Shameful Racial Legacy

Damon Root at discusses the attempt by Chip Berlet to link the opposition to Obamacare to white, right-wing racism:

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: "For over 100 years-more like 150, you've had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it's rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back."

Root is having none of it, however. If Berlet wants to go back 100 years to examine the history of racism in this country what he'll find is that it was largely a phenomenon of the left. Root provides chapter and verse:

Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina's Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of "unregulated capitalism" while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that "came out of the Civil War" to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again." It's hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that-and Tillman is obviously nobody's idea of a libertarian.

In fact, as the historian David Southern has documented, the worst evils of the South's Jim Crow regime, including segregation, disfranchisement, mob violence, and lynching, all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism."

In a separate post, Root's review of Southern's book titled The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917 provides excellent insight into the virulence of white racism during the Progressive era. Writing of Southern's book Root asks:

How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? [Southern's] answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. "At college," Southern notes, "budding progressives not only read expos�s of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science."

Popular titles included Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast(1900) and R.W. Shufeldt's The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of "race suicide," the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.

Such thinking, which emphasized "expert" opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed "the working man," "the common man," or "the people," he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.

Throughout the post-civil war era the greatest impediment to the advance of the black man, especially in the South, was the Democratic party and Progressive infatuations with social Darwinism and eugenics. It's one of the ironies of our times that modern liberals are so eager to identify themselves as Progressives and that approximately 95% of African-Americans who voted in the last election voted for the most Progressive Congress and White House since Franklin Roosevelt - maybe since Woodrow Wilson.

One wonders how aware either liberals or African-Americans are of the history of twentieth century Progressivism in this country, not only the ugliness of its racism but also of its links to European fascism. If they are aware then their willingness to identify themselves with people who push the Progressive agenda is really puzzling.

In any event, it's important that we learn the lessons of history, philosopher George Santayana famously admonished, because if we don't we're just doomed to repeat them.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The Value of Argument

What use, we sometimes wonder, are arguments? People are rarely persuaded by them to accept something they're not already disposed to believe so why bother? People who disbelieve in God, for example, don't often change their mind because they've heard someone effectively argue the opposite position.

This is probably because disbelief is not usually a consequence of a lack of proof in, or evidence for, God's existence. More often it's due to either a bad experience with Christians or the church, an incredulity over the doctrine of Christian exclusivism, the prevalence of suffering and terror in the world, or a simple desire that Christianity not be true and that God not exist. As such it's not something that can be changed by appeals to a person's reason.

For most people, believers and unbelievers alike, faith is a matter of the heart, not the head. It's rarely arrived at, or decided upon, on rational grounds. People are drawn to faith through their hearts or they reject it because their hearts are closed to it. People are moved more by story, song, film, testimonial, and what they see in other people's lives than they are, say, by Anselm's ontological argument.

For a man to be convinced of an idea or a truth, his heart needs to be persuaded, and, it's important to note, the head will always follow the heart. But arguments are useless with the heart, they only appeal to the head. Since the heart is the gate to the head, if the heart is closed no argument will ever compel the head to accept it. On the other hand, if the heart is sold on an idea anyway, then arguments aren't necessary. In most human beings the heart is the master. The head is merely an advisor that submits to the will of the heart.

Thus arguments aren't of much use to people who are unwilling to accept the conclusion that God is real. A person who doesn't want a particular idea to be true, whose heart is closed to it, will not be persuaded no matter how compelling the argument. He'll always find some way to evade its force and reject the idea.

Yet arguments are not without value. Arguments can strengthen the faith of those who already believe and they can blow away intellectual smokescreens that skepticism often hides behind. Most importantly, perhaps, they can alter the intellectual ambiance of a culture so that the assumption that Christianity is intellectually disreputable is no longer prevalent among young people. Arguments can shape the culture so that whether people accept their conclusions or not they live and move in an environment in which they know that belief can no longer be credibly portrayed as irrational. Indeed, arguments can so influence the larger culture that people accept that belief is even the most rational option, even if they don't always submit to the realization.

There are good reasons to believe that God exists and that Christianity is true, but the person who doesn't want to accept those beliefs, whose heart is already dead set against them, will, like a man who can look at the sky at noon on a clear day and claim not to see the sun, fail to see those reasons.

Even so, most people who have watched the debates between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens or have read the work of any number of Christian philosophers and apologists will, whatever conclusions they eventually draw for their own lives, have a very difficult time holding on to the notion that being a theist is somehow for fools, dunces, and old people.

RLC

Somethin's Happenin' Here

Did you ever notice how, at family gatherings, the older folks sometimes seem to just sit quietly while the conversation and activity swirls around them? I'm beginning to understand why older people sometimes just feel "out of it," and according to this video it's not going to get any easier for them:

As impressive as all this is, I can't escape the feeling that any medium which reduces communication to a series of single words or sentence fragments, as happens on Twitter, for example, is not a good thing. Banal and trivial dialogue where no real thinking is taking place can't be good for one's mental development.

Of course, it's reactionary notions like this which are sure to render people who hold them completely irrelevant, and not just at family gatherings.

RLC

Re: We're Right Because You're an Idiot

Byron issues a plea that we point out the ugly rhetoric emanating from both sides of our political debates and not just what's coming from the left. His email is on the Feedback page.

His concern is a fair one, but as I replied to him, I'm just not hearing consequential people on the right, except for some talk radio hosts whom I have criticized in this space on more than one occasion, using the sort of invective that Paul Begala and others are using. Begala called Sarah Palin, for example, "half a whack job" because she espied the possibility of "death panels" in HR 3200. I haven't heard anyone use that kind of language to describe Mr. Obama, but maybe I'm just not tuned in to it.

I therefore invite any of our readers who would like to participate in what we'll call a "civility patrol" to submit any instances of incivility that you encounter from people who are leaders in their parties or in the media to our Feedback page, and we'll post the results. The examples can be from conservatives or liberals, it doesn't matter.

RLC

Back to the Future?

A lot of Americans are growing increasingly vocal in expressing their concerns about the ideological direction of the current administration. Some few have even peered out ahead of the trajectory and espied "Nazism" skulking about on the horizon. This seems to me to be unfair, hyperbolic, and ahistorical (I note in passing, though, that no one on the left seemed to mind when George Bush was compared to Hitler by people on the left). The Nazis were first and foremost blood and soil nationalists, bent on militarism, conquest, and, in the early 1940s, genocide. One has to have a very vivid imagination to discern those particular themes in anything President Obama has said or done.

That doesn't mean, however, that there's no reason for concern that modern progressivism, of which President Obama is the avatar, bears an eerie similarity to patterns and traits which typified other versions of twentieth century fascism, of which the Nazi party was an extreme type. The concern arises, firstly, because of the historical fact that prior to WWII American progressives and European fascists, particularly Italian fascists, enjoyed a cozy philosophical relationship.

But the apprehensions are made more acute by a number of disturbing developments on our domestic political scene that collectively sound a note that has been historically discordant with the ideals of political freedom. We have in the past year witnessed, for example, the apotheosis of a charismatic leader by a worshipful media; an inexplicable rush to pass opaque legislation that would vastly expand the role of government in our lives; and a menage a trois between big business, big finance and big government.

The perception has grown that we're being misled about the purpose of major legislation, and that health care reform would subsidize death, both early and late. We've seen our President select as advisors several men who are radical advocates of either population control, euthansia and/or eugenics. We've been alarmed by the President's weird call during the campaign for a civilian defense force as well-trained and well-funded as the military and by attempts by some in our government to intimidate, silence, and demonize those in the media who oppose them.

Together these developments have engendered deep concern among a lot of Americans, an uneasiness that's been exacerbated by the President's nebulous vow to "fundamentally change America" and the failure of his administration to keep its promise to allow ample time for the public to review and debate its legislative proposals. The confidence originally reposed in Barack Obama by the American people and the willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt on his radical past associates and associations have been eroded by the fact that so many Democrats, and the President himself, were prepared to pass a massive arrogation of power by the federal government in the form of health care reform before they, or almost anyone else, even knew what was in the bill.

All of this is very troubling to those who value personal liberty and the lessons of history because so much of it has happened before. Most of the items listed above were associated with totalitarianisms and tyrannies of various stripes which plagued the twentieth century. Mr. Obama might sincerely recoil from any suggestion that he would want to retrace that history, but the fact is that, whether intentionally or not, much of what he says and does is an echo of it. The growing fear that once his policies are implemented they'll make it much easier for his successors to impose increasingly greater control over people's lives is genuine and largely salutary. It's rooted in the same skepticism that Americans have always had for big government going all the way back to the Founding Fathers' experience with the oppression of King George III.

It may be that concerns about the political themes and direction of our country will turn out eventually to be incorrect, but, given the evidence at this point in time, they certainly seem warranted, reasonable and prudent.

RLC

Atheism and the Future

Atheists often claim to be more rational than theists. They claim to base their lives on reason rather than faith, but they don't. What reason, for example, does an atheist have for arguing that we should preserve the earth's beauty and resources for future generations? What reason is there for caring what happens to the earth after we are gone from it? Would it be immoral for the present generation to use up everything and leave nothing for those who come after? Why, on the assumption of atheism, would it?

According to the atheist all we have is our own life. There's absolutely no reason why we should care about anyone else. We may care about others, of course, but if we don't why is that wrong?

The atheist may respond that we shouldn't leave our descendents bereft because we wouldn't have wanted that done to us. Of course we wouldn't, but that's no reason why we shouldn't do it to someone else. In other words, if there is no God, there is just no reason why we shouldn't live for ourselves. Atheism can give no reason why egoism is wrong except to say that it just is.

That doesn't sound to me like a very rational reason.

RLC

Confusion and Paradox

The Gallup organization has found something very puzzling:

According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states--including President Obama's home state of Illinois--even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.

"In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4," said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.

What are we to conclude from this paradox? Perhaps people either don't understand what it means to be conservative/liberal or they don't understand what it means to be Republican/Democrat. In any case, I think it shows that any politician who thinks that because he won an election he has a mandate to implement an ideological agenda is making a big mistake. Chances are, people voted for him because he was taller or better looking or more charming or a better speaker than his opponent or maybe because their friends were voting for the guy. I'm guessing, of course, but I doubt that very many people, even among those who take the trouble to vote, really have any idea who a candidate is or what he's going to do once elected.

That may be why, when President Obama sought to implement pretty much what he promised in the campaign that he'd do, he was reportedly taken by surprise at the public reaction and resistance. He thought people voted for him to do what he's doing, but many people voted for him for reasons completely unrelated to policy.

It's very discouraging.

RLC

Re: The Heavens Declare

Mike writes regarding yesterday's post titled The Heavens Declare to share with us a quote from C.S. Lewis:

It's hard to imagine a more fitting response to the writer of the article you posted on Hubble Telescope than the words of C.S. Lewis in Miracles:

"If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, then small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain...

To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the universe would be simply unintelligible. It is therefore from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. Men of sensibility look upon the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not...For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them."

Good stuff.

RLC

Ruse on the New Atheists

Philosopher Michael Ruse takes the "New Atheists" to the woodshed and gives them a good thrashing in a short essay at Belief.Net. Ruse is himself an atheist but he holds the quaint idea that atheists and believers can still respect each other and even like each other even as they disagree with each other's ideas. He also argues that the new atheists are hurting the cause of science in America. Here are a couple of paragraphs to give you the gist:

Let me say that I believe the new atheists do the side of science a grave disservice. I will defend to the death the right of them to say what they do - as one who is English-born one of the things I admire most about the USA is the First Amendment. But I think first that these people do a disservice to scholarship. Their treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant. (He was just this when, thirty years ago, Mary Midgeley went after the selfish gene concept without the slightest knowledge of genetics.) Conversely, I am indignant at the poor quality of the argumentation in Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and all of the others in that group.

Secondly, I think that the new atheists are doing terrible political damage to the cause of Creationism fighting. Americans are religious people. You may not like this fact. But they are. Not all are fanatics. Survey after survey shows that most American Christians (and Jews and others) fall in the middle on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as well as on science. They want to be science-friendly, although it is certainly true that many have been seduced by the Creationists. We evolutionists have got to speak to these people. We have got to show them that Darwinism is their friend not their enemy. We have got to get them onside when it comes to science in the classroom. And criticizing good men like Francis Collins, accusing them of fanaticism, is just not going to do the job. Nor is criticizing everyone, like me, who wants to build a bridge to believers - not accepting the beliefs, but willing to respect someone who does have them....

Most importantly, the new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of the schools. The First Amendment does not ban the teaching of bad science in publicly funded schools. It bans the teaching of religion. That is why it is crucial to argue that Creationism, including its side kick IDT, is religion and not just bad science. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If teaching "God exists" is teaching religion - and it is - then why is teaching "God does not exist" not teaching religion? Obviously it is teaching religion. But if science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment. Perhaps indeed teaching Darwinism is implicitly teaching atheism. This is the claim of the new atheists. If this is so, then we shall have to live with it and rethink our strategy about Creationism and the schools. The point is however that the new atheists have lamentably failed to prove their point, and excoriating people like me who show the failure is (again) not very helpful.

....I have written elsewhere that The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.

I think Ruse is wrong about Intelligent Design, of course, but he's a good man, a lapsed Quaker who still retains much that is admirable about the Quaker people, and I appreciate and admire his tone and openness.

RLC

We're Right Because You're an Idiot

It's getting tiresome hearing political hit-men like Paul Begala and others mocking Sarah Palin for suggesting on her website that the Democrats' health reform proposals would include "death panels" that would decide whether people suffering from severe disabilities, terminal illness, or advanced age would be eligible for major medical care.

Yesterday morning our Sunday paper carried a piece by a staff columnist calling people who believed such things "bat-guano insane," "charlatans," "nuts," and "lunatics." According to this writer the idea of death panels is "idiocy," and Sarah Palin is suffering from a "paranoid delusion rattling around in her empty skull." Of course, the only counter he offered to Palin's claim, when he wasn't shooting off personal insults like a fireworks finale, was to cite a minor error of fact by a misinformed writer at Investor's Business Daily and one or two fuzzy questions and accusations that emerged among the many town hall meetings held over the last couple of weeks. In other words, our columnist denied vehemently and viciously that the proposed legislation really provided for Palin's "death panels," but he never gave his readers any reason to believe that it didn't.

Maybe this was because the fear that the legislation would allow for such panels is grounded not in paranoia but in the President's own words. In an interview last April with the New York Times the President was talking about the story of his terminally ill grandmother who had hip replacement surgery so that she would not be bed-ridden for the last year of her life. Here's what he said:

PRESIDENT: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

NYT: So how do you - how do we deal with it?

PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

As of last April the President certainly seemed to be talking about some sort of group (Okay. He didn't use the words "death panel") which would make the kind of decisions that Ms Palin was concerned about. Why is it "bat-guano insane" to think that the President meant what he said?

Other commentators, no friends of Sarah Palin in particular or conservatives in general, have come to the same conclusion:

Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast, Charles Lane, editor of The Washington Post, and columnist Eugene Robinson at the WaPo have all held their noses and acknowledged that Palin was right. Are they also insane?

Indeed, the writers of the bill were so concerned that the language of the legislation was compatible with Palin's interpretation that they decided to strike it from the original bill. Were they crazy?

It would be helpful in this very important matter if the defenders of the current health reform legislation would just answer the many incisive questions that are being asked about it and address the problems being raised by it. It's harder than just calling them names, it requires more effort, but it'd also be a lot more instructive and persuasive.

RLC

The Heavens Declare

Bradlaugh at Secular Right posts this marvelous video based on the Hubble Deep Field photo, but he draws from it an odd conclusion:

He writes:

I have heard Heather (MacDonald) say that she has never been afflicted with any musings about the significance of human consciousness, or the place of humanity in the universe. (I hope I am not misquoting her.) I can't say the same. Images like this fill me with wonder, with something quite close to terror, and with something considerably closer to despair.

They also of course make the notion of a loving god with a particular interest in humanity, seem pretty darn ridiculous.

Just how does the fact that the universe is huge make the idea of a personal God who cares about us ridiculous? Is God's concern for humanity somehow contingent upon the size of the universe? Does your love for your children depend on the size of your house?

Cosmologists have demonstrated that in order for life to appear anywhere in the universe - given that the universe began in a big bang - the universe has to be about as old as it is and thus as big as it is (since it's been expanding since its origin).

It also has to have about the precise amount of mass/energy that it does, in fact, contain. More or less matter and the universe would have either collapsed or blown itself apart long ago.

In other words, if God created the universe as a home for humans, and did so along the lines that modern cosmology has elucidated, then in order for us to exist on this tiny speck, everything else must be almost exactly as it is to a breathtakingly precise order of magnitude. In order to create us God had to create the whole universe, all 100 billion galaxies. They are there so that we can be here.

Like Bradlaugh, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer size of the world, but unlike him I feel the opposite of terror and despair. The thought that God cares so much for us that, like a man who lavishes everything He can upon His beloved, He fills the whole of space with marvels beyond our imagining fills me with a sense of confidence and awe.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Wind Turbine Mortality

As the Obama administration pushes for clean energy one possible source would be wind farms with dozens or even hundreds of wind turbines. These might be thought to be environmentally friendly, although they're aesthetic eyesores, since they don't have any perceptible impact on the land and don't generate any pollution. They do have an important downside, though, as this article from the American Bird Conservancy explains:

Recent U.S. studies indicate that bird mortality at wind turbine projects varies from less than one bird/turbine/year to as high as 7.5 birds/per turbine/year. This means that between 10,000 and 40,000 birds may be killed each year at wind farms across the country - about 80% of which are songbirds, and 10% may be birds of prey. While not a large figure, local or regional impacts may be significant, and the rate of increase in turbine construction has conservationists concerned that new generators be built to standards that minimize the potential for bird kills. Bats are also subject to high mortality at wind farms frequently at considerably higher rates than birds.

The increasing number of proposals for new projects has stimulated discussion on the need for proper siting, operation, and monitoring guidelines or regulations to prevent, or at least keep to a minimum, avian and bat mortality.

Before construction of new wind farms, detailed studies should be conducted to assess the potential impact on birds, bats, and other wildlife. Sites known to be used by birds and bats listed under the Endangered Species Act should be avoided if the construction and operation of wind plants might adversely affect these species, as should locating turbines in known local bird migration pathways, in areas where birds are highly concentrated, or in areas or landscape features known to attract large numbers of raptors.

So I wonder if the following isn't a plausible scenario. President Obama gets cap and trade and wipes out the coal industry as he admitted his policy would do (see here). Entrepreneuers then try to get into the wind farm business, but they find that because of the effect of turbines on wildlife few of their siting proposals can pass EPA muster. So now we have no coal generated electricity and no wind generated electricity. Then what? Relax EPA standards? Build nuclear plants? Fat chance of that as long as the Democrats control the approval process.

What's most likely, it seems to me, is that electricity will get rationed just like medical care. You'll only be able to use it during certain hours of the day and in certain amounts. Kiss that air-conditioner good-bye, hope and change are cool enough all by themselves.

RLC

Interesting Disparity

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a study of scientists and their religious beliefs. Some of the results were expected and some were a bit surprising.

Whereas most Americans (83%) profess a belief in God, just a third (33%) of scientists say they hold such a belief. There's nothing unexpected there since those figures have been around for a while. What was a surprise, though, was the finding that younger scientists are substantially more likely than their older counterparts to say they believe in God. Forty two percent of scientists (or students studying to be scientists) between the ages of 18 and 34 claim to be theists, but only 28% of those over 65 make that claim.

I don't know what this portends for the future of theistic belief among the nation's scholars, but I would like to see if these numbers are similar across other disciplines. Assuming these survey results accurately reflect the state of theistic belief among contemporary scientists, I'd also like to know what's happening in the culture that's responsible for the disparity between the younger generation of scientists and their elders. Any ideas?

RLC

Does She Or Doesn't She?

Does Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appreciate disrupters or does she not? I guess it all depends on who's doing the disrupting (via Hot Air):

Since Speaker Pelosi also seemed shocked that someone was sporting a swastika at one recent town meeting, although this was never confirmed, I'll bet she was apoplectic at the demonstrations against President Bush that took place throughout his presidency in her very own district. I seem to remember, in fact, her fiery speeches denouncing the protestors whose photos appear here. I think I recall her outrage that people in her district would resort to such despicable tactics and ugly rhetoric. Or maybe I'm just hallucinating from being up too late and awake too long.

RLC

Why No Supermarkets?

An article at CNN raises disturbing questions. The piece addresses the predicament those who live in Detroit face as unemployment in the state continues to rise and fewer families have the money to buy food. It goes on to talk about how social agencies and volunteers from churches and parachurch organizations are working to meet the need (I didn't see any mention of the help being offered by the local secular humanist society, but, I hasten to add, that doesn't mean they're not doing anything.).

Anyway, the disturbing part was this paragraph:

"In this recession-racked town, the lack of food is a serious problem. It's a theme that comes up again and again in conversations in Detroit. There isn't a single major chain supermarket in the city, forcing residents to buy food from corner stores. Often less healthy and more expensive food."

Now why is that? Why would supermarket chains not exploit a market niche that they exploit in every other city and suburb in the nation? I'm sure someone will say that it must be racism, but of course that's absurd. Why Detroit and not Chicago? Or is the lack of supermarkets in cities more widespread than the article indicates?

Whatever the case, the urban poor are caught in a vicious cycle. They are poor, sometimes, because they can't find jobs. Because they're impoverished their communities are subject to all the dysfunctions often associated with poverty, including lousy education, crime, and feral fatherhood. Because their communities are ridden with crime and populated by uneducated, unskilled workers, businesses don't want to operate there. Because businesses don't locate in poor neighborhoods, the residents can't find employment and thus are poor.

What's the solution? The strongest predictor that a person will have weak education, turn to crime, and be economically poor is not having a father. When urban communities realize that fatherlessness is a blight on their neighborhoods and a curse upon their children perhaps pressure will mount on women to hold off having children until they're married and men will realize that if they want what women can give they have to be committed to a monogamous relationship. Until that day comes we'll not solve the problem of poverty in America no matter how much the government redistributes the nation's wealth.

RLC

New National Park

Some people think I never say anything nice about liberalism, but that's not true. I might not be able to remember when the last time was that I said anything nice about it, but I'm sure I did. One area, for instance, in which I think liberalism has it all over conservatism (although it really shouldn't be this way), is, ironically enough, the matter of conservation. I applaud President Clinton for preserving vast tracts of the southwest, President Bush for preserving vast tracts of ocean habitat, and now Senator Carper and Vice-President Biden for working to preserve Delaware's historical and natural heritage in a new National Park:

It's been a long time since tiny Delaware distinguished itself as it did way back in 1787 when state fathers huddling at Dover's Golden Fleece Tavern became the first to ratify the Constitution. Now, more than two centuries later, Delaware is back as the state of firsts. And not just because Joe Biden is the first vice president from Delaware. The mid-Atlantic coastal state could finally get its first national park, a goal championed by Biden in the 1990s. And he's now in a position to make sure it happens.

Delaware doesn't have what most national parks do-vast acreage. But at the suggestion of First State citizens, Interior is looking at a unique model that would connect historical and cultural landmarks in a collection of spoke and hub patterns, like a bike. "A hub with spokes leading to maybe the Golden Fleece Tavern where the Constitution was first debated and ratified in 1787," suggests Senator Tom Carper. "Or the spokes could lead to stops on the Underground Railroad."

Legislation is required, but with the support of Biden and [Secretary of the Interior] Salazar, says Carper, "I like our chances."

Details of the Park's unique design can be read here. Kudos to both Joe Biden and Tom Carper for their contribution to this effort. Why is it that more conservatives aren't interested in conserving our natural and historical treasures?

RLC

Materialism Isn't Science

There's a piece, in the LA Times, written by atheists, taking their fellow atheists to task for trying so strenuously to persuade people that science and religious belief are not only incompatible, but that science has shown religious belief to be empty:

This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution," as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins' new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America's anti-evolutionists. These religious adherents often view science itself as an assault on their faith and doggedly refuse to accept evolution because they fear it so utterly denies God that it will lead them, and their children, straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness. An in-your-face atheist touting evolution, like Dawkins, is probably the last messenger they'll heed.

Dawkins will, however, be championed by many scientists, especially the most secular -- those who were galvanized by "The God Delusion" and inspired by it to take a newly confrontational approach toward America's religious majority. They will help ensure Dawkins another literary success. It's certainly valuable to have the case for evolution articulated prominently and often, but what this unending polarization around evolution and religion does for the standing of science in the U.S. is a very different matter.

It often appears as though Dawkins and his followers -- often dubbed the New Atheists, though some object to the term -- want to change the country's science community in a lasting way. They'd have scientists and defenders of reason be far more confrontational and blunt: No more coddling the faithful, no tolerating nonscientific beliefs. Scientific institutions, in their view, ought to stop putting out politic PR about science and religion being compatible.

What people like Dawkins are doing is actually intellectually dishonest for at least two reasons. First, in The God Delusion Dawkins argues that the proposition God exists is a scientifically testable claim. If so, how can he now argue that propositions about ultimate reality are not scientific? Secondly, some of the "New Atheists" confuse people about what science is by conflating the practice of science with a metaphysical position held by many atheistic scientists called materialism.

Science is a search for truth that relies on testing theories about the physical world by observing how well those hypothetical explanations conform to the empirical evidence. As such, science, ironically perhaps, can provide us reasons for thinking that the universe is in fact the product of a transcendent mind, but no matter how much we learn about the cosmos, science will never be able to conclude that God does not, or even probably does not, exist. Once a scientist starts making claims like that he's no longer doing science, he's doing metaphysics.

Scientists, qua scientists, simply cannot say that there is no Creator or that miracles are impossible. On questions like these scientists must follow Wittgenstein's dictum that "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should be silent." Scientists assume in their day to day work that physical phenomena will have physical, natural, proximal causes just as everyone assumes that the events that occur in their everyday lives have causes that could, in principle, at least, be observed. This is called methodological or procedural materialism. It's simply the assumption that, in general, things in our experience can be expected to follow physical laws. This procedural assumption has nothing to do with whether God exists or whether metaphysical materialism is true.

Atheists, however, are metaphysical materialists. That is, they believe that matter is the fundamental reality and that nature is all there is (also called naturalism). There is no room in their worldview for a supernatural reality. Now both materialism and naturalism are incompatible with theism, so what people like Dawkins do, is conflate metaphysical materialism with methodological materialism so that the unwary reader doesn't realize that a bait and switch has occurred. In other words, they piggyback their metaphysical materialism onto science and argue that because science has shown that many phenomena have material proximal explanations that therefore there are no immaterial ultimate explanations. At this point he's no longer speaking as a scientist but as a philosopher, even though he's using his standing as a scientist to authorize his metaphysics.

It's a kind of shell game that they play, they know they're playing it, and it's fundamentally disingenuous.

RLC

Ugly Protests

This is just insane. Ed Schultz says on national television that he thinks conservative talk show hosts want to see Barack Obama shot. Why does he say such a horrible thing? Is it because conservatives believe he's destroying the country's economic foundations? For liberals like Schultz it is apparently nothing short of a hate crime to disagree with the President on policy. Schultz is far from alone. Nancy Pelosi calls dissenters Nazis and UnAmerican. Others have called them "mobs" and racists.

What short memories these people have. As Bill Sammon at Fox News reminds us nothing that any opponent of the Democrats' health care plans has said or done is anywhere near what the left did during the Bush years. Sammon refreshes our memories about some of what went on during the Bush presidency that neither the Democrats nor the media at the time deemed deserving of even a mention, let alone censure:

News outlets that are focusing on the incendiary rhetoric of conservatives outside President Obama's town hall meeting Tuesday ignored the incendiary rhetoric -- and even violence -- of liberals outside an appearance by former President George W. Bush in 2002.

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting "Bush is a terrorist!", the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush's assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

"BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE," read the placard, which had an X over the word "ALIVE."

Another poster showed Bush's face with the words: "F--- YOU, MOTHERF---ER!"

A third sign urged motorists to "HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH." A fourth declared: "CHRISTIAN FASCISM," with a swastika in place of the letter S in each word.

Although reporters from numerous national news organizations were traveling with Bush and witnessed the protest, none reported that protesters were shrieking at Republican donors epithets like "Slut!" "Whore!" and "Fascists!"

Frank Dulcich, president and CEO of Pacific Seafood Group, had a cup of liquid thrown into his face, and then was surrounded by a group of menacing protesters, including several who wore masks. Donald Tykeson, 75, who had multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair, was blocked by a thug who threatened him.

Protesters slashed the tires of several state patrol cruisers and leapt onto an occupied police car, slamming the hood and blocking the windshield with placards. A female police officer was knocked to the street by advancing protesters, badly injuring her wrist.

The angry protest grew so violent that the Secret Service was forced to take the highly unusual step of using a backup route for Bush's motorcade because the primary route had been compromised by protesters, one of whom pounded his fist on the president's moving limousine.

All the while, angry demonstrators brandished signs with incendiary rhetoric, such as "9/11 - YOU LET IT HAPPEN, SHRUB," and "BUSH: BASTARD CHILD OF THE SUPREME COURT." One sign read: "IMPEACH THE COURT-APPOINTED JUNTA AND THE FASCIST, EGOMANIACAL, BLOOD-SWILLING BEAST!"

Yet none of these signs were cited in the national media's coverage of the event. By contrast, the press focused extensively on over-the-top signs held by Obama critics at the president's town hall event held Tuesday in New Hampshire.

There's more at the link. It's very difficult to respect people, whether politicians or journalists, who are so self-serving that they loudly condemn behavior that is orders of magnitude less offensive than behavior they were totally silent about just a few years ago.

RLC

Eleven Questions

If you get the chance you might wish to ask your congressperson a few questions about the health care reform bill he or she will be voting on this fall:

1. Has the congressman (or woman) actually read and studied the bill?
   
2. Will the bill result in a single payer system?
   
3. Will the bill result in rationing of care and longer wait times?
   
4. Will the bill reduce medicare benefits?
   
5. Does the bill open the door for the elderly and infirm to be pressured into accepting death?
   
6. Will the bill pay for health care for illegal aliens?
   
7. Will the bill pay for abortions?
   
8. Will the bill require that abortions be provided by objector institutions like Catholic hospitals?
   
9. Will the bill vastly increase the deficit?
   
10. Will the bill require congressmen (and women) to participate in the same program as the rest of us?
    
11. Will the bill cause our taxes to go up?
    

The fact is that for most of our elected representatives the answer to the first question is "no," and according to almost everyone who has read the bill the answer to the other ten questions is "yes." It's no wonder people are irate about it.

RLC

Re: The Volt

Jason emails us to clarify something in yesterday's post titled 230 mpg! He writes:

I just think everyone needs to recognize that a for-profit business (i.e., General Motors before the takeover) invented and innovated the vehicle. A government-owned entity may have been at the helm when the car was issued, but not when it was first created. An important distinction that must be made, I think.

He's correct, of course. My lament in the last line of the original post was due not to thinking that a government- owned company had produced such an innovative vehicle but rather due to the fact that when GM accepted a public bailout and then began closing down dealerships which were not well-connected to the Democrat party, I decided that I personally wouldn't buy any more of their products.

Now they tempt me to violate my pledge with the Volt. Luckily, there will be other models coming out from other manufacturers that I'm sure will be just as attractive.

RLC

Expelled

Author and actor Ben Stein who, you may recall, figured prominently in the documentary movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has been let go from his job as a business columnist for the New York Times. Stein writes about being expelled by the Times in a piece at The American Spectator. It's only his side of the story, of course, but it sounds like he got fired for being critical of President Obama's policies. This wouldn't be so bad if the Times were at least honest that he was released for ideological reasons, but apparently they weren't.

Check out Stein's account at The Spectator. It's an interesting story.

RLC

Nudging the Old Folks

Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast is an Obamaphile who can't resist an opportunity to discredit conservatives, but even he can't go along with those who are trying to pooh-pooh conservative concerns that the Democrats' health care plans would push the elderly toward euthanasia:

[O]n one point the plan's critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under consideration-which can be read as expressing sympathy for limitations on end-of-life care-is morally revolting. And it's helping to kill the plan itself.

Make no mistake about it. Determining which treatments are "cost effective" at the end of a person's life and which are not is one of Obama's priorities. It's one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal healthcare affordable.

Siegel then goes on to wonder why a good guy like Obama would be sold on a provision that would in a dozen subtle ways, "nudge" older people toward declining care which would use up resources that might be better spent on younger people with more years to live:

Where is Obama coming from? Why is such an apparently humane man not more strongly condemning a utilitarian initiative straight out of Victorian England? A good part of the explanation has to do with the University of Chicago Law School milieu that Obama comes out of. By far, the most influential figure in that world is Judge Richard Posner, who teaches law at Chicago and publishes streams of pompous, robotically written books that are much praised and little read.

Judge Posner is both an enthusiastic advocate of euthanasia and an energetic eugenicist. He once wrote of Oliver Wendell Holmes' ideas about eugenics-Holmes believed that a just society "prevents continuance of the unfit"-that "we may yet find [Holmes'] enthusiasms prescient rather than depraved."

Cass Sunstein, who is Obama's nominee for regulatory czar, is a disciple of Posner and believes in what Time magazine describes as "the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating a regulation." In other words, Sunstein believes that the lives of younger people have a greater value than those of the elderly. This, obviously, would have a radical bearing on end-of-life considerations.

This is interesting. We have on several occasions (see here and here) pointed out that President Obama has surrounded himself with progressive eugenicist/euthanasists. His science czar and at least two of his closest medical advisors each favors culling the weak, whether passively or actively isn't clear, from the population. Now we see that this position is even more widespread in his administration than we thought. Cass Sunstein was on Obama's list of possible nominees for the Supreme Court and Judge Posner surely exerted influence on the President in his days as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

It's alarming that eugenic ideas are suddenly becoming respectable again. They were commonly held among progressives back in the early decades of the 20th century but fell into social and political odium because of their association with the Nazis in the thirties and early forties. Progressives found it in their interests to mask their affinities for fascist enthusiasms and to seek to convince people that fascism was an ideology of the right whereas they, the progressives, were men and women of the left. The fact is, however, that the fascists were all leftists and that the holocaust grew out of a German eugenics movement that included in its orbit Americans like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger.

Now with the emergence of the Obama presidency, the advocates of eugenic policies feel safe to reemerge from their closets and speak openly about their vision of an America where people who are elderly should be expected to get out of the way of the younger generation. How much longer will it be before those who suffer mental retardation and other serious debilities will also be expected, for the common good, to be euthanized? How long will it be before we slide down the slippery slope right back to the Germany of the 1930s? It's no wonder the older folks at those town halls are so angry.

People scoff at such a suggestion and say that couldn't happen here. That's simply false. What will happen here is whatever is logically entailed by the worldview of those who have the power to impose their will on the rest of us. Secular utilitarians see nothing special about human beings. We're not, in their view, created in the image of God, and we're not persons who possess inherent rights and dignity by virtue of our possession of the imago dei. In the eyes of such men as the President is surrounding himself with, we're resource consumers whose value to the collective, and thus our indispensibility, is determined by the value of the contribution we're able to make to the whole. Eugenicists see humanity in much the same way as a farmer sees livestock. The herd is there to be bred, managed, milked, sold and slaughtered to suit the needs of the moment.

When the government takes it upon itself to "nudge" the elderly toward death we're well on our way toward the world of Lois Lowery (The Giver), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and George Orwell (1984). If you haven't read any of these works you really should. Start with Orwell.

RLC

Post Offices and Public Options

One of the general arguments opponents of President Obama's health care reform plans have been making is that government-run enterprises rarely perform efficiently or profitably. At his recent town hall meeting the President himself inadvertently pressed this very argument into service without recognizing that he was agreeing with a major objection to his own proposals. It was pretty funny:

Perhaps by now Mr. Obama realizes his blunder, but if so, why does he not also recognize the reason the postal service has problems that UPS and Fed Ex don't have? Privately-owned companies, subject to market forces, often do well; publicly-owned companies usually don't. One wishes the President would at least appear concerned that when the government manages health care it will in fact be just as troubled as the postal service, maybe moreso.

I say perhaps he realizes his blunder because unlike the Bush years when the media could be counted on to be all over a bungle like this if it embarrassed Mr. Bush and made him look stupid, I don't think we'll hear anything at all about this one from the major media. So it could be that no one has pointed out to the President that this wasn't his finest performance.

RLC

230 mpg!

Allahpundit throws some cold water on the excitement being generated by the new Chevy hybrid the Volt before he gives us his take on the upside:

.... If it's true, then you're looking at the first car with triple-digit gas mileage, fully four times the amount of its nearest competitor. Actually, it's even better than that: It can run on electricity alone for up to 40 miles, so if your round-trip commute's within that range, you don't need gas at all. Thrilling news, not because the Volt's going to solve America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil overnight but because the baseline technology's now not only available but almost cost-effective.

Why do I say almost? Let's do the math. Initial sticker-price estimates are $40,000; assume it'll be a bit more than that, then deduct $7,500 for the federal tax credit you'll get for buying one. Let's say that leaves us with a cost of $35,000. Figure a new car with standard fuel efficiency will get 20 mpg and run you $18,000. Now assume gas prices of $3 per gallon. Buying the cheaper car will save you enough money to afford 5,667 gallons of gas, which, at 20 mpg, means it would be a better deal than the Volt for the first ... 113,000 miles. That also doesn't account for (a) the (comparatively tiny) cost of electricity to charge the battery, (b) the headaches for apartment-dwellers in finding a place to charge the thing, (c) the possibility of higher maintenance costs as the Volt's new technology suffers glitches, and (d) the strain on urban electrical grids a decade or two down the road when these suckers become popular.

There are, of course, some definite positives to cars like the Volt and some of these are mentioned at the link. I just wish it wasn't government-owned GM that's come out with the darn thing.

RLC

Iranian Prisons

You doubtless remember the revelations about how terrorists were treated at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. As bad as the detainees were, the treatment some of the received at the hands of a few American Guardsmen was unconscionable and illegal, and at least most of the persons responsible have been held to account.

You've also heard that the prison at Guantanamo Bay is scheduled to be closed in January because it fails to meet the exacting standards of American penology even though it's apparently a model penal institution whose detainees live better than do many inmates in our civilian penitentiaries.

In any event, amidst all the talk of prisoner mistreatment in American detention camps what's often omitted is any insight into how political prisoners are treated in most countries around the world.

Alexander Sohlzenitsyn was imprisoned in the former Soviet Union during the late forties and early fifties and survived to write an extraordinary book, titled The Gulag Archipelago, about the ghastly horrors of communist "justice."

Richard Wurmbrand was imprisoned behind the iron curtain because he was a Christian minister. His book titled Tortured for Christ describes the incredible cruelty of which men hostile to God are capable.

Armando Valladares was a Cuban who was deemed a political enemy of the Castro regime and was imprisoned in a system Dantesque in its hellishness. He wrote about his experience in Against All Hope.

In the aftermath of the war in Iraq we read of the unspeakable tortures perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his henchmen. We read about the horrible manner in which people who opposed them or stood in their way were tortured, mutilated, run through wood chippers, and suffered other grisly torments to the amusement of the Baathist psychopaths.

Some of the victims of these governments lived to tell their stories. Millions of others around the globe, especially in communist and Islamic countries, have not been so fortunate. The tortures they've suffered, and are suffering today, for no reason other than that they are political or religious liabilities are unimaginable.

Now word is beginning to leak out about the prisons in Iran and the brutalities to which hundreds of dissidents rounded up in the wake of the recent political protests there have been subjected. If the reports are accurate, they should be mailed to every person who applauded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his visit to New York City and Columbia University last year. If the reports are accurate this man and his political patrons among the mullahs are as demonic as Saddam Hussein, and they deserve the same fate.

Here's part of the report:

Until the defeated Iranian presidential contender Mehdi Karroubi broke the wall of silence surrounding the Islamic Republic's prisons to demand an investigation into allegations of rape, little attention was paid to the abuses meted out to protestors who dared to claim that the June 12 election was rigged.

These abuses are inflicted routinely and systematically in seven secret prisons where political detainees are held at the behest of the revolutionary Islamic regime. Those prisons are described by DEBKAfile's Iranian sources as inhuman hellholes:

Kahrizak

This is the jail which supreme leader Ayatallah Ali Khamenei wanted razed to the ground to conceal the outrages committed there against scores of reform-seeking protesters who had the cruel fortune to be dumped there. Kahrizak on the southern outskirts of Tehran was notorious as the penal facility for Iran's most violent thugs and gangsters. Those inmates were let loose on the political prisoners who were incarcerated in cells ten meters square. An unknown number suffered rape and bloody beatings, which not all survived.

The commander of Iran's internal security forces Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said Sunday, Aug. 9, that he would not deny his share in the blame for the "terrible things that took place in Kahrizak" where two protesters were admittedly found dead. He claimed that two of the security officials responsible for "widespread prisoner abuse" had been fired and awaited trial.

The prison remains open and our sources doubt those responsible for the outrages will be brought to trial.

Six more jails and detentions centers operate in the Tehran area.

Ghamar prison

A low, inconspicuous door behind the Ghamar Bani Hashem Hospital on Resaalat Street near the security ministry leads into a top-secret holding facility for interrogating political prisoners. It is closely guarded by Iran's intelligence ministry.

It has two floors and a yard, containing four interrogation rooms, eight isolation cells and eight holding cells in which dozens of detainees are crammed, allowed access to showers once a week and toilets three times a day. Here, the detainees undergo their first inquisition and beatings before they are transferred to other prisons. Their eyes and mouths are bound with leather straps to prevent them from identifying their tormentors. Their agony ends when they sign written confessions.

Most of the victims' families do not know their whereabouts.

Esharat-Abad prison

Several hundred political prisoners are crowded into this facility for drug offenders which is designed for 250 to 350 inmates. It is situated in the Narcotic Unit's headquarters in central Tehran.

The building consists of three large units broken up into cells of 1.5 x 2 meters, into each of which up to five detainees are squeezed for an agonizing three to seven days. Under interrogation, their arms and legs are broken to make them confess and give up information. Accustomed to beating and humiliating dope traffickers, the wardens carry on abusing the political detainees.

Sanitary conditions are appalling and the inmates are fed scraps from the prison staff canteens. The stench of vomit and sweat in the unventilated cells is unbearable. Whenever a detainee dies of torture or disease, prison authorities file a fictitious report. After the questioning finishes, those who survive are transferred to the central prison at Evin. No one has been brought to book for their deaths.

There's more at the link. Abu Ghraib was abominable, but I suspect that if prisoners in almost any jail in the communist or Islamic worlds were offered the opportunity to be transferred there, they'd accept without a moment's hesitation.

RLC

You Know You're a Racist If ...

There are legitimate grounds for criticizing some of the antics of the people who attend the town halls. Some of them have been rude and discourteous, and worst of all, a few of them have acted as if they worked for ACORN, but these people are frustrated and they have legitimate concerns. Thus, it's as insulting as it is weird to have someone like Chris Matthews even raise the question of whether these people are motivated by racism, but the answer he receives from nationally syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker is even worse:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Put 100 of these people in a room. Strap them into gurneys. Inject them with sodium pentathol. How many of them would say "I don't like the idea of having a black president"? What percentage?

CYNTHIA TUCKER: Oh, I'm just guessing. This is just off the cuff. I think 45 to 65% of the people who appear at these groups are people who will never be comfortable with the idea of a black president.

Tucker admits she has no idea, but she's willing to aver on national tv that about half of the people who show up at these meetings are racists. Why? What evidence does she have of this? In the strange and febrile imaginations of liberal progressives most white people (except them) are racists, and if they're pressed to support this self-righteous assumption they point to the widespread opposition to a government takeover of our economy. How does this opposition demonstrate that whites are racists? Well, people like Tucker and Matthews will tell you, it must be motivated by racism since, after all, it's a black man who's leading the takeover.

Paul Krugman strikes the same chord in the New York Times where he argues that because some of the angry town hall attendees are a little confused on some of the implications of health care reform they're probably racists:

[P]eople who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading ... But they're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they've heard about what he's doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the "birther" movement, which denies Mr. Obama's citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don't know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's a substantial fraction.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it's a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Krugman's implication here is that no objection to our headlong rush over the economic cliff can possibly be legitimate. It must instead be grounded in white distaste for a black man as President.

And here's an MSNBC anchor suggesting that perhaps the word socialism has become the new "n-word." He doesn't come right out and say it, but he seems to be laying the predicate for the idea that if you call President Obama a socialist or call his policies socialist, you might just be a closet racist:

Here's what appears to be happening. Racism is anathema in this country, so the left, in order to get its agenda passed, sees an opportunity to weaken the opposition to it by identifying opponents, in the public mind, with racism. Pretty soon, if you're a Republican you'll be assumed to be a racist. If you don't have an Obama sticker on your car it'll be assumed you're a racist. If you don't accept the President's vision of what America should be it will be perceived as an indication that you're a racist, and if you call a black man a socialist it's the same as calling him a "nigger."

This is the state to which the left has reduced our public discourse.

RLC

Journey Inside the Cell

A new video titled Journey Inside the Cell narrated by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell, gives a glimpse of a small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell. As Meyer's book makes clear the process is much more complex than this, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist story that the astonishing complexity of the cell is all a product of blind chance and natural selection.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be the result of intelligent minds. To think that it could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that so many bright people think it did. Even so, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this: Only material, physical processes can be considered in science. Enormously complex structures like cells exist. Therefore these structures must have been produced solely by physical processes.

The error here, of course, is to confuse what science has limited itself to considering with what the best explanation for biological entities might be. Just because some people think that science should be restricted to physical causes it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing only with physical causes - and not all scientists think this exclusivity is wise - have any right to rule out intelligent causes. The most a materialist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that they don't exist or haven't operated or can't be inferred from what we can observe or measure. Yet materialists do say this all the time.

RLC

Longevity

Openness, conscientiousness, and extrovertedness all tend to increase longevity, this article claims, whereas neuroticism shortens it. Curmudgeonliness, thank goodness, seems to have no effect.

RLC

Who They Are

Over at Hot Air Doctor Zero lays out with admirable clarity who those who oppose what the current administration is attempting to do are. He's perhaps a bit more ascerbic than he needs to be, but given the shameless calumnies levelled against those who've shown up at the town halls to protest the direction in which the Democrats are taking us, that may be understandable. Here's the first half of the piece:

There seems to be a bit of confusion among Democrats about the nature of the opposition to their plans. Maybe I can help clear things up by telling them a few things about us.

We're not paid minions of any corporate interest or lobby. Most bloggers working to stop the Obama health-care disaster are like me, writing when they can find the time, because we care about the future of our country. The same is true of the people showing up at town hall meetings, and organizing rallies. Some of us are well-dressed in tailored suits. Others wear jeans and T-shirts. Most of us are dressed in what we wore to work.

Our support for a massive government program does not increase when you tell us we're not allowed to ask questions about it.

We're not racists. We're also not racialists. We don't think a wise Latina is inherently more qualified to do anything than a wise Asian woman, a wise white woman, or a wise white man. We're tired of being fed excuses for high government offices staffed by anything but the best people for the job. There are too many high government offices, so we'd like some of Obama's absurdly incompetent appointees to take their titles with them when they leave. We remember what it was like when we got rid of the Clinton mob, so we'll be conducting inventories on the contents of those vacated offices, before we turn out the lights and pour cement in the locks.

We don't like having to fight desperate battles to save our freedom and future from socialist politicians every ten or twenty years. We don't like having our time wasted with trillion-dollar statist fantasies, when our government is already trillions of dollars in the red. We're tired of checking the papers each day, to see which group of us has been targeted as enemies of the State. We're growing impatient waiting for the Democrats to come up with ideas that don't require their supporters to hate someone. We've had our fill of "progressives" who act as if we're living in 1909, and none of their diseased policies have ever been tried before.

Read the rest at the link. It's as punchy as it is testy, and there's much truth in what he writes.

RLC

Ten Mysteries About Us

The fascinating thing about this story is not that there are still mysteries about human behavior but rather that some people are not embarrassed by the possible explanations that they offer for them. Anyway, when you assume that everything about us somehow enhances our sex appeal or our survival I guess you're bound to come up with theories like some of the ones below.

If we're looking for an evolutionary explanation for human behaviors it seems to me that many of these are much more likely to be behaviors that supervene upon other genetic adaptations. There's no reason to think that they have any survival value in themselves.

But if we're not looking for evolutionary explanations it could be that the Creator simply gave us laughter, altruism, and art because they make life richer, more human, and less brutish.

Here are some of the "mysteries" discussed in the article:

Blushing: Charles Darwin struggled to explain why evolution made us turn red when we lie, which alerts others. However, some think it may help diffuse confrontation or foster intimacy by revealing weakness.

Laughter: mood-improving endorphins are released when we laugh, which seems an obvious reason to do it...

Kissing: the explanation for kissing is unlikely to be genetic as not all human societies do it. There are theories that it is associated with memories of breastfeeding and that ancient humans weaned their children by feeding them from their mouths, which reinforced the link between sharing saliva and pleasure.

Picking your nose: the unappealing but common habit of ingesting 'nasal detritus' offers almost no nutritional benefit, so why do a quarter of teenagers do it, on average four times a day? Some think it boosts the immune system.

Altruism: giving things away with no certain return is odd behaviour in evolutionary terms. It may help with group bonding or simply give pleasure.

Art: painting, dance, sculpture and music could all be the human equivalent of a peacock's tail in showing what a good potential mate someone is. However, it could also be a tool for spreading knowledge or sharing experience.

Body hair: fine hair on the body and thick hair on the genitals is the opposite of what occurs in primates, our close animal relatives. Suggested reasons for pubic hair include a role in radiating scent, providing warmth or even protecting from chafing.

Superstition: unusual but reassuring habits make no evolutionary sense; however, ancient humans would have benefited from not dismissing a lion's rustle in the grass as a gust of wind. Religion seems to tap into this impulse.

Perhaps, but if superstition is believing in causes which are totally inadequate to the effect then what would we call the belief that all of these behaviors must be produced by genetic mutation? Unguided mutations over time degrade the specificity of information, they don't enhance it. The belief that mutations actually increase the information content of the genotype is, well, a superstition that biologists certainly tap into.

RLC

Credible Military Option

With everything that's going on with the economy, there hasn't been much focus lately on what we'll do if Iran doesn't relent in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Much of the discussion there has been has emphasized reasons why military measures would be inadequate and ineffective. Retired four-star Air Force General Chuck Wald, however, disagrees with these assessments. General Wald was the air commander for the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and deputy commander of the U.S. European Command. He has an article in the Wall Street Journal that outlines how the military could be used to supplement diplomatic pressure on Tehran and, if diplomacy fails, how it could be credibly employed to spare the world the specter of nuclear arms in the hands of a terrorist state that sees it as their religious duty to precipitate the end of the world. Here's some of what he writes:

There has been a lack of serious public discussion of the military tools available to us. Any mention of them is either met with accusations of warmongering or hushed with concerns over sharing sensitive information. It is important to discuss, within legal limits, such a serious issue as openly as possible. Discussion strengthens our democracy and dispels misinformation.

The military can play an important role in solving this complex problem without firing a single shot. Publicly signaling serious preparation for a military strike might obviate the need for one if deployments force Tehran to recognize the costs of its nuclear defiance. Mr. Obama might consider, for example, the deployment of additional carrier battle groups and minesweepers to the waters off Iran, and the conduct of military exercises with allies.

If such pressure fails to impress Iranian leadership, the U.S. Navy could move to blockade Iranian ports. A blockade-which is an act of war-would effectively cut off Iran's gasoline imports, which constitute about one-third of its consumption. Especially in the aftermath of post-election protests, the Iranian leadership must worry about the economic dislocations and political impact of such action.

Should these measures not compel Tehran to reverse course on its nuclear program, and only after all other diplomatic avenues and economic pressures have been exhausted, the U.S. military is capable of launching a devastating attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities.

Many policy makers and journalists dismiss the military option on the basis of a false sense of futility. They assume that the U.S. military is already overstretched, that we lack adequate intelligence about the location of covert nuclear sites, and that known sites are too heavily fortified.

Such assumptions are false.

General Wald then goes on to discuss the pros and cons of a series of military strikes on Iranian facilities. It's quite interesting.

I wonder: Given that President Obama's political base is the progressive left, and given that this base is strongly opposed to military interventions, what are the chances that Tehran will make a calculation that Mr. Obama would not do more than use the military as a bluff? If he did set up a blockade or bomb the Iranian weapons facilities would the progressives abandon their principles and find some excuse to justify acquiesing to war or would they oppose Obama the way they opposed President Bush?

We'll see.

RLC

Robin's Journey

Robin, a psychotherapist living in Berkeley, explains how she (I think she's a she) seemingly journeyed from the progressive left to conservatism in a relative twinkling of an eye. Actually, she tells us, it was a conversion that had been brewing all her life:

Now that I look back, I had the seeds of both a conservative and a liberal in me all along. On the liberal side: I was raised a secular Jew, and, for some God forsaken reason, most of us are Democrats. My upbringing lacked meaning and substance, which propelled my devotion to social causes. Of course, arriving in Berkeley in my 20's only hardened my liberal propensity.

I became a therapist, made friends with therapists, and spent tons of money having shrinks dissect my psyche. So my life was focused on problems, complaints, and kvetches. As Milton said, our minds can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. My preoccupation with the darkness put me in a liberal state of mind.

But the conservative was alive and well in me too: My grandparents came from Russia with only the shirts on their backs. Yet they never complained about the hardships or expected any government help. My parents, in their own wacky way, were devoted, dutiful, and fiercely patriotic.

I was also victimized early on by do-gooder liberal politics (though I didn't put two and two together until last year). I attended public schools with forced busing that ignited tremendous animosity and racial violence. As an adult, I've been harassed and molested innumerable times on urban streets both east coast and west, and was mugged several years ago in broad daylight.

Unlike most liberals, I never blamed myself or the dominant culture. I placed culpability directly on the thugs and on those in authority who remained silent. Whenever my friends excused immoral behavior, I would get seriously ticked off.

Lastly, my personality has always had elements both left and right. Now that I think about it, it's been dizzying living in my brain. I'm a straight shooter and detest phoniness (conservative), though I wanted to be liked (liberal). I've never been a group think person and don't like to be controlled (right), but at the same time, I wanted to fit in (left).

Read the rest of her story at the link.

I'm sure there are lots of Robins out there, not just ideological Robins but also religious Robins. They're people who've abandoned the beliefs and principles of their parents and grandparents but who feel the aching emptiness that's left inside when God is expelled and one ersatz philosophy after another is stuffed into the bottomless pit that's left by His absence.

They know where their home is but they want to be liked, they want to fit in, they want to seem sophisticated, and the best way to achieve all that, they think, perhaps subliminally, is to be liberal both in their politics and in their religious views. Like Robin, some of them may eventually come to a point in their life where they realize it just doesn't work. Neither the political ideology nor the secularism can serve as a substitute for the Real Thing.

RLC

One Woman Stimulus Package

When President Obama talks about all the jobs his administration has created he's missing a good bet if he doesn't include the entourage his wife has amassed in the White House. Indeed, she may have created more jobs than he has.

According to Canada Free Press our first lady has employed an army of attendants, at your expense, far in excess of anything needed by any of her predecessors:

Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn't perform any official duties. But this hasn't deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession. Just think, Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War, and Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary.

How things have changed! If you're one of the tens of millions of Americans facing destitution, earning less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, you might want to keep in mind that the benefit package for these servants of Ms Obama are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by you:

• $172,000 - Sher, Susan (Chief of Staff)
• $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and Director or Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
• $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary)
• $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the First Lady)
• Winter, Melissa E. (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $90,000 - Medina, David S. (Deputy Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $84,000 - Lelyveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady)
• $75,000 - Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance for the First Lady)
• $70,000 - Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
• $65,000 - Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
• $62,000 - Goodman, Jennifer R. (Deputy Director of Scheduling and Events Coordinator for the First Lady)
• $60,000 - Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip Director for the First Lady)
• Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First Lady)
• $52,500 - Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Associate Director and Deputy Press Secretary to the First Lady)
• $50,000 - Jarvis, Kristen E. (Special assistant for Scheduling and Traveling Aide to the First Lady)
• $45,000 - Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)
• Tubman, Samantha (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)
• $40,000 - Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Asistant to the Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $36,000 - Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social Secretary)
• Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)
• Jackson, Deilia A. (Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)

The person who sent the link notes that this list doesn't include makeup artist Ingrid Grimes-Miles, 49, and "First Hairstylist" Johnny Wright, 31, both of whom traveled aboard Air Force One to Europe. He also asks why Ms Obama needs so much help, at taxpayer expense, when even Hillary, had only three employees, Jackie Kennedy one, Laura Bush one, and,prior to Mamie Eisenhower,social help was paid out of the President's own pocket.

Good question. Meanwhile, how are you making out with your mortgage payments this year?

RLC

Counter-Proposal (Pt. II)

The other day I mentioned Keith Hennessey's counter-proposal to the President's plan for health care reform. Here are the basics:

Do:

1. Repeal the current law tax exclusion for employer provided health insurance, and replace it with a $7,500 (single) / $15K (family) flat deduction for buying health insurance.

• The deduction is independent of the premium cost. If you buy a $5,000 individual policy, you get a $7,500 deduction. If you buy a $10,000 individual policy, you get the same $7,500 deduction.
• The overwhelming majority of premiums fall under these threshholds, so 100m+ people would pay lower taxes.
• The minority with premiums above these thresholds would pay higher taxes.
• In total the government does not collect more revenue, although the tax burden shifts to those with high-cost policies.
• Index the thresholds to inflation (CPI). This bites more tightly over time. I'd funnel the long-term increased revenues into some broad-based tax relief to stay revenue-neutral over time.

2. Allow the purchase of health insurance sold anywhere in the U.S.This would force States to compete for the right regulatory balance of consumer protection and premium cost. Rep. John Shadegg has a bill that does this.

3. Make health insurance portable. This requires relatively small tweaks to law, but insurers would need to develop new portable insurance plans that you could take with you from one job to the next. The policy change is easy. Getting employers and insurers to change their long-standing business models is hard.

4. Expand Health Savings Accounts. Allow higher contribution limits, and allow financially equivalent coinsurance structures driven by market demand. Continue to mandate an initial deductible and catastrophic protection. No benefit-specific exemptions as advocated by some.

5. Aggressively reform medical liability, aka "medical tort reform." Details TBD.

6. Aggressively slow Medicare and Medicaid spending growth, and use the savings for long-term deficit reduction. Details TBD.

Assume that my package would be significantly more aggressive ("deeper cuts," in the terms of opponents) than anything being discussed in Congress today.

Don't:

• Raise taxes
• Create a new government health entitlement
• Mandate the purchase of health insurance
• Mandate that employers provide health insurance to their employees
• Have government set private premiums
• Create a government-run health plan option
• Have the government mandate benefits
• Expand Medicaid

Results:

• Lower premiums, higher wages
• Portable health insurance reduces "job lock"
• +5 million insured (net)
• 100 million people will pay lower taxes
• 30m with expensive health plans pay higher taxes
• No net tax increase overall
• Reduces short-term and long-term deficit
• Fair to small business employees & self-employed
• Incentives and individual decisions "bend the cost curve down"
• More individual control & responsibility for medical decisions

Whether all of these measures could be done or not I don't know, but it does seem a little disingenuous for supporters of the Democrats' bills to say that the opposition offers no alternatives. Keep in mind, too, that this is just one of several proposals which have been offered as counters to the plans currently in committee.

Let us tip our hats to liberal Democrats for impressing upon us the need for action on health care, and for forcing the national conversation, but when it comes to actually concocting a remedy, let's leave that to people who know how to do it without destroying the system and bankrupting the country.

RLC

Fears Confirmed

It was bound to happen. Violence broke out at a town hall meeting yesterday, a black man was beaten by a group of thugs, and racist epithets filled the air. The talking heads have been fretting about this for days and exactly what they feared would happen has happened. Patterico has the details.

The only part of this ugly episode that did not conform to the expectations of the commentators is that the thugs were Obama supporters wearing SEIU shirts, the black man was a conservative selling "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and the racial epithets were employed by a black man who was among the attackers.

Somebody videoed part of the proceedings including the arrest of one of the union muggers:

I guess events don't always go according to the way our stereotypes would have them.

RLC