't want bankruptcy because it will limit their compensation. Labor doesn't want bankruptcy because they'll be forced to renegotiate their ridiculous work rules and their lucrative benefit packages. Politicians, particularly Democrats, don't want bankruptcy because they're in bed with labor and because they see a bailout as providing a lever to force auto makers to make the cars they want rather than what the American car buyer wants.

Sounds to me like bankruptcy has a lot to recommend it.

RLC

The Multiverse and the Razor

We have from time to time noted that theories of a multiverse suffer from being in stark conflict with the law of parsimony. This is the law that tells us that given several competing explanations for some phenomenon, the simplest explanation that's compatible with the known facts is to be preferred.

Evidently, a commenter at Uncommon Descent has opined that the multiverse theory, the idea that there are, besides our own world, an infinity of universes exhibiting an infinity of laws and parameters, is not incompatible with the law of parsimony. I find this hard to accept, as does Barry Arrington. He explains his reasons here.

Arrington doesn't explain his objection quite as thoroughly as a reader unfamiliar with the multiverse concept might like, but what he's getting at is that any theory that multiplies entities to infinity in order to explain the existence of the unimaginable precision of the fine-tuning of this world is by definition unparsimonious. This is especially true given that there's no evidence of any other universes, much less an infinity of them. All we know is that some versions of string theory allow for them, but we don't even know if string theory is true.

Since the alternative theory is that there is just one world, the world of our experience and the only world we have evidence for, it would seem that that is the simplest hypothesis that fits all the facts and it really is hard to understand how some people justify thinking otherwise.

Anyway, Arrington's post gives us, besides us a bit of unnecessary hyperventilation, a helpful and succinct overview of the law of parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, and a little background on William of Ockham himself.

Check it out.

RLC

Plan B

The U.S. and Britain have urged India not to go to war with Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks so, according to this report at DEBKAfile, New Delhi has developed a plan B. They've solicited help from Israel to train commandos in quick in/out strikes against terrorist centers and camps in several Pakistani regions. Condaleeza Rice has apparently given tacit approval for such reprisals and the Israelis are currently training the Indian forces.

NATO forces are waging war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in northwest Pakistan and now India will be waging war against various Pakistani terror groups in the southeast. How long can the government in Islamabad ignore all this and still remain stable? At what point does Pakistan have to make a decision to either be a fully committed partner in the war on terror or to side completely with the terrorists? The strip of middle-ground they've tried to occupy for the last ten years is growing increasingly narrow.

RLC

Intellectual Honesty

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest. In a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Dishonesty Mike Gene lists ten good rules to follow when participating with others in an exchange of ideas.

Here are three of the ten with his explanation:

Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology likewise have great difficulty admitting to being wrong, as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Dishonesty and have them posted over my computer. Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

RLC

Vindication

Bill shares this video of economist Peter Schiff being made the object of scorn and derision two years ago by cable talk colleagues for predicting exactly what has come to pass in our economy. I hope Obama appoints this guy as one of his economic advisors. I also wonder how much money his antagonists have lost since those financial markets they were so high on collapsed.

I wonder if Mr. Schiff has this video playing in a continuous loop in his home and office. I hope he mailed a copy of it to each of the pompous critics he appeared on these talk shows with. In a just world those shows would play this clip every night. As it is few will remember how right poor Mr. Schiff was and how terribly and foolishly wrong his detractors were.

RLC

Obama's Prescription for Nuclear War

There's not much confidence in this little corner of the blogosphere in Barack Obama's ability to launch a successful foreign policy, and this story in Haaretz does little to bolster our sagging hopes that we might be underestimating the incoming President:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's administration will offer Israel a "nuclear umbrella" against the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, a well-placed American source said earlier this week. The source, who is close to the new administration, said the U.S. will declare that an attack on Israel by Tehran would result in a devastating U.S. nuclear response against Iran.

But America's nuclear guarantee to Israel could also be interpreted as a sign the U.S. believes Iran will eventually acquire nuclear arms.

What this seems to mean is that Obama will do little of consequence to prevent an Iran determined to develop nuclear weapons from succeeding. His policy appears to be to leave himself with only one option if Iran employs its weapons against Israel, as it has strongly indicated it will: nuclear war. This strikes most sober observers as a strategy right out of Dr. Strangelove.

It can be summarized this way: Use diplomatic means and sanctions to deter Iran from building nukes, but this will fail, so threaten Iran with nuclear war - which, for religious reasons, they welcome - if they use their nukes against Israel, which, they have assured us, they will.

Of course, to be effective as a deterrent the threat has to be credible, and Iran knows it won't be. Once the Iranian mullahs have nukes they could simply respond to Obama's bluster by informing Washington that nuclear bombs have been smuggled into America and will be detonated in several major cities in the event of an attack on Iran. Whether such bombs have in fact been planted in our cities won't matter. We'd have to assume they were, and there'd be very little enthusiasm in this country for trading Chicago, L.A., and New York for Tehran just because Israel had been destroyed.

Another gambit the Iranians could employ to defuse the threat of American retaliation against Tehran for an attack on Israel would be to send a nuclear missile aboard a ship off our coast and detonate the missile a couple of hundred miles high over Kansas. The resulting electro-magnetic pulse would destroy the United States as a nation, driving us back to the 19th century and creating utter chaos in our social fabric (Use our search feature (search EMP) to view previous posts on the effects such a blast would have).

Given the Iranian options, Obama's threat to nuke Tehran if Iran uses nuclear force against Israel seems either naive or dumb.

To make matters worse, Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, not only wants to place a "nuclear umbrella" over Israel she wants to extend it to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states as well:

Clinton also proposed that the American nuclear umbrella be extended to other countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, if they agree to relinquish their own nuclear ambitions.

Is this administration serious? Who in their right mind would be willing to risk any American city just because Riyadh has been destroyed? Most Americans would regard an attack on Saudi Arabia, the spawning ground of most of the 9/11 terrorists, as condign justice. They certainly wouldn't think we should risk an EMP strike to avenge the deaths of the same people who had been squeezing us at the gas pumps until just last month.

It would be far wiser to avoid all this empty posturing by preventing Iran, by whatever means necessary, from getting nuclear weapons in the first place, but nowhere in the article is this viewed as an option. Ironically, the Obama team seems to have no appetite for the use of military force unless it's catastrophic force.

Meanwhile, our major media seems utterly uninterested in this problem. We're too busy being titillated by reports of scandal in Illinois and the discovery of a murdered child's bones in Florida to bother ourselves with debating how best to avoid nuclear war.

RLC

Fantasy World

The system in this video, passed along by Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Notes, is a good metaphor for the cellular machinery that operates in every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies, and it illustrates nicely the difference between Intelligent Design theorists and Darwinians. IDers would recognize that the sequence of events in the system evinces intelligent conceptualization and engineering. The Darwinians would say that given random mutation, natural selection, chance and enough time, this sort of thing could have developed on its own, and, indeed, has developed on its own billions, if not trillions, of times in living things throughout the evolutionary past.

Maybe a system like this could have developed on its own through purely physical processes with no intelligent input, but if experience rather than mere logical possibility is to be our guide, we have to admit that whenever metal parts are left to the forces of nature, they invariably wind up as scattered rust. Darwinian materialists chide theists for believing in the existence of a divine mind, but one has to wonder which belief is the more fantastic - that a biological system similar to that portrayed in the ad could have happened by accident or that such systems were designed intentionally by intelligent agents.

RLC

A Religious Case for Gay Marriage

The recent issue of Newsweek brings with it a polemic by Lisa Miller urging religious people to drop their opposition to gay marriage. Now there may be reasons out there why Christians and others should end their insistence that marriage remain a union of one man and one woman, but, if so, they've eluded Ms Miller. Her argument is largely irrelevant to the case she wishes to make.

For example, she dismisses Old Testament prohibitions of homosexual sex on the basis that the O.T. prohibited a lot of stuff we don't prohibit today, which is true enough, but then one could make the same argument for tolerating murder. Just because some O.T. prescriptions are not deemed appropriate today (e.g. stoning adulterers, etc.) it doesn't follow that none are.

If this were Ms Miller's only logical lapse perhaps we might simply avert our eyes to avoid adding to her embarrassment, but almost every paragraph of her essay is replete with non-sequiturs and other logical solecisms. Indeed, she seems almost relentless in her determination to offend the basic principles of rational thought. She struggles to derive from assertions like, Jesus wasn't married nor ever mentioned homosexuality, gay marriage is not a term found in the Bible, and Paul had more to say about divorce than about homosexuality, that therefore homosexuality is morally unproblematic.

Yet abortion and euthanasia are never mentioned in the Bible but they're hardly unproblematic. Jesus never mentions child abuse or slavery either, but it doesn't follow that therefore we should feel free to embrace these behaviors today.

Reminding us that scripture is full of instances of polygamy and divorce, Ms Miller avers that the Bible isn't a very good source for instruction on marriage, as if the fact that the Bible recounts the bad behavior of the people who appear in it somehow means that it can't be trusted to offer good rules for living. It's a bit like trying to argue that because the Bible tells us how the poor were often oppressed, we shouldn't attach too much importance to its adjurations to care for the poor and the widow.

She then dismisses Paul's teaching on homosexuality by noting that since a lot of Christians seem to ignore his appeals to shun divorce they may as well ignore his sanctions against gay sex as well. Surely, this woman needs to ask her editor why he let her sound so silly. Are we to assume that because some Christians ignore Jesus' teaching on turning the other cheek that they ought to ignore his teaching on showing compassion to the poor also?

Ms Miller tells us that:

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who were inflamed with "lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity, debauchery.

The term "progressive" should alert us to impending danger and indeed it follows close upon. Paul's condemnations of homosexuality, we are told, are really condemnations not of homoerotic sex but of promiscuous, violent, self-delusional sex. But this puts words in Paul's mouth that aren't there, as anyone who actually reads what Paul wrote on the matter (Romans 1: 18-32, I Cor. 6: 9,10) can see.

She then adds this graph:

In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all, " Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God."

Mr. Elliott is projecting what he wishes Paul were saying onto what Paul actually wrote. Paul is including homosexuality in a list of sins like adultery and fornication. He doesn't say that it's only promiscuous or violent homosexuals who are transgressing the law, just as he doesn't say that it's only violent adulterers who are sinning. Paul's teaching on homosexuality is that, like adultery, it's a perversion of God's intention for sex just as divorce is a perversion of God's intention for marriage.

"The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own," Ms Miller continues, "that it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours."

This, of course, is the standard liberal view of any document that constrains behavior. They say the same thing about the Constitution. It's true that some Biblical rules are culturally conditioned, but there's no reason to think that proscriptions concerning homosexuality are among them. After all, what is different about the modern era's thinking on homosexuality from that of Paul's day? In both eras religious people think it wrong and secular elites don't.

Ms Miller tries her luck with a few other arguments which emerge equally stillborn. She suggests, for example, that because David and Jonathan had a deep love for each other that therefore homosexuality is okay, as if a strong feeling of affection between men somehow not only implies homoerotic sex but validates it as well.

She asserts that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was unconventional and draws from this support for her conclusion that we should therefore embrace other unconventional forms of marriage, like marriage between people of the same gender.

In other words, in Ms. Miller's thinking, the fact that one kind of unconventionality is acceptable, means that all kinds of unconventionality should be acceptable. Would Ms Miller extend her logic to include incestuous or group marriages or other unconventional unions like marrying one's pets? If not, why not?

She also states that the Bible doesn't mention sex between women, but this is correct, if it is correct, only in the technical sense that the Bible never uses the phrase "sex between women." Any fair reader of Romans 1:24-27, however, would conclude that sex between women is exactly what Paul is deploring in that passage.

She argues that since "the Bible was all about inclusion, reaching out to outcasts, togetherness and community" those principles provide warrant for accepting gay marriage, but again her conclusion doesn't follow. The principle of inclusiveness and community provides warrant for reaching out to gays, but it doesn't provide warrant for accepting what gays do any more than reaching out to thieves, alcoholics, drug abusers or prostitutes provides warrant for accepting what they do.

She goes on to cite the fact that we're all God's children, made in his likeness and image, and insists that to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is thus exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color, but Ms Miller clearly hasn't thought this through.

Does she really think that denying the sacrament to someone who has a sexual orientation toward promiscuous behavior, or toward young boys, and consequently acts upon his desires is the same as denying the sacrament to someone based on his skin color? Ms Miller seems to believe that just because we're made in God's image whatever we do sexually is okay. She also seems to think that homosexual behavior is genetically determined just like one's race, but there's no conclusive evidence that this is so. It may be that there's a genetic disposition toward homosexuality but that doesn't mean that homosexual behavior is determined any more than a genetic disposition toward violence or alcoholism preordains that one will be violent or alcoholic.

A priest friend of Ms Miller's believes that if Jesus were alive today (an odd hypothetical for a priest, I should think), he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad."

No doubt Jesus would reach out to them, but not because they were gays and lesbians but because they were lonely and sad. Moreover, he would urge them, like the woman at the well, the alcoholic, drug addict, the compulsive gambler and everyone else wrestling with some disordered element in their nature to fight to get their life in line with God's will for it. I seriously doubt that he would say that we should celebrate alcoholism just so the alcoholic feels less lonely and more accepted and so that we can all feel warm, liberal and tolerant.

RLC

Softball

Why Chris Matthews' show on MSNBC isn't laughed to scorn just for the absurdity of its name is one of the peculiar mysteries of this political year. The last thing Matthews does with his guests is play "Hardball", unless, of course, the guest is a Republican. On last night's show his guest was Bill Ayers and all Matthews did was pitch marshmallows at him. Watching it, I couldn't help feel that Ayers may have been giving Matthews one of those tingly feelings he's become famous for:

Here's a man whose wife celebrated Charles Manson's murders, was herself implicated in the murder of two policemen, and who is a friend of Michelle Obama. He's a man whose organization (and his wife) set fire to the house of the judge presiding over the trial of black panthers while the judge's wife and young son were inside. He's a man whose organization blinded an innocent man with acid at JFK airport and which included people who spoke blithely of executing as many as 25 million Americans if their revolution ever proved successful. He's a man who as late as 2001 said that he wished he had done more during his terrorist years. He's a man who once sang that he was guilty as sin and free as a bird. And Matthews asked him about none of this.

Nor did the "journalist" Matthews ask Ayers why he hosted Obama's political christening in his home, or what the nature of his relationship with Obama was on the various boards on which they served together. Nor did he ask him about what kind of "educational reform" he's working on in Chicago.

Matthews, the host of the risibly named Hardball, asked not a single question that would make Ayers uncomfortable, not a single question that would enlighten the public on why Ayers' association with Obama is potentially significant. The interview left me puzzling over why he even bothered to have Ayers on the show in the first place. No wonder people tune into talk radio and Fox News rather than MSNBC if they want to actually learn anything.

RLC

Restless Natives

Jason directs us to Politico where it looks as if liberal discontent with our new President is already stirring, and the man hasn't yet served a day in office. The lefties are growing restless with concerns that Obama is backing away from the positions that won him their support in the first place:

Obama insists he hasn't abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left's bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won't enact the tax.

Obama's pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he's struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he'll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama's post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama says that on his first day in office he will begin to "design a plan for a responsible drawdown," as he told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

The central premise of the left's criticism is direct - don't bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

To be sure most of the left is holding their fire to give him a chance, but they do seem to have their safeties off and their hammers cocked (or is a gun metaphor a little inappropriate for lefties?). Mr. Obama's honeymoon may be one of the shortest ever, and the irony is that it looks like it won't be his political opponents who'll find themselves most at odds with him but rather those who raised all the money and did all the legwork to get him elected.

They're wondering where all the hope and change went.

P.S. Glen Beck said this morning that he saw a bumper sticker in Seattle that read: Obama Is My Co-Pilot. I don't know whether to laugh at the stupidity of this or to tremble at the implications of people investing a complete unknown with Messianic attributes.

RLC

The Perfect Gift

It's long been the case in the U.S. that different groups of people choose to celebrate different aspects of the Christmas story. Merchants, of course, celebrate the giving of gifts by the Maji to the Christ child because the symbolism encourages shoppers to knock themselves out making the cash registers ring.

Secular humanists celebrate the notion of good will toward men even though they're hard-pressed to articulate a cogent reason why anyone should feel all warm and tingly toward anyone, much less complete strangers, in a godless, empty universe.

Christians celebrate the wonder of the creator of the universe becoming one of us in order to sacrifice himself for us in our lostness.

Yet, until now, there's been one aspect of the Christmas story that never gets celebrated - the slaughter of the innocents. King Herod, you'll recall, exercised his sovereignty over the children of Bethlehem by having everyone under the age of two put to the sword so that he wouldn't have to suffer a competitor to his throne.

Now comes word that in what certainly appears to be a celebration of Herod's exercise of his right as sovereign king to choose the deaths of those children, the Indiana Planned Parenthood affiliates are selling gift certificates this Christmas season which can be used for, inter alia, procuring an abortion.

It happens that lots of people are disgusted by this, but I think it's the perfect gift to celebrate that part of the Christmas narrative, Herod's infanticide, which rarely gets much positive recognition. Think for a moment of the happiness these certificates will bring in the days following Christmas. Young, expectant mommies who need to unburden themselves of an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy will delight in the gift, as will young men on the verge of panic at having sired a child. Abortionists whose skills at ending nascent lives are inversely proportional to the compunctions of their consciences will continue to enrich themselves plying their ugly trade, and Planned Parenthood itself, a business which profits handsomely from dismembering children, will continue to rake in the cash. It won't have been such a happy Christmas for the child itself, but as anyone can tell you, the child is just a blob of tissue and doesn't count.

Indiana Planned Parenthood should be lauded for doing their part to make this an especially blessed and meaningful holiday season and for carrying on a wonderfully Herodian Christmas tradition.

RLC

President -Elect Gump

Its fairly well-known that Barack and Mrs. Obama were plagued by numerous unsavory associations throughout the Senator's campaign for the presidency. You'll remember the bigoted Reverend Wright, of course, and his fellow odd-ball cleric Michael Pfleger, and there were also the former terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn as well as convicted felon Tony Rezko, and don't forget that Palestinian terrorist sympathizer Rashid Khalidi.

Now it seems that Obama is also connected to the corrupt and foul-mouthed Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who was arrested yesterday for trying to profit from the sale of Obama's Senate seat. There's no evidence that Obama was involved in the matters which precipitated Blagojevich's arrest, but still. Blago and the President-elect evidently go back a long way, and we have to wonder how many more crooks and nuts Obama has been holding hands with over the years.

Like a political Forrest Gump, Mr. Obama keeps turning up in the company of Illinois' most odious characters. One almost expects that by the time he's completed his first term he'll have been found to have had ties to Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

RLC

For Tanya

One almost has to chuckle at the spate of anti-theist ads littering this year's Christmas landscape. The anti-theists are evidently not content to see Christmas simply secularized, they want to persuade Christians to abandon the celebration altogether. Such a dreary, gray, sterile world they'd have us all live in.

On the other hand, Hot Air links to an atheist at Dizzying Intellect who posts a mild rebuke of his fellow non-believers and adopts the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and Christians, would adopt.

Unfortunately, a commenter at DI named Tanya spoils the mellow mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and a sad ignorance of, Christian belief about the afterlife. Tanya writes:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life". Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the formidable city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that was good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, awful orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to kill him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They kidnapped her and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange Tanya for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king was distraught and told the prince of the horrible news. The prince, all the rejections he had experienced from Tanya notwithstanding, still loved her deeply and his heart was broken at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live in the beautiful city.

And so the day came for the exchange and the prince rode atop his horse out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward his enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she had fled, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she ran past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and resolve to endure whatver they subjected him to were fortified by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe. Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body into a pool of offal.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart like wax within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to stay within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore. Tanya considered the offer, but she decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she didn't really want to be too close to the prince, and, by the way, where is that pissy little whiner anyway?

Merry Christmas, Tanya.

RLC

Foreign Competition

There have been a lot of forecasts in recent years of the coming American economic senescence. We're hearing that the United States is destined to be eclipsed by China, India, a united Europe and maybe, one can hardly say it without gasping, even Russia. Rod Hunter at The American takes a contrary view. Citing a book by economist Robert Shapiro, Hunter points out that problems each of these would-be competitors faces over the long run are intractable and will act like heavy anchors on the economy of these nations.

Take demographics for example. China, Japan and Europe all have rapidly aging populations which will need to be supported by a shrinking cohort of younger workers. This is really a recipe for economic calamity since either the elderly are going to have to be forsaken or the young are going to be heavily taxed to support them. Either scenario bodes ill for the economic vitality of a nation.

Russia is no threat at all to American economic supremacy since the productivity of the average Russian worker is the same as that of the average Botswanian.

India has little manufacturing, and, like China, has very poor infrastructure which is essential for moving goods and sustaining a vibrant economy. Moreover, the heavy hand of government stifles initiative and flexibility both these economies need in order to thrive.

The United States is poised to avoid all of these problems and others Hunter discusses as well. Read his essay to see why.

Thanks for the tip to No Left Turns

RLC

New York Is Not Mumbai

The attack that shut down the city of Mumbai would never have succeeded in an American city of comparable size - our cops are too well trained and too well armed. So writes Jonathan Foreman in a piece for the New York Post titled Mumbai's Lessons for New York.

What Foreman doesn't mention but which is almost certainly true is that a similar terrorist attack in many places in the U.S. would encounter not only an effective police response but also armed citizens who, unlike those poor Indians, would not be sitting ducks for the terrorists to pick off at their leisure.

Even so, there are other scenarios for terror attacks on our cities to which we are vulnerable and Foreman discusses some of these. Check out his essay here.

RLC

Let it Rest

The Supreme Court has refused to hear the latest challenge to President-elect Obama's constitutional right to be president of the United States, based on alleged hankey-pankey with his birth certificate. Ron Kessler summarizes the contretemps and concludes what a lot of people had concluded some time ago - there's nothing to it. It would be a big relief if the matter is now laid to rest because the last thing this nation needs is a crisis of legitimacy in the White House.

Even if Obama was born out of the country because his mother was traveling in Kenya and was unfit to return home until after her delivery - and all the hard evidence I've seen runs counter to this hypothetical - I wonder if it wouldn't still be a miscarriage of justice to deny Obama the White House on such a technicality. Conservatives rightly complain when courts overturn the clearly expressed will of the people in voter referenda because the jurists manage to espy some technical punctilio of the law that the referenda violates. Conservatives should be equally opposed to allowing a technicality to thwart the democratic process and the will of the electorate on the matter of Obama's presidency. The last thing conservatives should wish to do is sound like those on the left who threw tantrums because they thought George Bush was an illegitimate president after the 2000 election.

Yet I confess to being conflicted about all this because I believe strongly that the constitution is not just a helpful guideline but is rather an essential anchor that keeps us from being blown about by the winds of ideological fashion. I don't want to treat the constitution as though its provisions could be ignored just because they prove inconvenient.

So, let's hope that President-elect Obama has no qualificational skeletons in his closet, and let's hope as well that future candidates are much more thoroughly vetted by the media and their parties than was Obama. In his case the media was so eager to see him elected that there was just no appetite to do any digging into anything that might impede that outcome.

RLC

Black Women and Gay Marriage

Charles M. Blow lays out a strategy in the New York Times by which gays might win the support of African American women, a demographic which in California last month voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. Blow offers up some interesting reasons why black women are opposed to gay marriage, but he dances all around what is almost certainly the main reason without really coming out and acknowledging it. He points out that black women go to church, that they tend to be socially conservative, and that they frown on interracial marriage because they believe there aren't enough good black men to go around without having them marrying each other. He never really says clearly, though, that the reason these women voted against gay marriage is because they simply believe that it's wrong and they don't want government meddling with traditional marriage.

It's hard for our educated elite to believe that in this day and age anyone would really think that any consensual act might be wrong, but there you have it. There still are, apparently, a lot of people who believe that homosexual behavior violates the natural law, that it violates the law of God, and therefore should not receive our collective stamp of approval. Imagine.

RLC

Whither Genius?

Quick. Name at least three geniuses in the history of science - three people whose ideas changed the world.

If you tried you probably came up with names like Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Edison, Galileo, etc. Robert Roy Britt at Live Science notes that among the things these world-changing thinkers share in common is that they were essentially loners:

Major breakthroughs in science have historically been the province of individuals, not institutes. Galileo and Copernicus, Edison and Einstein, toiling away in lonely labs or pondering the cosmos in private studies.

But in recent decades - especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 - the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.

This is an interesting observation. Has the move toward large research teams, made necessary by the need for funding, stifled individual genius? Or has the accumulation of knowledge made it much more difficult for great discoveries to be made because there are fewer left and those that are still out there are much more difficult to elucidate?

Britt discusses these questions in an interesting essay here. I wonder if genius isn't still flourishing but because the great thinkers are usually part of a research team they tend to be relatively anonymous compared to past giants like Einstein and Newton who worked alone.

Anyway, read Britt's essay at the link.

RLC

Paper Dragon

The conventional wisdom is that China is an economic juggernaut that'll overtake the United States by mid-century as not only the world's foremost economic dynamo but also the world's premier military power. The problem with conventional wisdom, however, is that it's so often wrong. Jonathan Wellum at Comment throws cold water on the Golden Age of China speculation and argues that China suffers from systemic moral problems that are more likely to turn it onto a path similar to that which Japan followed twenty years ago.

Here's his introduction:

With the U.S. embroiled in economic turmoil, three decades of unprecedented economic growth behind it, a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour and bulging foreign currency exchange reserves due to massive trade surpluses, Chinese growth does indeed appear unstoppable. Even the world's largest bank by market capitalization is now Chinese. Yet it is the image of the "flawless" girl lip-synching her way through the opening of the Beijing Olympics while the real singer was set aside due to her chubby cheeks and less than perfect teeth that offers insight into the challenges ahead.

Remember that 20 years ago, the same experts predicting China's inevitable coronation were forecasting that Japan would dominate the world financially. At that time, Japan housed some of the world's most highly valued corporations, including the most expensive financial institutions. Its future also seemed inevitable. But the Japanese forgot the most pedestrian of all economic realities: if you are not prepared to reproduce, you guarantee your extinction. Its low birthrate now means that, according to its own statistics, Japan will lose 70 per cent of its workforce by mid-century, and already its share of the world economy has dropped from a high of 18% in 1994 to below 10% in 2008.

Read Wellum's essay to find our what he thinks China's specific problems are.

RLC

Ending the Search for the Real Killer

O. J. Simpson has been sentenced to nine to thirty three years in jail for armed robbery. It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy, but we wonder now how anyone will find the real killers of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown now that O.J. won't be able to continue his tireless search of the nation's golf courses for the murderer.

Ron Goldman's father and sister talk about the sentence here:

For those too young to remember why Mr. Goldman is so gratified by the verdict and why the verdict is so significant you can catch up on the history here.

RLC