Dealing with Pirates

Strategy Page offers an interesting explanation as to why the world seems slow to do anything about the Somali pirates:

While ten percent of world shipping traffic goes through the Gulf of Aden each year, most of it is in ships too fast for the pirates to catch, and too large for them to easily get aboard. These ships pay higher fuel costs (for the high speed transit), higher insurance premiums, and two days of "danger pay" for their unionized crews, and that's it. This increases the annual operating costs of these ships by a fraction of one percent. But for smaller, and slower, freighters, mostly serving local customers, the pirates remain a problem. These ships tend to be owned by African and Arab companies, and manned by African and Arab crews.

In other words, in financial terms piracy is just not much of a problem. The article goes on to lay out the pros and cons of the various options for ending it:

In dealing with a piracy problem like this, you have three main choices. You can do what is currently being done, which is patrolling the Gulf of Aden and shooting only when you see speedboats full of gunmen threatening a merchant ship. The rule appears to be that you fire lots of warning shots, and rarely fire at the pirates themselves. This approach has saved a few ships from capture, and the more warships you get into the Gulf, the more pirate attacks you can foil. But it won't stop the pirates from capturing ships. Establishing a similar anti-piracy patrol off the east coast of Africa would cost over half a billion dollars a year, at least.

A second approach is to be more aggressive. That is, your ships and helicopters shoot (pirates) on sight and shoot to kill. Naturally, the pirates will hide their weapons (until they are in the act of taking a ship), but it will still be obvious what a speedboat full of "unarmed" men are up to. You could take a chance (of dead civilians and bad publicity) and shoot up any suspicious speedboat. Some of the pirates would probably resort to taking some women and children with them. Using human shields is an old custom, and usually works against Westerners. More pirate attacks will be thwarted with this approach, but the attacks will continue, and NATO will be painted as murderous bullies in the media.

The third option is to go ashore and kill or capture all the pirates, or at least as many as you can identify. Destroy pirate boats and weapons. This is very dangerous, because innocent civilians will be killed or injured, and the property of non-pirates will be damaged. The anti-piracy forces will be condemned in some quarters for committing atrocities. There might even be indictments for war crimes. There will be bad publicity. NATO will most likely avoid this option too. The bottom line is that the pirate attacks, even if they took two or three times as many ships as last year, would not have a meaningful economic impact on world shipping. For example, the international anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden costs $300 million a year, a fraction of a percent of the defense budgets of the nations involved. Politicians and bureaucrats can stand that kind of pain, and will likely do so and refrain from doing anything bold in Somalia.

It seems to me that the best option is to amend the Law of the Sea treaty to allow shipping companies to employ trained private security contractors, such as we used in Iraq, to fend off attacks. Once word gets out that ships are manned by security teams and that a lot of pirates are going to get killed if they try to hijack a ship, a lot of them would see their enthusiasm for piracy evaporate rather quickly.

Ron Paul offers a somewhat similar plan. He thinks the U.S. should employ bounty hunters.

RLC

Three Months In

Today protesters across the country are having "Tea Parties" to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the economic policies of the current administration. The fear is that the enormous spending undertaken by the Obama administration is going to strap us with debt that will only be paid by inflating the currency or raising taxes, both of which will suffocate the hopes we have for our childrens' future.

But it's not just the government's economic nostrums that have people alarmed.

Just before the election last November we noted that most conservatives and many libertarians opposed Barack Obama because they foresaw an Obama administration, supported and abetted by a Democratic congress, eager to implement a number of measures that would erode our freedoms and be detrimental to our national health. Here's the listwe posted back then:

1. Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
   
2. Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
   
3. Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
   
4. Redistribute wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
   
5. Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
   
6. Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs. (Cap and Trade, minimum wage, capital gains tax, health insurance)
   
7. Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
   
8. Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare.
   
9. Nationalize health care.
   
10. Deny to parents any choice in where they send their children to school.
    
11. Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
    
12. Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it's conservative and/or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine or "Localism."
    
13. Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
    
14. Take away the right to own or buy most types of firearms or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
    
15. Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections by implementing card check.
    

We're now three months into the new administration and it's clear that the list above failed to do justice to Democrat ambitions. Already the President, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their minions in Congress have taken steps toward implementing most, if not all, of the above goals. The Democrats are anxious to fundamentally reshape the contours of our society, and there's very little that can be done to dissuade them until the elections of 2010.

To be sure, there's much about our society that's in need of reshaping, but none of the changes listed above are among them. In my opinion, at least, achieving any of the items on the list would be at best harmful and at worst calamitous.

RLC

Change We Could Believe in

When people don't pay income taxes they have little stake in the economic health of the nation and a lot of incentive to vote for whatever politicians will keep their tax at zero. In the U.S. approximately half of wage-earners pay no income tax at all, while ten percent of wage-earners account for 70% of tax revenue.

Students of government going all the way back to Plato have pointed out that no polity can sustain itself when people who don't pay taxes are able to vote to tax the wealthier citizens in order to provide them with the amenities of life. When the less wealthy have access to the public purse it won't be long until they clean it out, which is what we've done in this country.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer compares the tax burden in the U.S. to an inverted pyramid with the narrow top 10% supporting the rest of the structure. Such a pyramid poised on the point is inherently unstable and so is our tax structure.

Fleischer argues that everyone who earns anything should be required to pay something and he's right. I have not yet come across a cogent objection to the Flat Tax plan that would assess everyone who has an income a particular percentage (say, 20%) with no deductions and few exceptions.

Another intriguing proposal is the Fair Tax.

Whatever plan is adopted it's clear that the current system is unworkable. If a sizable portion of the president's cabinet selections, including the secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner), plus much of Congress, including the chairman of the committee that writes the tax code (Charley Rangel), can't figure out what they owe then the code needs to be overhauled.

That would be the sort of meaningful change that we could actually believe in.

RLC

Salient Details

Every report I've seen or heard about the horrible abduction and murder of 8 year-old Sandra Cantu has mentioned that her killer, Melissa Huckaby, was a Sunday School teacher and pastor's daughter. I'm not sure why the media feels this is a salient detail that the public should be aware of unless they just can't resist an opportunity to stick a thumb in the eye of Christians. After all, how many times are the religious associations, or lack thereof, of any of the mass murderers who've befouled our society from the Columbine killers to the most recent shooting in the immigration office at Binghamton, NY featured on the evening news? Are we ever told how many of these killers are, say, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or atheists?

Let a putative Christian do something horrific, however, and the person's faith is almost certain to be made an explicit part of the story, as if to impress upon us that Christians are just as bad as everyone else and that Christianity makes no difference in one's moral life.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the media's motives. Perhaps they reported Ms Huckaby's religious background because they thought it an anomaly that someone of her persuasion would do something so terrible. It's possible. It's possible that the media don't report the religious stance of those who commit similar horrors because, well, because most of them have no religious stance and their crimes are really not so surprising given that fact.

Even so, I propose that from now forward every murderer's religious beliefs be made an integral part of the news accounts of his or her atrocities. It'll be interesting to see the results in print, although anyone who thinks about it can predict what they'll be.

RLC

Condescending Contempt

Anyone who has spent much time browsing YouTube, or listening to people like Bill Maher, will recognize the sort of condescending contempt A.N. Wilson describes in an essay in the Mail Online about the attitude of the British secular elite toward people of faith.

During the course of his column Wilson tells us something of his own story:

For much of my life, I, too, have been one of those who did not believe. It was in my young manhood that I began to wonder how much of the Easter story I accepted, and in my 30s I lost any religious belief whatsoever.

Like many people who lost faith, I felt anger with myself for having been 'conned' by such a story. I began to rail against Christianity, and wrote a book, entitled Jesus, which endeavoured to establish that he had been no more than a messianic prophet who had well and truly failed, and died.

Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion.

Wilson then concludes by pointing out that the confidence adherents to atheistic materialism have in the rationality of their belief is quite unjustified:

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.

All in all it's not a bad essay with which to conclude the Easter season.

RLC

The Year of Astronomy

New Scientist celebrates the Year of Astronomy by releasing a series of eight of the best astronomical photographs of the year. They're dazzling.

Jupiter's Ghost

RLC

Irena Opdyke

Dennis Prager tells a story of a woman in Nazi-occupied Poland that raises some serious moral questions. The story has been made into a play that's currently on Broadway entitled Irena's Vow:

Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, "Irena's Vow." The Irena of the title is Irena Gut Opdyke, who, at the time of the play's World War II's setting, was a pretty 19-year-old blond Polish Roman Catholic to whom fate (she would say God) gave the opportunity to save 12 Jews in, of all places, the home of the highest-ranking German officer in a Polish city. Ultimately discovered by the Nazi officer, she was offered the choice of becoming the elderly Nazi's mistress or the Jews all being sent to death camps.

As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a "Nazi whore" but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.

What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.

Here's the question this story compels us to ponder: Is what Irena did wrong or right? Do you, like Prager, see her adultery as heroic and deeply good or do you see it as deeply wrong and sinful? Or neither? Is your answer one you could explain to someone else or is it just an intuition?

RLC

Easter Poll

I find this a bit hard to believe, but since it's Easter I thought I'd put it up on Viewpoint anyway:

As Christians gather to celebrate Easter this Sunday, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 88% of adults nationwide think the person known to history as Jesus Christ actually walked the earth 2,000 years ago. That's up five points from a year ago. Today, 5% disagree and 7% are not sure.

Eighty-two percent (82%) also believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God who came to Earth and died for our sins. Another 10% think otherwise and 8% aren't sure.

Nearly as many, 79% believe the central claim of the Christian faith--that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Only 10% say they do not believe the first Easter resurrection really happened, while 11% are not sure.

Almost 80% of Americans believe in the historical resurrection of Jesus? Eighty two percent believe in the deity of Christ and substitutionary atonement? I wonder what the response would have been had folks been asked what difference these beliefs make in the way they live their life. I also wonder what the response would've been had these questions been posed to, say, a thousand college students surveyed on a range of campuses. Alas, Rasmussen apparently wasn't curious about the same things I am.

There's more on this poll at the link.

RLC

More on Hitchens/Craig

Doug TenNapel over at Big Hollywood offers a retrospective of the Hitchens/Craig debate held last Saturday at Biola University. TenNapel, who was present for the event, thinks that although Craig won the argument, Hitchens won the debate. He says this because Craig's arguments, based as they are on reason and logic, have little purchase in a culture that has learned to think emotively rather than rationally. Hitchens based his case for atheism on the ubiquity of suffering and returned to this theme at every opportunity. It's a theme that deeply resonates with people and possesses a great deal of emotional and psychological power even if, as an argument, it possesses very little logical force.

TenNapel writes:

But in my opinion, though Dr. Craig won the argument (he was the only one who even presented a formal argument), Hitchens won the debate. It's not the argument of the debaters, it's the condition of the audience that wins the day. While few of Dr. Craig's arguments are dispersed through culture, even religious culture, I've been raised on most of Hitchens' arguments. Dr. Craig's arguments are true and well-reasoned but difficult to comprehend on a first hearing. Hitchens' arguments are what we'll find spoken against God on prime time television, at the water-cooler, I've even heard some of them on Animal Planet. Culture generally makes Hitchens' argument by default....

I think if there were atheists in the audience on the brink of salvation that Dr. Craig's well-argued positions would find little purchase. Opposite that, the room of Christians would likely have a large segment of doubters, and the cultural arguments against God presented by Hitchens would likely change more minds in my opinion.

So are debates judged by the merit of the arguments or the embrace of the audience? In this all important subject, I think the effect on the audience is the preferred measurement. But the evening left little doubt to most of us that Hitchens did not make a case for atheism at all. He barely even acknowledged his own atheism which was oddly refreshing. It reminds me of G. K. Chesterton who said, "Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist."

It reminds me of a quote from Feuerbach who said that all atheists deny their faith by their actions. In other words, they can't live consistently with the logical entailments of their atheism.

At any rate, TenNapel is probably correct about the effect of non-rational appeals on a post-modern audience, and the power of Hitchens' wit and British accent to charm his listeners are not to be underestimated either. Even so, I think there's something ironic in the fact that an atheist who lays claim to having the rationally superior position utterly fails on the grounds of rationality and can only succeed by resorting to emotional appeals. Some might have thought that emotional appeal would have been the recourse of the defender of theism.

Anyway, you can read TenNapel's full summary of the debate at the link.

RLC

The Whole World in His Mind?

The May issue of Discover magazine has a very interesting article on a topic we've addressed from time to time on this page. We've noted that much, if not all, of our experience of the universe is in fact subjective, that not only the phenomena of sense experience - things like color, sound and fragrance - but also that which appears to us to be objectively real - matter, space and time - are in fact ultimately created by our minds. If this is true then the irreducible ground of reality is mind, not matter.

This seems to be the implication, not only of much philosophical speculation, but also of much of contemporary physics, especially quantum physics. As physicist James Jeans once said, the universe looks more like a grand idea than a grand machine.

The article in Discover (which is not yet available online) makes a similar case and concludes that the universe is "biocentric," i.e. that it's a creation of human minds. I think this is probably true of qualia (sensations) and what we call time, but to say that it's true of the universe as a whole seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. To be sure, it may well be that all of cosmic reality is indeed mind-dependent, but that it's dependent upon our minds for its existence seems to me to be the least likely alternative. It seems more plausible to suppose that Jeans' grand idea is the product not of human minds but of a cosmic mind, the mind of God.

The authors of the Discover article shy from considering this possibility, not wishing, perhaps, to suggest anything that has religious connotations, but it makes much more sense of the evidence they adduce than does their biocentrism.

Consider just one example from the quantum world. Pairs of sub-atomic particles formed simultaneously share a property known as entanglement. These particles are somehow mysteriously connected to each other even if they are separated by vast distances across space. If one of the pair undergoes some alteration the other undergoes a corresponding alteration even though any message sent from the one to the other would have to travel at near infinite speed in order for the second particle to know that the first has been altered. How does this happen? There's no physical explanation for this instantaneous connectivity. If, however, these particles, and everything else, are really part of God's consciousness, the problem of entanglement is explained. Every event is immediately known by God, and His mind imposes the laws that govern the behavior of these particles.

It seems like an obvious solution for anyone who already believes that quantum phenomena are observer-dependent, but perhaps we're going to have to unravel more of the mysteries of the universe's structure and behavior before those scientists still in the grip of a metaphysical naturalism begin to wean themselves away from their theophobia.

RLC

State of the Union

I haven't posted my thoughts lately as a variety of issues have precluded me from taking the time to share, but events are such these days that I feel compelled to speak out. I'm talking about the state of our Union and what it means for the average American citizen.

The simple fact of the matter is that the United States is bankrupt and, interestingly I think, it really doesn't matter who is responsible. After all if, for example, Bernard Madoff spends the rest of his life in jail, will that undo the disaster he wrought on his thousands of victims? So rather than waste time and energy talking about who is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, consider this a time to reflect as it may be more profitable to ask why and how have we have come to this point in time.

Our founding fathers were keenly aware that the very nature of government was to expand and encroach upon every facet of the lives of its citizens so it limited the powers of the central government in the Constitution. They also knew that sound money, by definition, would protect the people by containing the central government.

Now consider this quote from Ludwig von Mises in his work: The Theory of Money and Credit.

"It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments."

Please read the entire article here.

Perhaps what we find most interesting is the display of outrage by Americans over the proposed $800 billion TARP I bailout during the Bush administration and even more outrage about the $180 million AIG bonuses. To be sure, this money doesn't exist and it will have to be borrowed by the Treasury and the obligation to pay it back with interest will fall on our children. And before this is all over, they will indeed be slaves. We have seen estimates of government spending and guarantees totaling over $13 Trillion dollars and that seems to have taken place somewhat under the radar. Does anyone recall any meetings of Congress to approve it? And let's not forget the $1 Trillion dollar shortfall of government guaranteed pensions. We don't think that's included anywhere.

And please note that this article is bipartisan. The Republicans and the Democrats are equally guilty of squandering the nations wealth and this has been going on for forty years.

It almost seems as though there is someone who decides when and where there will be outrage

But the bigger question is: where is the outrage about the un-funded liabilities of the US for Social Security and Medicare? That figure is $65-$70 Trillion dollars (see http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/06/07/Kotlikoff.pdf)

The current spending pales in comparison when one considers what's coming at us. See the coming generational storm

And has anyone considered why the crisis hasn't been solved with all of the spending of money to which we have committed? Why is it that Henry Paulson, past Secretary of the Treasury and Timothy Geithner present Secretary of the Treasury seem so afraid, impotent, and inept? Perhaps Paulson was concerned about the $500(?) million dollars in options he had on Goldman Sachs that would go worthless and as Secretary of Treasury he had to escrow to avoid conflict of interest as former Goldman Sachs CEO if a bailout didn't happen.

Or, more to the point, perhaps it is simply that the money spent thus far on the banks doesn't even touch the real problem. Further, Paulson and Geithner don't even know for sure how bad the problem is. The reason for this is that the banks have invested heavily in derivatives of all kinds. This happened after the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Bush administration waved the reserve requirements for the big banks on Wall Street, which enabled them to extend their leverage from $10 for every $1 of capital to $40 for every $1 of capital. These derivatives are leveraged investment vehicles, for lack of a better term, gambling bets, "derived" from an underlying asset. If the asset is, say, a $100 Billion mortgage portfolio, that's a value of $4 Trillion dollars. And when that mortgage portfolio is sub-prime loans lent to people who had no chance to maintain them, the investment blows up.

But wait, there's more. Suppose said financial institution also bought CDSs (credit default swaps), which insures against default of a financial product (can you say AIG?). Now you have a total debt of $8 Trillion dollars all predicated on $100 Billion of bogus mortgages that should never have been made in the first place. And that's just one financial institution. And nobody really understands how far this has gone so they don't have any way of knowing the extent of the damage. Some estimates of the total derivatives in existence near $1,500 Trillion dollars. Truly insane. No wonder Geithner looks scared. So, in effect, he's simply buying time hoping that something will happen that prevents a financial Armageddon. And let's not forget, it was the Maestro, Allan Greenspan who sat before Congress advising them not to regulate derivatives, as they were a way to "spread risk"...Absolutely unbelievable.

But we digress. When looking at the how and why of our problems it should be intuitively obvious to even the casual observer that we would not be where we are if ours was a country that had stayed true to its Constitution. If our government had kept a policy of sound money, they would not have been able to commit to spend money they do not have and does not exist.

So this brings us to the question, how will we finance our spending? There are three ways, none of which are particularly attractive.

1. Increase taxes. Not likely as the American citizen is tapped out.

2. Borrow from foreign investors. The Treasury sells Treasury bonds to other nations. While this has been the way we paid for our deficits in the past, it's not likely to continue, primarily because the buyers of our Treasury bonds are starting to question their value and with good reason given that our spending has gone parabolic. In other words, they question our ability to repay with anything of value. Also, the rest of the world cannot, even if they wanted to, "finance" the insatiable debt demands now pouring out of the current Administration.

And 3. we just heard this announcement a couple weeks ago, the Federal Reserve will print the money to purchase the Treasury bonds that the rest of the world doesn't want to buy because they perceive them as worthless. This is called monetizing the debt. It's the beginning of the end as it leads into an inflationary spiral. If we have to "take up the slack" by buying our own Treasuries by printing money, that devalues our currency, the dollar. As a result, fewer buyers will show up for the next Treasury auction so the Federal Reserve will have to print more money to buy a greater share of the unsold bonds. Eventually, you have a Zimbabwe-like scenario where nobody is interested in our Treasury bonds and the US is printing the money to finance its spending entirely. That's called hyperinflation. Welcome to the banana republic of the USA.

In conclusion, we see our government leaders meeting for their G20 and their G8 meetings and, and one thing we can be sure of; they are united in a single resolve. With the loss of control over the issuance of money comes the loss of control over the political power they wield. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

So you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do about all of this? Realistically, there is nothing any of us can do to change a government that, for the most part, is made up of evil people who care only about power and nothing about its citizens and are throwing us and our children into financial slavery. But there is something we can do to protect ourselves from our government. And I'm not talking about voting as, for the most part, the candidates are all of the same ilk.

From the link above...

"Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism."

"The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it renders the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the policies of governments and political parties."

"What all the enemies of the gold standard spurn as its main vice is precisely the same thing that in the eyes of the advocates of the gold standard is its main virtue, namely, its incompatibility with a policy of credit expansion."

And this quote is more timely than ever...

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account, which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'
Ayn Rand

To Allan Greenspan's credit, he must have been intrigued by Ayn Rand's philosophy and most likely, she inspired him to write this.

Dear readers, the "day" has arrived. The bottom line is that while we may not be able to influence our government of "destroyers" that is hell-bent on the destruction of our currency and our nation, you can, in fact, defend yourself against the ravages of a government gone wrong. Buy gold and buy silver as your understanding permits.

Canadian Common Sense

Canadian-American Steven Crowder says it in ways that even a couch potato can understand. If you can get past all the gesticulations there are several important truths to be gleaned from Mr. Crowder's presentation:

RLC

Moral Beliefs and Proper Basicality

One of the arguments we've made here over the years is that if there is no God the notion of moral obligation becomes meaningless. Apart from a transcendent ground for moral right and wrong, there can be no duty to act one way rather than another.

Now atheistic philosophers, no doubt weary of having their theistic colleagues point out to them the nihilistic implications of their atheism, have adopted a strategy to answer this criticism of the attempt to develop an atheistic ethics or morality. A paper in Faith and Philosophy (available by subscription only) authored by Erik Wielenberg, makes the bold claim that moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic.

Properly basic beliefs are beliefs which do not require that they be based on any other beliefs. We are within our epistemic rights to hold them even if we can give no reasons or evidential support for them.

Traditionally, many philosophers held that such things as my belief that I'm experiencing pain-like sensations in my tooth (beliefs evident to the senses), that I had cereal for breakfast (memory beliefs), or that I exist (beliefs that are incorrigible or can't be wrong) are all properly basic.

It's self-evident, Wielenberg claims, that cruelty is wrong and kindness is right. There's no need to defend or justify that belief, and no one with properly functioning cognitive faculties would deny it. Thus, there's no need to ground moral beliefs in God or anything else. They're just brute facts and that's all there is to it.

This is a clever move, especially since some Christian philosophers want to assert that belief in God is also properly basic. Wielenberg compares the basicality of belief in God to belief that, say, cruelty is wrong. He then goes on to argue that if belief in God is properly basic then so, too, is a belief that cruelty is wrong.

Now if moral beliefs are indeed, properly basic then it will do no good to ask what the atheist bases his beliefs upon. He'll simply answer that there's no need to justify them or warrant them. Kindness is better than cruelty and that's the end of the matter.

But I'm not so sure. What does it mean to say that something is wrong if there is no God? Presumably it means that you shouldn't do it, but if we ask why we shouldn't, the answer is simply that you just shouldn't.

Suppose I can profit from harming someone and get away with it. Why is that wrong? Wielenberg replies that it just is, that most people agree that it is, and that no further reasons are necessary. This strikes me as inadequate and question begging.

Moreover, setting that aside, the problem is not so much with beliefs about this or that moral act but with the notion of moral obligation. An obligation is something which binds us to act. It must be imposed.

If there is no God then what obligates us to behave one way rather than another? If one person is kind and another is cruel what obligates the first to behave the way he does and obligates the second not to behave as he does?

How can we have a moral duty if there is no transcendent moral authority to impose that duty and to enforce it? In lieu of God where does such a duty come from and why should I feel bound by it?

Finally, what can it mean to say that a behavior is wrong if there's no sanction for performing it?

If there were no law enforcement or judicial system laws would be meaningless. If there's no God then to whom, or what, are we accountable for our acts? Society? Ourselves?

Why should anyone care what society thinks, and if I impose the obligation on myself, surely I can release myself from it if it proves inconvenient.

If Wielenberg is correct, to say that cruelty is wrong is simply to say that a lot of people don't like it, but what people like and don't like can hardly be the ground for what's moral, much less for moral obligation.

The fact remains that moral obligation can only exist in a world in which there is a transcendent moral authority. Atheists can live just the same as theists in terms of their ethics. They can adopt the very same values, but if they chose to adopt the opposite values they would be neither wrong nor right to do so.

In a Godless world, there simply is no wrong or right. There are just things that people, like any other animal, do.

The End of McCain-Feingold?

For those who follow such things there's a chance that the Supreme Court will do the right thing this summer and nullify McCain-Feingold. At least the editors at National Review are hopeful:

From its conception, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law was an assault on the First Amendment. Signing that unconstitutional bill into law, knowing it to be unconstitutional, was one of the worst moments of George W. Bush's presidency. Yet this malignancy lurks in the legal code, widely accepted, even celebrated. Now Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart has gone before the Supreme Court arguing that McCain-Feingold gives the government the right to ban books and films. He's right, it does. And for that reason, McCain-Feingold should be nullified.

At issue is a film called Hillary: The Movie, a documentary produced by the nonprofit group Citizens United, which did not wish to see Senator Clinton elected president. Because McCain-Feingold prohibits so much as mentioning a candidate's name in pre-election communications paid for by certain disfavored groups - unions and "corporations" - the filmmakers were informed by a federal judge that showing their work would constitute a crime. The filmmakers sued, and the case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Mr. Stewart is defending the government's ban on this film; the same rules that apply to a campaign commercial apply to a documentary film, his reasoning goes.

Justice Alito alertly pressed Mr. Stewart on that issue: If commercials and films are covered, how about books? How about campaign biographies? Yes, Mr. Stewart answered, the U.S. government is prepared to ban books, under certain circumstances, and is legally empowered by McCain-Feingold to do so. Jaws dropped, black robes fluttered.

There is in politics a principle referred to as the law of unintended consequences which states that meddling with things will almost invariably produce completely unforeseen and completely unwanted outcomes. McCain-Feingold was a well-intentioned attempt to limit the impact of big money on elections by banning political ads within 60 days of an election.

President Obama's Federal Election Commission lawyers argue, however, that the law must be interpreted as also covering films and books and that, if so, this interpetation gives the administration the right to censor films and ban books that mention a candidate and are in circulation 60 days prior to elections. National Review Online agrees that logic compels that the law be interpreted as covering films and books but argues that this is sufficient reason to overturn a law whose implications are so clearly at odds with the First Amendment.

NRO is right. The Court is expected to hand down its decision by the end of June.

RLC

For Tanya, a Reprise

Last Christmas we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya on another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again slightly edited.

An atheist at Dizzying Intellect had issued a mild rebuke of his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christmas to deride Christian belief and, in so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, a commenter named Tanya spoiled the mellow mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the orthodox Christian understanding of the atonement.

Tanya wrote:

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, distraught beyond words, 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 once she was ransomed.

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 determination to endure whatever 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 melting like ice 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 remain 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?

We wish Tanya and all of our readers a meaningful Good Friday, and a very happy Easter.

RLC

Your Lying Eyes

It's bad enough that the President of the United States abased himself before a foreign dictator, but now the White House is compounding the embarrassment by denying that the President actually did it. This is an astonishing bit of chutzpah considering that videos of the event leave no doubt that the President, contrary to protocol, bowed deeply before the Saudi king.

Come on, fellas. The President's credibility is sinking low enough without the staff at the White House performing a variation of "Who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes?"

Here's the video that apparently no one at the White House has seen:

Next they'll be trying to convince us that the President suffered a back spasm just as he shook the royal hand.

RLC

Campus Porn

McLatchey offers this sad report on the popularity of a pornographic movie that's currently being shown on college campuses across the nation:

The movie - reportedly the most expensive porn film ever made - combines computer-generated images with hardcore sex scenes.

Digital Playground's 2005 film "Pirates" became a surprise hit on campuses from Yale to Tulane, said spokesman Christopher Ruth. Student groups contacted Digital Playground for permission to show that movie, he said.

From that experience, Ruth said the idea arose to market the 2008 sequel to university audiences by offering it free.

Student groups at a half-dozen universities - including UCLA and Carnegie Mellon University - accepted the offer. Hundreds of students lined up at each show.

The University of Maryland will screen the movie this weekend, the firm said.

The unfortunate aspect of this is not just the availability of the film, kids have unlimited access to pornography today. Nor is it just that universities across the country are facilitating the showing of the thing. Universities long ago abrogated their responsibility to responsibly shepherd young people through their late-teens years into adulthood. The most unfortunate part of the article, perhaps, is found in the last couple of lines:

The screenings generate publicity and sell a few copies of the movie, Ruth said. But the larger point is to get young people accustomed to seeing adult movies as mainstream entertainment.

"It's not anything you should be ashamed of," he said. "Sexuality never is."

This statement transcends stupid. Whether people should be ashamed of "sexuality" is hardly what's at issue. The issue is what we're doing to the hearts and minds of young people by immersing them in a pornographic culture. What effect does it have on a young man's view of women to see them graphically portrayed as sex toys? What does it do to the self-image of women when their objectification is glamorized and sensualized? What happens to our sense of human dignity when we watch for a couple of hours people copulating on screen? What are the expectations a young couple have for each other in a marriage when sexual athleticism is held up as an ideal? What does it do to sex itself when the act is emptied of all its mystery, intimacy, commitment and love and reduced to a mere expression of sheer lust?

Parents who pay their child's activity fee when they send them off to college probably never suspect that one of the activities they're paying for is the screening of movies that encourage young men to think of young women as little more than a means to their gratification. It's all very sad.

RLC

The Angry Vet

Penn State puts out a series of short videos to illustrate for instructors how they might deal with troublesome students. One of these depicts a veteran who's portrayed as unreasonable and angry. Why PSU chose to portray a veteran as "worrisome" is unclear except that possibly Penn State faculty are finding that young men coming back from the war are less docile, pliable and vulnerable to professorial political proselytizing than are their non-vet classmates.

In the last few years I've had a number of students in class who were combat veterans, and their behavior has been exemplary. They do sometimes seem a little amused by some of the views expressed by classmates who haven't experienced much of the world's ugliness, but they've always been polite and conscientious.

Perhaps this hasn't been the experience of Penn State instructors, however. Perhaps there've been numerous cases on the PSU campus of veterans threatening or intimidating teachers. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the makers of the video are simply displaying their own prejudices by drawing on the stereotypes common among people of the left of what veterans are like.

I think one of these explanations is more probable than the other, but I'll let you decide which one you think it is.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

Unilateral Disarmament

President Obama has indicated that we are about to reduce our arsenal of nuclear weapons and suspend our program to develop a system that would enable us to intercept nuclear-armed ICBMs fired at us. Mr. Obama believes, apparently, that the only way to get the rest of the world to give up its nukes is to set an example for them to follow.

But what if, having reduced our preparedness and capability to minimal levels it becomes clear that other countries are not going along, which, of course, they won't. We can't even persuade a fourth-rate power like North Korea to stop its march toward nuclear arms much less cajole a third-rate power like Iran to do so. How are we going to convince China and Russia to give up the weapons that make them both world powers? What incentive could we possibly offer them? Economic aid?

If the President follows through on his proposal to unilaterally disarm he'll place both the U.S. and much of the rest of the world in enormous jeopardy. The bad guys will continue to develop nukes even while pretending to negotiate them away. Gun-rights folks like to say that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. The same holds true for any weapon. When nukes are outlawed only rogue nations will have them, and they'll be much more inclined to use them if no one else is in a position to retaliate. The people who gave us 9/11 would hardly scruple at the detonation of a nuclear device.

Imagine a world in which no western country has nuclear weapons but Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, China, and say, Venezuela, do. Will that be a safer world? If Israel were to give up its nuclear arsenal how long would it remain in existence? If India were to rid itself of these weapons how long would it be before it succumbed to Pakistani blackmail? What would happen to Taiwan if we could no longer trump the Chinese military with superior power? How long would South Korea remain free of North Korean aggression if the Norks had nukes and the South didn't?

Let's be serious about this. If these countries could get the West to disarm by promising to do likewise, they'll promise until their faces turn blue, but they'll give up neither their weapons nor their ambitions. It would be incredible folly to think they would. Experience has taught us that they'd hem and haw, obfuscate and dilate, and effectively confound any attempt to inspect their facilities until it was too late. The only countries that would be honest and open would be Western nations. The rest of the world would do exactly what Iran and North Korea are doing now.

The President insists that he's not naive, but if he thinks that these states are going to forego the opportunity to possess nuclear weapons and the power they confer just because he wants them to, he's worse than naive. He's delusional.

RLC

Another Uninformed Critic

David Harsanyi has a column at the Denver Post that is remarkable for its serendipity. He gets almost everything wrong regarding the recent controversy in Texas about teaching both sides of the debate over evolution and intelligent design and still winds up drawing the correct conclusion.

Harsanyi, like so many commenters before him, confuses ID with creationism, and then blasts creationism, fooling himself into thinking that his criticisms are relevant to ID. He also states, like so many others before him, that IDers are anti-evolution. This is simply false. IDers are anti-Darwinian evolution. They're anti-materialism, not anti-evolution, and indeed many of them are evolutionists of one sort or another themselves.

Despite what critics allege and the popular press thinks, the current controversy is not between ID proponents and evolutionists, it's not between science and religion nor science and faith. It's between advocates of two conflicting metaphysical worldviews. On the one side, deceptively draping itself in the mantle of science, are proponents of materialistic naturalism - the view that only natural, physical causes have operated in the creation of the universe and of life. Those on the other side hold to a version of metaphysical dualism and are convinced that the evidence discovered by science reveals signs of purpose and intelligence behind what we perceive. IDers take no position on how this mind operated, how long ago it designed the world, or whether the mind is that of the God of the Bible or of an inhabitant of some other universe. It simply claims that however the world and life came about in this universe, it wasn't by physical, natural processes and forces alone.

Mr. Harsanyi hasn't yet gotten to the point where he has discovered the significance of this distinction and finds it easier and more polemically effective to just conflate ID and creationism. Nevertheless, he admirably comes out in his essay on the side of teaching students both sides of the controversy, a view Darwinians find abhorrent, and for good reason. They know that once students start learning about the incredibly precise calibration of the cosmic forces and parameters and once they start seeing videos like these, very few of them are going to conclude that this world is just the result of a cosmic belch by blind forces and matter.

Perhaps if Mr. Harsanyi viewed some of this evidence himself he wouldn't make the sorts of uniformed claims that tarnish his column.

RLC

Hitchens Makes His Case

After his book god [sic] Is Not Great was released atheist author Christopher Hitchens urged his literary agent to line him up with opportunities to debate Christian apologists. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens thought that by so-doing he would be facing local televangelists or members of the church's ladies auxillary, but that's not exactly what has happened. He has instead found himself crossing swords with some very bright people, most recently William Lane Craig.

Craig is an accomplished presenter and a premier philosopher and theologian. On April 4th Craig and Hitchens debated the question of whether God exists in front of over four thousand people at Biola University. Reading the live-blog of their exchange was like watching the Harlem Globe Trotters play the hapless Washington Generals. I almost felt sorry for Hitchens who on other matters, like the Iraq war and the Islamic threat, I think is an adept polemicist.

On March 21st Mr. Hitchens had joined several Christian apologists, including Dr. Craig, for a panel discussion at the Christian Book Expo in Texas. In his closing remarks Dr. Craig cautioned Mr. Hitchens that he would need to be better prepared for their up-coming April 4th debate than he was that evening. Apparently Mr. Hitchens declined the advice. The panel discussion, by the way, can be viewed here.

The story is similar whenever anti-theistic writers venture out into an arena where they must defend the claims they make in their books. They find that it's a lot easier to write an attack against theism when no one is defending it than to make a coherent case when an able advocate is present to offer a rebuttal. Their books often generate a great-deal of excitement in the skeptical community, but by the time people have had a chance to examine the arguments they often wonder what it is about them that readers found so compelling (Our critique of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion can be read on our Hall of Fame on the left of this page).

Hitchens wished to advance the claim in the debate last Saturday that God does not exist. Craig defended theism by arguing that there are no good arguments against the assertion that God exists and lots of reasons to think it true. In this debate, in my opinion, Craig's was much the better case, an opinion shared, by the way, even by many of Hitchens' supporters.

UPDATE: Common Sense Atheism to whom the last link directs you, has taken down their post on the debate.

RLC

Bowing and Scraping

You just have to laugh at the major media. Their hypocrisy is so egregious it's humorous. In 1994, according to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, the New York Times chastised then president Clinton for making a slight suggestion of a bow to the Japanese emperor. Now President Obama does a full jackknife in front of a Saudi Arabian dictator, and the Times finds its attention suddenly diverted elsewhere.

This video compares the measure of respect given by our president to the Queen of England, our closest ally, to the deft toe-touch granted a man who would just as soon see all infidels dead if it didn't mean that he'd have no one to buy his oil and protect him from his fellow Arab cutthroats:

A little obsequious, don't you think? I don't know why the President of the United States should bow to a dictator of a country whose only accomplishment is to be situated atop an ocean of oil. I suppose we should be glad he didn't kiss his ring.

RLC

Ten Myths about America

It's not uncommon to hear or read that the United States was founded on an attempt to eradicate Native Americans or that our Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular nation or that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace on the world scene today, etc. Often the claims are made with little or no evidence to support them, but if the person making them seems credible, they're often allowed to go unchallenged.

President Obama's recent claim that America has too often treated Europe with disdain and contempt and failed to recognize European leadership abroad are an example of the sorts of unsubstantiated calumnies that the left often levels at this nation. It's easy to make the accusation, but if it's not backed up with historical evidence then it's little more than empty rhetoric.

At any rate, Michael Medved has decided that some of these claims need to be challenged and he does so in a very useful book entitled Ten Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation. In the book he tackles ten common myths about the United States that have currency in the academy and leftist media, and shows that each is either false or at best unwarranted.

The ten "lies" are these:

• That America was founded on genocide against native Americans.
• That the U.S. is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery and based its wealth on stolen African labor.
• That the Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular rather than a Christian nation.
• That America has always been a multicultural society and that it has been strengthened by its diversity.
• That the power of big business hurts the country and oppresses its people.
• That government programs are the answer for poverty and economic downturns.
• That America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace.
• That we need a third political party.
• That there is a war on the American middle class which is causing many to fall back into poverty.
• That America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline.

I should mention that Medved's treatment of these claims (I think it's a stretch to call some of them "lies." They might better be called errors or myths) is uneven. The chapter on third parties, for example, takes on a decidedly more unpleasant tone than was employed throughout the rest of the book, as if he was personally offended by people who, quixotically perhaps, wanted to offer the country another political alternative. The subsequent chapter on the middle class offers a lot of facts and figures which cause the mind to wander, and is perhaps the least interesting of the ten.

Having said that, though, his treatment of the other myths is well-worth the price of the book. The first chapter, for example, examines the history of the interaction of the white settlers with the Indians and shows how the accounts of deliberate genocide and white atrocities are either unfounded or greatly exaggerated. There is much fascinating history to be learned here.

Exaggeration also seems to be the rhetorical tool of choice when it comes to the American involvement with slavery. Medved argues that as bad as chattel slavery is it's simply false to think that the United States was somehow the key villain in the story. Of all the slaves sold (by fellow Africans, it should be noted) to the western hemisphere, only 3% were shipped to North America. Yet we never hear denunciations of the Central or South American countries for their history of slavery which was far uglier than what took place in this land until ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville points out in his masterful work Democracy in America, so far from being the economic engine that drove American prosperity, slavery played only a minor role in building the American economy and in fact retarded economic progress rather than advance it. Slavery is indeed a great evil, but America should be respected for the tremendous sacrifice our forefathers made to end it. No country in the history of the world has ever done anything like what we did in our Civil War in order to bring an end to the injustice of human bondage.

Aside from the caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to know more about the country in which they live. It'll be an education and a good antidote to the deprecations and denunciations of this country by many of our leftist academics and political leaders.

RLC

Talkers

Talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt explains the value of the medium to America, why the "legacy" media is dying, and also makes a surprisingly good case that conservative talk radio is actually good for President Obama.

There's not much to disagree with in his essay - except his admiration for Sean Hannity whose popularity I simply cannot understand - and it's a piece that should be read by those on both left and right.

RLC

The Blessings of Obesity

According to this article in New Scientist the musical genius of George Friedrich Handel was due to .... obesity and lead poisoning. That's what some Handel experts think anyway.

RLC

Sharing the Wealth

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have embarked upon a policy to tax the rich in order to fund programs that all of us can benefit from. A reader sends me this anecdote, perhaps apocryphal but no matter, that illustrates the problem with Obamanomics:

An economics professor had a class of students who adamantly insisted that the best society was one in which the government taxed the wealthy and gave the money to the poor. The best society was one in which all people were roughly equal in terms of their worldly goods. The professor decided to conduct an experiment with the class to teach them why such schemes always fail.

All grades in the class would henceforth be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little. The second test average, predictably enough, was a D. No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the motivation to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one has an incentive to try, or even want, to succeed.

Maybe we should forward this to the White House.

RLC

Falling into a Black Hole

Ever wonder what it would be like if by some odd set of circumstances you just happened to fall into a black hole? Of course you have. Everyone has. Well, go here and have it explained to you. Meanwhile, here's a quick simulation of the event:

Looks like a wild ride. I'm surprised amusement parks don't have one of these.

RLC

What's a Promise Worth?

What's the value of a politician's word? Breitbart gives us a clue in this report on President Obama's recent tobacco tax hike:

"I can make a firm pledge," [candidate Obama] said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

He repeatedly vowed "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."

Now in office, Obama, who stopped smoking but has admitted he slips now and then, signed a law raising the tobacco tax nearly 62 cents on a pack of cigarettes, to $1.01. Other tobacco products saw similarly steep increases.

This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.

"Listen now," he said in his widely watched nomination acceptance speech, "I will cut taxes-cut taxes-for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class."

An unequivocal "any tax" pledge also was heard in the vice presidential debate, another prominent forum.

"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised," Joe Biden said, "whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax."

Okay, you say. So the Democrats broke their promise, nothing new about that, but people don't have to pay the tax. After all, no one has to smoke. Yes, but suppose everyone stops smoking, or at least many do. The revenue this tax is supposed to raise is to be used to expand medical care coverage for uninsured children. If people stop smoking where will the funding for this program come from?

Those of you making less than $250,000 may be the first to hazard a guess.

RLC

Hitchens Underwater

Christopher Hitchens wades into the Darwinism/Intelligent Design controversy and almost immediately finds himself in philosophical waters quite over his head. Referring to the Texas School Board debate over whether to teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory to school children Hitch writes this:

So by all means let's "be honest with the kids," as Dr. Don McLeroy, the chairman of the Texas education board, wants us to be. The problem is that he is urging that the argument be taught, not in a history or in a civics class, but in a biology class. ... But it would also set a precedent for the sharing of the astronomy period with the teaching of astrology, or indeed of equal time as between chemistry and alchemy. Less boring perhaps, but also much less scientific and less educational.

Well, yes. Much of the debate is over how to interpret biological evidence. Why shouldn't a discussion about biological evidence occur in a biology class?

It's not just that the overwhelming majority of scientists are now convinced that evolution is inscribed in the fossil record and in the lineaments of molecular biology. It is more that evolutionists will say in advance which evidence, if found, would refute them and force them to reconsider. ("Rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer" was, I seem to remember, the response of Prof. J.B.S. Haldane.) Try asking an "intelligent design" advocate to stipulate upfront what would constitute refutation of his world view and you will easily see the difference between the scientific method and the pseudoscientific one.

This is simply not so. I can think of several things that would give pause to most IDers. One would be if procedures similar to the Urey/Miller experiments produced living cells or even just self-replicating molecules. Another would be if plausible pathways (as opposed to nomologically possible pathways) could be adduced to explain how seemingly irreducibly complex structures could have been constructed in a step-by-step fashion with no intelligent input.

At any rate, in the end Hitch comes up with a proposal that almost no Darwinian wants to see adopted:

I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following. First, let the school debating societies restage the wonderful set-piece real-life dramas of Oxford and Dayton, Tenn. Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can't be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?).

Set aside the fact that Mr. Hitchens, like so many other ID critics, still hasn't comprehended that the issue is not about teaching Genesis. Intelligent Design is not creationism. The real problem here is that Hitchens inexcusably perpetuates another myth about this whole debate: This is not a controversy between rival creation stories. It's silly to suggest that if we teach one creation story we have to teach them all. The debate is about this question: Are blind purposeless processes and forces adequate by themselves to account for the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the existence of information-rich living organisms or do the exquisitely precise values of the cosmic parameters and the existence of astonishingly complex biological machines and algorithms point to the need for intelligent input and/or guidance.

That's the question at issue and Mr. Hitchens misses it entirely.

He finishes with a second proposal which I'd love to see adopted:

Second, we can surely demand that the principle of "strengths and weaknesses" will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the "strengths and weaknesses" of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

This proposal for teaching the arguments for and against the existence of a cosmic designer in all state and tax-exempt institutions is one that most IDers would love - and every Darwinian would be horrified - to see implemented. It would be great if both churches and public schools did what Hitchens suggests, but surely Darwinians blanch at the prospect. The works of Voltaire, Hume, Paine, et al. do nothing to challenge the view that the cosmos and life are intelligently designed, and, indeed, several of these worthies themselves believed that there was a designer of the world.

Hitchens seems to think that just because these writers were critical of classical Christianity that they therefore were opposed to the idea of a designer. They were not. Even uber-atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledges, albeit somewhat unguardedly, in the documentary Expelled that there's a case to be made that life on earth is designed by an intelligent agent.

It would be wonderful for students to be exposed to writers on both sides of the debate and allowed to make up their own minds without being indoctrinated by a philosophical school of thought which doesn't suffer any other position to be heard.

RLC

Uh Oh

Those of you who have money in the stock market might be celebrating the recent run that has seen the Dow rise 20.4 percent over the last month. Lest we get carried away, however, the AP's business writer Sarah Lepro, perhaps inadvertently, throws a little cold water on our exuberance.

She notes that the Dow's rise over the last four weeks is "its biggest percentage gain in a four-week period since the spring of 1933." That date sounds ominous. The depression lasted for about another decade after 1933.

RLC

Life among the Lefties

In the manner of the late intrepid Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, Jason Mattera wades out into the fever swamps of left-wingdom to bring back exotic specimens of the lefty fauna endemic to Washington and to show us how these strange creatures think, or don't think:

What's even more frightening than lefties talking about torturing conservatives or forming a military to fight against the bourgoisie or signing petitions to abolish greed is to think that these people probably all vote. I wonder how many of them voted for John McCain.

Anyway, Mattera is hilarious. More of his work can be found by typing in his name on our Search function.

Thanks to Hot Air for posting the videos.

RLC

The Last Thing We Can Tolerate

With the economy dominating all the talk we haven't heard much lately about what is perhaps the greatest challenge Barack Obama faces. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic reminds us that the problem hasn't gone away and in fact is closer to the boiling point now than ever before. That problem is what to do about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Israel's new Prime Minister has given President Obama a choice: either we stop Iran or they will, and the deadline is not years in the future but months:

Netanyahu gave his fullest public explication yet of why he believes President Obama must consider Iran's nuclear ambitions to be his preeminent overseas challenge. "Why is this a hinge of history? Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran's militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they'd force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.

"Third, they would be able to pose a real and credible threat to the supply of oil, to the overwhelming part of the world's oil supply. Fourth, they may threaten to use these weapons or to give them to terrorist proxies of their own, or fabricate terror proxies. Finally, you'd create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area-nearly all the Arab regimes are dead-set opposed to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. They fervently hope, even if they don't say it, that the U.S. will act to prevent this, that it will use its political, economic, and, if necessary, military power to prevent this from happening."

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Netanyahu asserted, Washington's Arab allies would drift into Iran's orbit.

Not only would many of them, including Iraq, cozy up to Iran, but those which could afford it would seek to purchase their own nuclear weapons to counter the Iranian threat.

The last thing the world can tolerate is a nuclear Iran. The question is what will President Obama do to prevent it from happening.

RLC

How Much Power?

A little humor from Michael Ramirez to cap off the month:

I wonder how far President Obama is going to go with this exercise of his power. Is everyone who manages an institution which takes federal money going to be subject to being fired by the White House? What about schools and colleges? Are their administrators under Obama's thumb? What about employees of towns and cities that are recipients of federal largesse?

How much power will the President arrogate to himself before the people stand up and say "that's enough?"

RLC

The Basic Difference

Here's a quick quiz: How would you describe the fundamental difference between modern liberals (progressives) and modern conservatives?

Perhaps one way to answer this is to note how each group would answer another question:

Should government be empowered to regulate our lives to maximize the common good or should it be limited to protecting citizens from encroachments upon their basic freedoms?

Which of these two views did you think our Founders had in mind?

Progressives believe the role of government is to use its power to ensure that the greatest good is done for the greatest number of people. They hold that the greatest benefit is realized when everyone has a roughly equal share of the world's resources and that it is the role of government to bring this about, even if that means taking from those who have and giving to those who don't. To progressives, opposition to this view is a sign of greed and selfishness.

Conservatives maintain that that is not at all what our Founders intended. The men who established this nation, and most of those who followed them, believed that the purpose of the government they established was to guarantee the freedoms articulated in the Declaration of Independence and especially the Bill of Rights, and to protect these from the encroachments of all who would take them away, both foreign and domestic. The progressive view, most conservatives would argue, leads ultimately to tyranny.

Chances are if you hold to the first view you're a Democrat and if you hold to the second you're a Republican.

Right now, the first view is prevailing.

RLC

One in Ten Chinese

The British TimesOnline has a story about the amazing struggle and growth of the Chinese church:

A murmur of "Amen" echoes softly down a corridor in a luxury Beijing hotel. Dozens of young Chinese are gathered in a beige-carpeted conference room to listen to the word of God. After helping themselves to hot water or tea at the back of the room, they find a seat and chatter with friends. They tuck Louis Vuitton and Prada handbags under their seats, switch their mobile phones to silent and turn to listen to a young woman who takes the microphone to ask for silence and recite a prayer.

A casually dressed, grey-haired Chinese man takes to the podium. "Let us begin with a look at the Gospel of Saint John." There is a rustling of pages as converts and curious open their Bibles. Almost everyone in the room is scarcely a day over 30. Most look as if they are in their early twenties. They are fashionably dressed - girls with high-heeled boots, men sporting trendy knitted hats. This is Friday night Bible class in Beijing. And it is a weekend venue of choice for growing numbers of well-off middle-class city sophisticates.

The fact that this class is technically illegal, run by pastors lacking approval from the state-sanctioned Protestant church, is not the attraction. These are not young people seeking a frisson of excitement from some underground activity. They are at the forefront of a movement sweeping China - the search for spiritual satisfaction now that Marx is démodé.

No attempt is made to conceal what is, in effect, an underground religious gathering. A sign in Chinese outside the conference room reads: "Hill of Golgotha Church meeting". A board outside the hotel lift directs visitors to Hall 5. There is not a nod towards secrecy or even discretion. There is no sense of anxiety, let alone fear, that officials could burst in to break up this illegal assembly even though police do still frequently raid house churches run by underground Protestant pastors.

In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism - a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China's only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China's 1.3 billion souls.

Recent surveys calculate the number of Christians worshipping independently of the State churches in China to be as high as 100 million. That means that almost one in every ten Chinese may now be a Christian, making Christianity bigger than the 74 million-member Communist Party.

These one in ten are not, presumably, tepid about their faith like, say, many mainline protestants and Catholics in America. These are people who realize they could very well pay a terrible price for attending a worship service. Yet they come.

There's an interesting irony in this. While Christianity seems to be flickering out in those regions of the globe where it held sway for almost 2000 years and where there's been no real social or political cost for affiliating with a church, it's exploding in places like China, where the faithful could be imprisoned, beaten, or otherwise sanctioned. It's also burgeoning in Africa and elsewhere in the third world countries that girdle the southern hemisphere.

Such news doubtless moves people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to reach for the Maalox.

RLC

Re: Presidential Trends, Etc.

Jeff writes to add some insights of his own to the post titled Presidential Trends. Here's part of what he says:

...two candidates that fit all of these characteristics better than both Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal are Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty (both of which are younger than Jeb Bush anyway). Both of these men served as Governors and both are very open about being Evangelical Christians. Both are down to earth and were popular in each of their bluish states (Arkansas and Minnesota). Both reached out to those outside of their own party and worked together to find positive solutions to problems and got a lot accomplished despite the opposing party in their states' legislatures. I think that a candidate such as Huckabee or Pawlenty would be a fresh new face for the GOP and could attract voters outside of the far right and rather than focusing on negativity and what the other party is doing wrong, they would focus on coming up with solutions and making progress.

The rest of Jeff's e-mail can be read on the Feedback Page.

Another reader wrote to take issue with the tone of an article by Keith Pavlischek that we discussed a few weeks ago. That letter is also on the Feedback Page.

RLC

The Problem of the Self

A.C. Grayling at New Scientist discusses a little of the history of an interesting metaphysical problem. The problem lies in trying to ascertain exactly what it is we are referring to when we talk about the self. What is the self? Who is the I or me to which I refer when I use these words? If it's just the body, as materialists believe, then what is it about us that perdures through time and makes us the same self from one point in time to the next?

Grayling writes:

After John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life.

Belief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy.

In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self.

The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them.

Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the Enlightenment dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it.

Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis.

So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And ... that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results.

The disconcerting results consist primarily in the inability of materialist philosophers to identify anything other than the physical body that would constitute a self. If we have a mind or a soul then presumably it is that, or could be that, which comprises the essential "me," but for modern materialists who have no room in their ontological cupboard for immaterial substances, nothing remains but to conclude that we are simply a mobile pile of carbon and a few other elements. These chemicals are in constant flux so the self is constantly shifting and changing. There's nothing upon which to base a belief that I am the same person I remember being ten years ago.

T.S. Eliot put it this way: "What we know of other people is just our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....At every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

If this is the case several awkward conclusions follow. In the first place there's no sense in which I can be held responsible for what was done by an individual who had my name and social security number ten years ago. It wasn't me. I cannot be held responsible for promises, contracts, crimes, or anything, for that matter, any more than I could be held responsible to keep a promise made by you.

Another thing that follows from the materialist view of man is that if there really is no self then there's no intrinsic human worth, no dignity, no significance to the individual, or indeed to humanity as a whole. We're simply a couple of scoops of gooey organic molecules, and there's not much value to goo.

Of course, once society comes to recognize and accept this unfortunate idea it will be no time at all before holocausts start looming right around every corner.

Ideas, especially metaphysical ideas, have consequences.

RLC

Bristol and Ashley

It'd be a terrible shame if the allegations of a tape of Joe Biden's daughter using cocaine really exists. I'm sure it would be a source of anguish for Biden and his wife, and it's beneath contempt that someone made it and is trying to shop the tape around. I'm frankly very reluctant to talk about it and prefer that this sort of thing just be ignored.

However, there's a point about this that needs to be made. Vice-president Biden has, to his credit, been a leader in the war on drugs, created the Drug Czar post and sponsored much anti-drug legislation. Thus the problems his daughter is allegedly having must be especially painful, and we should all be sympathetic, but this leads me to my point.

When word came out that Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant and unmarried the media and many Democrats richly, and publicly, enjoyed the irony of the daughter refusing to abide by the values of the mother. Bristol Palin's story was all over the media. Some outlets even ran unsubstantiated allegations that Sarah's mentally retarded child was really Bristol's. Then, even after the election was over, the media came back to get in a few more kicks to the Palins' ribs when Bristol and the baby's father broke up. The whole episode was very sad and quite contemptible, but that didn't hinder gleeful reporters from doing their worst to gloat over every detail.

Now the shoe may be on the other political foot, but you'll probably not hear much about Ashley Biden on the six o'clock news, nor should you. But then you shouldn't have heard much about Bristol Palin, either. A principled reluctance on the part of journalists and political operatives to embarrass the families of our public figures is only principled if it's a courtesy extended to all of our public figures and not just those on the side we want to see win.

RLC