Offering commentary on current developments and controversies in politics, religion, philosophy, science, education and anything else which attracts our interest.
The New York Timesconfirms that Barack Obama is indeed the nation's first black president, having inexplicably checked "Black" to identify his race on his census form. I say "inexplicably" because the man who was going to bring us together and end all of that ugly divisiveness that plagues our politics, the man who was going to transcend race, could have checked "Other." Instead, he chose to identify with the black father he never knew, and spurn the white family that raised him.
Doesn't that seem faintly racist, if I may be forgiven for asking? If someone had one white parent and one black wouldn't it be inaccurate and arbitrary to call oneself white?
A student once asked, if every president until Mr. Obama had been black would everyone be calling President Obama the first white president?
Kyle suggests (Re: The Most Insidious Drug) that we treat pornography like we treat tobacco and alcohol - tax it. We might also mount the same sort of campaign against pornography that's been mounted against smoking:
[T]he issue of pornography reminds me of the issue of tobacco smoking. Through anti-smoking ads and taxation, smoking has significantly decreased in America. So my plan is to begin by taxing pornography. With a 97 billion dollar a year industry, a tax is going to provide some significant income. With that money, let's start doing some meaningful and powerful research on the subject. Conclusively get the pros and cons of pornography and show the world our results. I think we're all pretty confident that it is harmful. After that, begin to use the money to target sex offenders, provide recover programs for those addicted to pornography and sexual addiction...
Neo-atheist Sam Harris delivers a lecture on morality in which he argues, sometimes sensibly, against moral relativism. Unfortunately, he seeks to ground his argument in the belief that somehow science can tell us what is objectively right and what is objectively wrong. He sets human flourishing as his summum bonum and then argues that whatever promotes that flourishing is right and whatever impedes it is wrong.
But why should we think that human flourishing is the summum bonum? His answer seems to be because we just feel that it is, and anyone who doesn't feel this way is wrong. Not only is this unpersuasive, it also leaves unanswered the question of why, if flourishing is indeed the greatest good we can pursue, I shouldn't pursue it just for myself or why our nation shouldn't pursue it at the expense of other nations. Why should anyone care about the flourishing of others? Why is it wrong to subordinate other people's flourishing to my own? And if death is the end what does it matter how we live anyway? Why not maximize whatever pleasures are to be found in life and let other people take care of themselves?
Harris, unfortunately, doesn't address those questions, but they really are at the heart of the metaethical debate between theists and atheists. Atheism has no answer to questions like why I should care for the poor, or why we should conserve the earth's resources, or why I should contribute to Haitian earthquake relief. The fact is that there's simply no reason why one should sacrifice anything for others unless it's in his own self-interest somehow to do so.
Here's Harris' lecture:
It's a peculiarity among science-oriented atheists like Harris that they so often argue that we should all behave in certain ways because, well, it feels to them like we should. The oddest thing about the lecture, though, is that he was given a standing ovation at its conclusion. Having listened to nothing significant for twenty five minutes or so the audience jumped to their feet to express their approval. Pretty funny.
A crowd of people lolling about on a beach in mid-morning takes no notice of the modest swell far off on the horizon. The weather's a little cloudy, but the forecasts in the newspapers and talking heads on tv are chattering on about how everything is soon going to be beautiful on this bright summer day, how the weather is improving, and how beach-goers will soon be basking in the glorious light of the summer sun.
A note of concern ripples through the crowd, however, when some notice that the surf appears to be draining out to sea, as if someone pulled the plug. Even so, the vacationers go on about their business applying tanning lotion, building sand castles, reading a pulp novel, listening to music, eating and drinking. But soon the surf line is a hundred yards or more further out than it was just a few minutes ago, and the crowd grows puzzled. Something is happening. They look around and see a few people hurriedly leaving the beach. Suddenly, someone yells to look out toward the ocean and to their horror a huge mountain of water, a 100 foot tsunami, is rising up and rushing headlong toward the beach. The people panic and try to scramble inland to safety, but it's too late. The tsunami crashes down upon them with unimaginable force crushing and sweeping away everything.
This is a parable of what is in store for us as a result of the incomprehensible fiscal recklessness of the last year and a half. But don't take my word for it, instead take about ten minutes to read this speech given by Rep. Paul Ryan on March 31st. Ryan is like one of those tsunami detectors that have been placed out in the ocean to alert coastal populations to the threat of an imminent tsunami. His speech is the equivalent of a three-credit college course and his warning is more valuable than any course any college offers.
If you care about your future and that of your children you should read it. You can find it here.
For at least fifty years conservatives have been supporting reform of our tax structure. One of the most popular ideas that has been around for a while is to switch from the current labyrinthine complexity to a simple flat tax. The flat tax has so many advantages that it's hard to understand why we don't adopt it, other than that too many powerful people make too much money off the current system. The flat tax would replace all the confusing forms, deductions, regulations, exceptions, etc. with one simple post card size form. Instead of pages and pages of tax tables everyone would simply pay 17% of their gross income in taxes. The guy who makes 100 times what you make would pay 100 times more than you pay.
The Cato Institute has put together this video with Dan Mitchell to briefly explain how a flat tax works and what its advantages are:
Not the least of the advantages would be that the bloated IRS would be reduced in size to a fraction of its current bulk.
Another option that has excited a lot of people is something called the Fair Tax. It, too, would be a great improvement over the current system, but it might require repeal of the 16th amendment. In any event, the current system is nothing more than a full-employment mechanism for the IRS and tax lawyers. There are better, more just ways, of doing raising revenue, and we should implement them.
I have from time to time confessed that I have a very difficult time listening to radio talker Sean Hannity. His reliance upon rhetorical tics that have the same cumulative effect as Chinese water torture, the way his voice goes into unmodulated screed mode as soon as his show opens and continues for three hours, his ersatz humility, the unctuous piety with which he lectures callers about moral issues, and his rude, arrogant treatment of callers who fail to kiss his ring often have me reaching for the radio's off button after about five minutes of being subjected to his assault on my sensibilities. Even so, a lot of people like him, and that has made him a target for the Left. Unfortunately, when the Left selects a target, truth isn't allowed to get in their way.
A week or so ago MSNBC was breathlessly reporting irregularities in Hannity's charitable work, but their allegations were soon shown to be absurd. Unabashed, they've now latched on to an even more ludicrous allegation - that Hannity expressed sympathy on his show for Timothy McVeigh. This charge is so laughable, given the context in which Hannity made his allegedly inculpatory remark, that you have to conclude that his critics, specifically a couple of lefty radio talkers named Mike Malloy and Ed Schultz, are either incredibly dumb or maliciously dishonest, or both (Schultz avowed last January that he'd be willing to cheat to keep Scott Brown from being elected in Massachussetts, so we're not dealing here with a man known for scrupulosity. This video will give you further insight into what sort of person Ed Schultz is).
Anyway, what Malloy and Schultz want you to believe to be so breathtakingly scandalous was something Hannity said to a bunch of tea-party types at a rally recently. Here's the quote:
"When you think of the vast majorities that they [the Democrats] have in Congress, and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption [to pass health care]. That's all because the tea party movement, the people, all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here, as they say."
The audience applauded.
Hannity was clearly using sarcasm - a weapon he admittedly wields with an unfortunate lack of dexterity - to make fun of the Left's portrayal of tea-partiers as violent extremists. His jab was, however, either too subtle for Malloy and Schultz to grasp or else they're so desperate to find something they can twist and distort that they're willing to seize any reed, no matter how slender, that might be pressed into service to discredit him.
Whatever one thinks of Hannity, the behavior of Malloy and Schultz reported at the link has the distinction of being mean, oafish and farcical all at once.
Speaking of farcical, consider MSNBC's Chris Matthews who's all beside himself because Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring to the Obama administration as a "regime." Matthews was so irate about Limbaugh's use of the pejorative that he recently felt driven to name-calling. Byron York of the Washington Examiner recounts the details of Matthews' tirade:
"I've never seen language like this in the American press," [Matthews] said, "referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country.... We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it."
Matthews didn't stop there. "I never heard the word 'regime,' before, have you?" he said to NBC's Chuck Todd. "I don't even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a 'regime.'"
Well, as Mr. York reminds the forgetful Mr. Matthews, during the Bush administration the term saw the light of day over 6,700 times. It was used dozens of times in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and on Matthew's own network, MSNBC, in reference to Mr. Bush's presidency. In fact, it was used several times on Matthews' own show and, amusingly enough, at least once by Matthews himself.
I leave it to the reader to decide how best to describe Mr. Matthews' chastisement of Mr. Limbaugh for invoking a term that Matthews himself has chosen to employ.
Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, an atheist and co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong, has a piece at Spiked Review of Books that claims that Darwinism is a secular religion whose devotees brook no questioning or challenges. As a prelude to his argument he recounts this story:
Some months ago an American philosopher explained to a highly sophisticated audience in Britain what, in his opinion, was wrong, indeed fatally wrong, with the standard neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution. He made it crystal clear that his criticism was not inspired by creationism, intelligent design or any remotely religious motivation. A senior gentleman in the audience erupted, in indignation: 'You should not say such things, you should not write such things! The creationists will treasure them and use them against science.' The lecturer politely asked: 'Even if they are true?' To which the instant and vibrant retort was: 'Especially if they are true!' with emphasis on the 'especially'.
For at least this gentleman, who sounds like no one so much as Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, truth is not as important as is maintaining the viability of the materialist dogma. The dogma must not be questioned lest faith in materialism wane among the masses. The dogma's weaknesses must not be publicized lest its opponents be encouraged thereby.
John Stuart Mill, perhaps the paradigmatic classical liberal, wrote in his great essay On Liberty that:
[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit; the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Mill goes on to say that when a belief is insulated from criticism, suffering no fresh and living conviction to challenge it, it does nothing for the mind or heart except stand sentinel over them to keep them vacant. Mill was thinking here of theistic religion but the admonition applies just as much to modern naturalistic religion as well. Maybe moreso.
The answer to the question in the title is, "Whenever Democrats do it."
When it was thought that the Bush administration was engaged in profiling terrorist suspects, or whenever it was suggested that we should profile (which, of course, we should), the left-leaning media got all in a swivet about infringements of civil rights and other such pretensions. Now the Obama administration is actually going to profile airline travelers, though they won't call it that, and you probably haven't heard much more than subdued tsk tsking from the Left:
While trying hard to avoid admitting to "profiling," the Obama administration has introduced new measures for screening US-bound air travelers based on how closely their personal characteristics match intelligence on potential terrorists. Nationality, age, certain physical characteristics, recently visited countries and partial (Muslim-sounding) names will be used alongside the no-fly list to step up flight security.
Here's a rule of thumb for understanding how the Left interprets any security policy enacted by an administration: If Republicans do it it's ipso facto an outrageous threat to our civil rights. If Democrats do it it's ipso facto a perfectly reasonable effort to guarantee our safety.
If these people ever need to supplement their income maybe they should consider stand-up comedy. They're good at it.
This post originally appeared on Viewpoint on Easter 2005:
Jon Meacham of Newsweek, perhaps chastened by the criticism he received following his foray into Christian theology over Christmas, pens a much less offensive column about the Resurrection of Jesus in the current issue. He notes that the tomb of Christ was almost certainly empty that first Easter morning. If it were not, he observes, the opponents of Christ had only to produce the body to abort the religious turmoil that the sect of Christians was beginning to arouse. This they did not do, a startling historical fact, really, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that they couldn't do it. This leads us in turn to ask why not.
No naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb makes sense. The most common of these is that the disciples stole the corpse, but this hypothesis is plausible only if one assumes a priori that non-natural explanations are impossible. To believe that the disciples stole the body one must believe that a band of terrified fishermen overpowered an armed military guard, a crime for which they were never arrested or charged, stole the cadaver, and eventually underwent torture and martyrdom for preaching around the world what they knew to be a lie. People will die for a lie they believe to be true, but only men suffering from some form of dementia would die for a lie they knew to be a lie, and there's no reason to think these men were demented.
Surely, if the authorities believed the disciples had stolen the body they would have brought irresistibly persuasive techniques to bear to coerce them into divulging its whereabouts. Yet there's no indication whatsoever in the historical record that this was even attempted.
The skeptic says, as was noted above, that no matter how implausible a given naturalistic explanation may be it's still more believable than the claim that a man rose from the dead. This objection, however, rests on the assumption that there is no God, an assumption that is much easier to make than to defend. If, contrary to the skeptical view, it is possible that God exists then miracles are indeed also possible, and if they are possible, we have to examine the evidence for an alleged instance of one, especially one as significant as the resurrection of Jesus, to determine whether it is, in fact, credible. The evidence for the historical, physical revivification of Christ, many scholars have concluded, is at least as powerful as that for any other event in antiquity.
Other attempts to avoid the conclusion that a miracle actually occurred are equally unimpressive. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code adopts a version of the swoon theory, that after some thirty six hours without medical care, Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds, including the spear thrust, with sufficient vigor to roll away the heavy stone blocking the tomb. He accomplished this astonishing feat without being detected by the Roman guard, and subsequently appeared to the disciples and dozens, even hundreds, of others, looking so hale and hearty that they believed that he had conquered death and was the very Son of God.
Even if something like this could have happened, the disciples would have known that Jesus had not "risen from the dead" in any theologically significant sense. He would have eventually died (or, as Brown has it, absconded to France with his beloved Mary Magdalene), and his dead body would be proof that he was not the Messiah. This, then, brings us back to the question above: Why would people have been willing to be tortured and martyred for a man they would have realized was a false messiah?
Skeptics scoff at miracles, but the most important miracle in the history of Christendom is one which defies any attempt to explain away. The most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, unless one holds an a priori commitment to atheism, is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead just as we are promised that we will be. Because death did not result in the annihilation of His being we have the hope that neither will it result in ours.
This is the wonderful significance of the event Christians celebrate every Easter. Have a wonderful Resurrection Day.
The story of Phoebe Prince, the Massachussetts 15 year-old immigrant from Ireland who was bullied and harassed to the extent that she took her life is heart-breakingly sad. The girls who drove her to suicide exhibited a phenomenon common enough to have been given a name, "mean girls," apparently after a movie by that title which was also about girls who behave abominably.
There's been a lot of talk about the culpability of the school officials in Prince's death, but the question we might better ponder is why girls behave like this in the first place? What kind of human beings would hound a girl to her death and then continue to mock her on Facebook afterward? Are packs of girl's pushing other girls to total desperation now a normal part of an already fetid and effete culture? Why were these girls so cruel, why did they have so little empathy, so little compassion or kindness in their hearts?
Of course it's human nature to be cruel and resentful of outsiders. Compassion and acceptance of others have to be taught. These virtues have to be instilled in our children as a duty, and a culture that has abandoned the basis for moral duty, i.e. a Christian understanding of the world, is generally going to do a poor job of teaching that we have any such obligations to others.
Courtesy, forgiveness, selflessness, generosity and magnanimity in giving the benefit of the doubt all require a conviction that this is the proper way to conduct oneself, but if someone asks the question why one should comport oneself this way our post-Christian culture can give them no answer other than to say that it's nice to do so. In other words, we should be nice, we try to convince our children, because it's nice. That's going to fail to persuade a lot of young people, but it's the best we can do without invoking socially proscribed religious sanctions.
Consequently, our young people absorb their ethics from their cultural role models, and these are often, though not always, foul-mouthed, slutty, selfish, materialistic and petty. Many young girls learn at an early age that the most important thing in life is to look good and be popular and the best way to be popular is to be hard, loose, and hot. Failing that, the best way to consolidate one's status in the social hierarchy is to display power over another, and the best way to do that is by showing that you can hurt them. Young women weaned on this Darwinian view of what life's all about have little warmth in their hearts and little room for compassion in their souls.
As tragic and disgusting as the behavior of the culprits in Massachussetts was, no one should be surprised by it. Simply look at how too many of their role models behave, look at who and what the entertainment media incessantly promote, consider that many kids grow up with no real moral instruction and no foundation for whatever instruction they do get, and the wonder is that more girls aren't as cruel and repellent as the South Hadley High School nine.
Those readers with an interest in theology will be saddened by this news. Thomas Oord writes at his blog that:
Clark Pinnock is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Clark sent John Sanders and me the following note:
Dear Tom and John:
I want to inform you that I am now middle stage Alzheimer's. I will not be able to do my writing etc. I am 73 years now, and I've enjoyed my biblical three score and ten. I am not bitter. I have had a good life. I'll meet you over Jordan if not before.
You are free to make this news known.
With love,
Clark
Clark Pinnock was an extremely influential theologian during the latter half of the twentieth century, especially among Evangelicals. He was most well-known, and most controversial, as a champion of the view called Open Theism or Open Theology.
Oord pens a splendid summary of Pinnock's view on this issue on the same page that he features his email. Those interested in the subject will find Oord's treatment very helpful.
The Weekly Standarddiscerns a distinct hostility in the Obama administration toward business, wealth and achievement:
This animus toward accomplishment is producing significant political consequences. The February issue of Trends Magazine included an article titled, "The War on Achievement and its Building Backlash."
"For 250 years, America has been known throughout the world as the place where anyone could work hard, scrape together a little money and invest in a great idea," the Trends writers observe. "But a creeping kind of governmental interference has seriously threatened this ideal," they argue. In other words, the Trends writers continue, "the very bedrock concept underlying what's typically called 'the American Dream' is threatened by these measures."
Some specific pillars in the anti-achievement platform appear popular when polled - like raising taxes on the wealthy. Yet that's because higher taxes on the wealthy is never linked with any costs for the middle class in these surveys. Once voters understand there is a point at which taxing the rich or other perks produces negative economic consequences, the poll numbers would shift dramatically. Just ask the cocktail waitress in Vegas how Obama's tax and bonus rhetoric affects her economic prospects.
Rather than protecting the middle class, Obama's policies threaten their long-term ambitions through piling up unprecedented levels of debt justified by scorekeeping gimmicks. The president and his staff argued the health bill would reduce the deficit over the first ten years. But that's only because it includes ten years of taxes and spending cuts but only six years of benefits. Has Bernie Madoff become the Democrats' bookkeeper?
There's more at the link. Thanks to Jason for passing it along.
Actually the situation is even more dire than this article suggests. Keep checking back for more articles on the coming day of fiscal reckoning with which our government has put us on a collison course. We have to wonder why they're doing this. What is their justification for burying our children under mountains of debt?
All we get from the President are assurances that we've "turned the corner" on the recession even as his policies virtually guarantee that any recovery is going to be very short-lived. It's all very troubling.
A writer at National Review discusses her conviction that her husband's addiction ruined her family:
Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a man's perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue - $97 billion worldwide in 2006 - than all of the leading technology companies combined. Consider a narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades, thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment.
According to an online statistics firm, an estimated 40 million people use this drug on a regular basis. It doesn't come in pill form. It can't be smoked, injected, or snorted. And yet neurological data suggest its effects on the brain are strikingly similar to those of synthetic drugs. Indeed, two authorities on the neurochemistry of addiction, Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth, claim it is the ability of this drug to influence all three pleasure systems in the brain - arousal, satiation, and fantasy - that makes it "the pi�ce de r�sistance among the addictions."
The drug, of course, is pornography. The writer, a psychologist who wishes to remain anonymous, continues:
According to Dr. Victor Cline, a nationally renowned clinical psychologist who specializes in sexual addiction, pornography addiction is a process that undergoes four phases. First, addiction, resulting from early and repeated exposure accompanied by masturbation. Second, escalation, during which the addict requires more frequent porn exposure to achieve the same "highs" and may learn to prefer porn to sexual intercourse. Third, desensitization, during which the addict views as normal what was once considered repulsive or immoral. And finally, the acting-out phase, during which the addict runs an increased risk of making the leap from screen to real life.
The article is as arresting as it is important. When pornography began to be mass-produced back in the sixties it was common to hear it defended by liberals as a harmless outlet for pent-up urges. Well, we've had the outlet around now for almost fifty years. It has metastasized via the internet and film throughout the culture to the point that it's hard to avoid it, and every study I've read about gives the lie to those who assured us way back then that pornography was no big deal. Like alcohol it's addictive and devastating, not only to the person who consumes it but also to the consumer's family and, in an increasing number of cases, other innocent women and children.
Read the rest of the essay. If you're a young woman dating someone you might want to enquire about his attitudes toward pornography. If you think he might be viewing it, you could be very likely setting yourself up for a lot of heartbreak if you continue in the relationship.
Jason Mattera is at it again. This time he confronts Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran about the $6.4 billion of stimulus money that went to congressional districts that don't exist. Rep. Moran insists it was just a "clerical error."
Hey, what's a few billion dollars of taxpayer money when you're spending trillions?
I wonder what would have happened had Mr. Moran's aides not been there to keep the two men apart.
Congressman Paul Ryan, the ranking member on the House budget committee, knows the recently passed health care reform bill inside and out. In a recent column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he explains to his Wisconsin constituents the enormous costs that loom ahead:
Premiums in the individual [insurance] market would rise from 10% to 13% for families. Our debt and deficit crisis - driven by $76 trillion in unfunded liabilities [mostly Social Security and Medicare] - would accelerate from the creation of a brand new entitlement and an increase in the federal deficit by $662 billion, when the true costs are factored in. National health expenditures will increase by an additional $222 billion over the next decade, according to the president's own chief actuary, and $2.4 trillion in the decade after the new entitlement is up and running.
The entire architecture of this overhaul is designed, unapologetically, to give the government greater control over what kind of insurance is available, how much health care is enough and which treatments are worth paying for.
The massive expansion of the federal government into the personal health care decisions will drive providers out of business and force employers to dump their workers on to government - controlled exchanges. Because Washington doesn't approve, millions of Wisconsin seniors will lose their Medicare Advantage plans and millions more will lose the consumer - friendly high-deductible health plans they enjoy.
There is another personal cost to this deluge of new government spending and control. Wisconsin remains in dire need of sustained job growth and robust economic recovery. This legislation will hit our economy with $569 billion in tax increases - tax hikes that will hit workers, families and job-creators alike.
Ryan concludes his piece with an important explanation as to why the Democrats were so determined to foist this crushing burden upon us and our children:
The yearlong partisan crusade - right through its ugly conclusion - revealed that this debate was never about policy but rather a paternalistic ideology at odds with our historic commitment to individual liberty, limited government and entrepreneurial dynamism. The proponents of this legislation reject an opportunity society and instead assume you are stuck in your station in life and the role of government is to help you cope with it. Rather than promote equal opportunities for individuals to make the most of their lives, the cradle-to-grave welfare state seeks to equalize the results of people's lives.
Apparently so, but since Congress has exempted some of their own members from the bill they must think that they're more equal than the rest of us. A great way to achieve the equality they wish to impose on us is to return them to private life in November.
Dennis Prager surveys the current cultural and political scene and concludes that we're in the midst of a non-violent civil war. This assessment shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has been paying attention to the culture wars that've been raging in our society for the last thirty years.
What Prager says, and what many have been saying for decades now, is that the Left is at war with traditional America. Their values and ambitions are inimical to the principles upon which the country was founded and upon which five generations of Americans have been raised.
It's important to note that by the term "Left" Prager doesn't mean liberals:
Liberalism believed in American exceptionalism; the Left not only does not believe in it, but opposes it. (President Obama, when asked if he believes in American exceptionalism, replied, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.")
Liberalism believed in creating wealth; the Left is interested in redistributing it. Liberalism believed in a strong defense. The Left believes in cutting defense and relying on a strong United Nations.
How have we gotten to the point where those who want to fundamentally change the things that have made life in America so much better for so many people now have the power to do it? Perhaps it's largely because for too long too many of our citizens have taken little interest in matters beyond the scope of their own families, workplaces, and communities. The average American is woefully uninformed about the larger culture, particularly the political culture, and has failed and been failed in his education by both school and church.
Too many students graduate from high school, for example, with an understanding neither of the Constitution nor of American history. Too many Americans sit in pews every Sunday without ever hearing a sermon on the crucial importance of religion as a basis for moral virtue, or, for that matter, on the need for moral virtue in our personal and corporate lives. Instead, much of our understanding of matters both of faith and politics is left to be shaped by a mostly toxic and inane pop culture.
Too few Americans have ever read The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mill's On Liberty, Locke's Second Treatise on Government, or Smith's Wealth of Nations. Without at least a passing familiarity with works like these by men whose ideas informed the American experiment, it's hard for people to grasp how much different the Left's principles are from the principles of those who founded this country.
Too few Americans know even two or three of the amendments to the Constitution. Too few even care what they are or would be much concerned if they heard that they were all to be repealed tomorrow.
Our ignorance about how our nation came to be and how it works makes us vulnerable to the corrosive acids of a leftist ideology that abhors the very freedom that has made America a great nation and the hope of people all around the globe. Representative John Dingell gave us a peek into the leftist mindset the other day when he let slip that the goal of health care was to "control the people." Individual freedom is the furthest thing from the minds of too many of our political leaders. For such as Mr. Dingell the opportunity to govern is all about the power to control:
If the Left is successful in reducing this country to the status of, say, France or England the world will pay an awful price. There'll be no economic powerhouse to deliver to the world's destitute the food, medicine, and other charitable benefits they need to survive. There'll be no military strong enough to serve as a check on Islamic terror and expansion or to deter war in the Middle East or between India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Turkey and Greece, or Russia and Europe. An economically enfeebled America would be a militarily crippled America and our weakness would invite chaos and bloodletting on a massive scale around the globe.
This is the direction the Left, under Obama, Pelosi and Reid, is taking us, whether purposely or not. Our national indebtedness will, in a decade or so, be so high, our government will be so top-heavy, that all our wealth will either be siphoned off to creditors like China, or sucked into the vast bureaucratic machinery of the social welfare state. There'll be little left over to spend on defense or charitable relief and little incentive for individuals to work hard and take risks.
Edmund Burke once said, "All that's necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." Perhaps the last year has roused Americans from their traditional torpor and inspired them to start caring. At least we can hope.
Readers under the age of 25 might never have heard of Jaime Escalante, and even many over 25 probably never heard of him either. Even so, he was a role model for a generation of teachers who wanted to do everything they could to give their students the best education they could get.
There are teachers who just want to put in the time and collect a check. There are teachers who want to teach, but are unwilling to work much beyond what the contract calls for, and then there are teachers like Escalante who view teaching much like most coaches view coaching. He was ready and willing to put in whatever time and effort were needed to win, and it paid off. Escalante was an immigrant from Bolivia who struggled with English. He taught math in inner city L.A., and through sheer hard work, determination and personality brought many of his students to a point where they were passing the AP calculus exam as a matter of course. His was a wonderful, moving story made into a movie in 1988 starring Edward James Olmos and titled Stand and Deliver.
If you're planning to be a teacher or if you just want to be inspired by what one man can accomplish when he's determined to achieve, rent Stand and Deliver.
Jaime Escalante died Tuesday in his native Bolivia at the age of 79.
I understand Rep. Hank Johnson is not a well man, infected as he is with hepatitis C. This is tragic, of course, but it doesn't make it any the less embarrassing that this fellow is a United States Congressman. In this video clip from last week he expresses his concern that putting too many military personnel on Guam might cause it, being a small island, to tip over in the ocean. I know you don't believe that he really said that so watch the video:
Reflect now upon the fact that the honorable gentleman from Georgia is also an enthusiastic supporter of health care reform. Yikes.
Seriously, whether Rep. Johnson's fears about Guam capsizing are a result of the effects of his illness (though I don't know how hepatitis would addle one's brain) or whether he's simply simple-minded, we should have compassion for him, but compassion surely does not extend to allowing Mr. Johnson to have a say in formulating the policies by which the rest of us must be governed.
To listen to MSNBC and the people who write for the New York Times you would think that nasty, threatening rhetoric was actually invented by tea party conservatives. Never mind that it has proven very difficult to document most of the worst allegations made against tea-party protestors, let's give the Paul Krugmans and Keith Olbermanns of the world the benefit of the doubt and concede that there have indeed been some mean things said about our President and our congresspersons.
After all, some individuals have certainly expressed doubt about Mr. Obama's birthplace and thus the legitimacy of his holding the office of President; people are calling him awful names like socialist; many are so angry with his policies that they're threatening to launch a political "Armageddon" in November and "target" Democrats for defeat; people are portraying the President as the Joker, and they're doing and saying other unimaginable things as well.
All of this, we're given to believe, is a novel development in our politics, a quantum leap in vitriol and hate. Well, hardly. The tea partier rhetoric, such as it is, is the mere cooing of doves compared to what the Democrat rank and file treated us to during the Bush era. For those with short memories we offer this video as a sampling of what Democrat activists were saying in 2004. As you watch ask yourself if the media wouldn't be going off like a Roman candle if every time one of these people said "Bush," or "Left," or whatever, they had actually used the corresponding noun "Obama" or "Right," etc:
When Democrats use hateful rhetoric, well, that's to be expected. It scarcely makes the news, but if conservatives use it then the liberal media Chicken Littles scurry about covering the ears and screaming that they've never heard such terrible things ever in our whole modern history. These people are beyond parody.
Some time ago 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.
Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christmas to deride Christian belief. 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, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the orthodox Christian understanding of the atonement.
She 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 wonderful 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 be rid of him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They snuck into her village, kidnapped Tanya and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange her 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. Despite all the rejections the prince had experienced from Tanya, he still loved her deeply, and his heart broke 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 safely in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.
And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode bravely and proudly bestride his steed out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward the camp of his mortal enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she was out of the camp, fleeing toward the safety of the king's city, 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 agonies to which they subjected him were strengthened 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 onto a garbage heap.
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 son's heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain with him 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 in too close proximity to the prince, and, by the way, she asked the king, where is that pissy little whiner son of yours anyway?
A Washington Timesarticle by David Dickson confronts us with some very troubling fiscal facts. According to last Thursday's Congressional Budget Office report President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years - $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected - and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020.
The federal public debt was $6.3 trillion when Mr. Obama entered office. It currently totals $8.2 trillion, and it's headed toward $20.3 trillion in 2020, according to the CBO's deficit estimates. This translates to a debt of $170,000 per household in ten years. How in the world does our political leadership think we're going to pay for that? If they were deliberately trying to drive this country over the cliff, as some think is the case, what would they do differently?
Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, in commenting on Dickson's column, offers some historical perspective:
The worst deficit under a Republican Congress was $400 billion in FY2004. It's also worth noting that the last budget produced by a Republican Congress spent $2.77 trillion (FY2007), and had a deficit of less than half of that peak. While Republican Congresses added almost $800 billion in annual spending to the budget in six years - an indefensible expansion - that pales in comparison to the $1.1 trillion added by Democratic Congresses in just three years. Under those conditions, the massive budget deficits shown in the CBO's graph are simply unavoidable, and the best of the next ten years is double the worst of the Republican Congress from 2001-7.
Don't expect that debt to come cheap, either. We're already seeing signs that our interest rates will have to go up in order to sell more paper, which will cause the deficit projections here to actually fall short of reality. We could be looking at a collapse scenario where we can't borrow enough to keep up with our interest payments by the time this decade concludes.
This CBO graph, from Hot Air, pretty much sums up the fiscal predicament the Obama administration has placed us in:
Pretty soon those of us who can remember will be waxing nostalgic for the good old days of the Carter presidency.
The news outlets are telling us that authorities have arrested nine members of a midwestern group that was planning on murdering policemen.
We can all be glad that these reprehensible people are securely behind bars, but I have a bit of a quibble with the characterization of these criminals. Their organization is frequently referred to as a "right-wing Christian militia." Perhaps this is how they imagine themselves, but for the sake of accuracy it should be noted that it's not clear that they are "right-wing," they are certainly not "Christian," and the proper designation of the group is not "militia," but "terrorist organization."
I hesitate to call them "right-wing," although they may be, because their political views have not yet been brought to light. What we do know of them, however, makes them sound more like fascists. Fascism is an ideology of the left, not the right, and fascists have always been prone toward the trappings of militarism and a lust for violence. Moreover, violence directed toward police has always been characteristic in this country of extremist groups on the left. The "Hutaree" seem, in fact, to be a white version of the fascist, leftist black panthers or black Muslims of the 1960s.
Whatever their political linkages may be, though, they are not Christians religiously. Just because they recite a couple of Bible verses and believe a few dogmas that may be faintly Christian does not make them Christian any more than the Muslim belief in God and an afterlife makes them Christian. Jesus said that not everyone who speaks in his name is a disciple of his but rather it's he who does the will of his Father. Murdering innocent people is not the will of the Father of Jesus Christ. These people may call themselves Christian but, if so, they are CINOs (Christian In Name Only). They are no more Christian than Stalin was a humanitarian. They're even less Christian, as difficult as it is to imagine, than is the Westboro Baptist crowd.
Nor should their organization be called a "militia." To do so is to smear the name of an honorable tradition in American history. These people are not militia men, they're terrorists. Their machinations are indistinguishable from those of any al Qaeda cell and, indeed, they serve much the same purpose. But for the fact that they're United States citizens they should not be tried as criminals in civilian court but rather sent to Guantanamo to be tried by a military tribunal as enemy combatants.
I sympathize with those who are alarmed by our current government, and I agree with Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers that a long chain of abuses may at some point prove unendurable, but we are right now very far from that point. We still have the right to vote, we still have the right to speak out against encroachments upon our freedom, we still have the right to undo through peaceful means whatever damage is done to our country through misguided political policies. To decide that there is no other recourse at this juncture than killing, to plan to murder the men and women who are working to protect us every day, as well as their families, is absolutely despicable.
Send them to Guantanamo and let them cohabit with the jihadis there. They have much in common.
Imagine a movie made by Woody Allen whose script was written by Franz Kafka based on Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and you have the Coen brothers' latest film, a dark comedy titled A Serious Man. The protaganist of the story is a Kafkaesque character (think of Joseph K. in The Trial) living in a world that seems completely inscrutable.
Aside from being a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a very ordinary man, but his life is falling apart by the hour. His wife is in love with Gopnik's colleague and wants a divorce, his kids are incessant whiners, his socially inept brother has moved in and won't move out, a student tries to bribe and then sue him for a higher grade, and, as with Job whose enquiries among his friends for an explanation for his miseries were ultimately futile, no one Larry goes to for help has any answers. The more deeply we enter Gopnik's life the more surreal it all becomes. One can't help think that Larry's 1967 midwestern neighborhood is a concoction of the mind of Lewis Carroll, author of the logically bizarre world in Through the Looking Glass.
Larry Gopnik tries valiantly to make sense of it all, he strives to find the meaning in the trials he faces, but he never succeeds. The insanity of his life is invincible. None of the situations which plague him ever gets resolved. His life is absurd, and this seems to be what the Coen brothers' wanted to say in this film. This is the existential burden borne by modern man. His life seems meaningless, nothing is certain (the film makes a point of exploiting the weirdness of the principles of quantum physics), nothing makes sense, nothing is ever resolved. Even the structure of the film bears the stamp of this absurdity. The prologue of the film has nothing at all to do with the main story.
Even so, the movie is very well done and, for the philosophically-minded, very much worth watching (caution: it's R-rated for language, which is as irksome as it is jejunne, and one scene of sexuality). Some scenes are genuinely funny, there are multiple layers of symbolism to contemplate in the film, and those who ponder the point and purpose of human existence will find Larry Gopnik's life an excellent stimulus for reflection.
There's a scene in the movie Amistad in which the captain of an illegal slave ship orders the crew to push the slaves, all chained together, overboard. The camera filming the slaves falling into the ocean looks up from about thirty feet below the surface, giving the viewer a horrifying underwater perspective of the slaves being drowned by the weight of their shackles.
That searing scene is a metaphor, perhaps, for what's already happening to our economy because of Obamacare. Captain Obama has given the order, first-mate Pelosi has carried it out and already the chains of government control are pulling American corporations underwater.
The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don't make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.
What is that damage? As part of the bill Democrats decided to eliminate tax breaks given to companies that offer prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. As a result AT&T announced yesterday that its profits will be reduced by $1 billion this year due solely to the health bill. Other corporations reporting massive losses include Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks, according to the WSJ article.
Nancy Pelosi told us that we'd have to pass the bill to see what's in it, but that once we did the American people would love it. Maybe, but it's hard to love a bill that puts you out of work or keeps you from getting a job, and any policy which imposes huge costs on employers will have just that result.
When employers are losing money their employees suffer. Either they get laid off or they lose benefits. In either case Obamacare looks more and more like a heavy chain around the ankles of the nation's businesses. Given this burden, it's hard to see how there could be much improvement in the job market anytime soon.
My heart goes out to all the students graduating from college this spring who'll be trying to find a job to pay off their student loans. I wish them well, and I hope that next time they vote they'll attend more carefully to what the candidate will actually do once in office rather than, as so many students were in 2008, being seduced by the color of his skin and the eloquence of his words.
Those who are opposed to illegal immigration are often rebuked with what some apparently fancy to be a cogent argument. It goes something like this:
This nation was founded by immigrants. We're all descended from immigrants. Why should we deny others the opportunities that our ancestors had?
There are a number of difficulties with this line of reasoning, but to take just one, when our ancestors arrived the people already here were under no financial obligation to provide them with food, housing, education, and medical care. There was no welfare state. Our ancestors had to make their way by dint of their own industry.
In 1868 Congress ratified the 14th amendment which has since been interpreted to mandate that anyone born in the U.S. is ipso facto an American citizen. Given that Americans have obligated themselves to pay for many of their citizens' needs from cradle to grave, this "birthright citizenship" is an enormous incentive for people to emigrate here illegally, just so their children can enjoy the benefits provided by the beleaguered American taxpayer.
George Will, a Washington Post syndicated columnist, believes that we can no longer afford such magnanimity. He notes that:
[M]ore than two-thirds of all births in Los Angeles public hospitals, and more than half of all births in that city, and nearly 10 percent of all births in the nation in recent years, have been to mothers who are here illegally.
All of these children are now citizens entitled to their fair share of "Obama's stash" i.e. our tax dollars. They and their parents are placing an enormous strain on California's fiscal health. Indeed, the costs of illegal immigration are a major reason California teeters on the precipice of bankruptcy.
Will says it's time to end birthright citizenship to people who are here illegally, and that doing so would cool much of the antipathy toward immigration reform. I think he's right. Read his argument at the link. Meanwhile, those who are interested might want to check out our own proposal for immigration reform. If so, go here and scroll down to Addressing Illegal Immigration.
A reader named Brian passes along a link to a column at the New York Times by Charles Blow which illustrates one of the more troublesome aspects of our contemporary political discourse. Blow writes:
The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions. The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they're only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
I say this is troubling because Blow, like others, just throws out the charge that the "far-right extremists" have been issuing threats and engaging in acts of violence, but he nowhere documents any of the alleged misconduct. He just expects us to accept his word that it's happening. The charge is made, the media report it, and it becomes common knowledge without anyone ever verifying that it actually happened.
Like those who've accused the right of fomenting hate and of telling lies about health care, I'd like to know what form, exactly do these lies and this hate take, and who, exactly, is doing it? Paul Ryan? Tom Coburn? Facts would be nice, but Blow's not interested in facts. The "narrative" of conservative hate has purchase with his readers, I suppose, so it becomes their truth regardless of the objective facts of the matter.
Meanwhile, the police have indeed arrested a Philadelphia man for threatening to kill a Congressman and his family, but unfortunately for Blow's narrative the threat was directed at an opponent of Obama's health care reform, Republican Eric Cantor, by an apparent Obama supporter.
It's as easy as it is irresponsible to simply assert that there's hatred, violence, and mendacity among the tea-partiers and other conservatives, but unless the charge is backed up by evidence it's little more than a slanderous cheap shot.
Blow goes on in his column to display an alarming lack of political perspicacity as he sheds crocodile tears for the tea-party folks:
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill's most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It's enough to make a good old boy go crazy. Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small.
This borders on being simple-minded. Conservatives are not frustrated because the perpetrators of incipient socialism are female, Jewish and black. Is Blow completely daft? Who, if they had their way, would the tea-party folk have selected for their president among the four candidates on the major party tickets in 2008? Sarah Palin. Who is one of the tea-party heroes among the GOP caucus? Eric Cantor, a Jew. Who is one of the most admired men in America among conservatives? Clarence Thomas, a black Supreme Court Justice.
Though people like Blow, who see everything through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity, may find this hard to believe, these superficialities are not what stoke conservative anger. What pushes their buttons is ideology. Conservatives oppose Obama not because he's black but because his progressive ideology has brought nothing but economic malaise everywhere it's been implemented. Blow, however, can't seem to get his mind around that simple fact, choosing instead to live by a syllogism that goes like this:
Obama is black. Conservatives oppose Obama. Therefore, conservatives oppose Obama because he's black.
This is a pretty pathetic credo, of course, but the Charles Blows of the world evidently consider it irrefutable.
Brian sums up the piece this way:
Mr. Blow's article appears to be a taunting of those who care for the future with the facts of the past - though worthless in terms of insight it does serve as a boldfaced statement of what the Left thinks the Right stands for.
The fact is that conservatives long ago got past race and gender. It's time that the progressives caught up.
The debate over the President's plans to "transform" America have reminded some of the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. You'll recall that the story goes like this:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
The moral, of course, is that we should all work hard and be responsible for ourselves.
The Democrats have revised this venerable tale, however, so that it now reads something like this:
The ant works hard in the withering heat and rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The ant worked hard in school as well, earned an education, waited until he was married before having children, and remained faithful to his ant-wife. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. The grasshopper couldn't care less about school, sleeps with whichever other grasshopper will have him, and lives life in a haze of drugs, alcohol, cheese curls and television shows.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he's cold, hungry and without health insurance. The major networks all show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant snug in his comfortable home with a refrigerator filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Acorn and SEIU stage demonstrations in front of the ant's house where the news stations film them singing, "We shall overcome." Rev. Al Sharpton leads the group in a prayer for the grasshopper's sake and condemns the ant for his lack of compassion.
President Obama also publicly chastises the ant and blames President Bush and Israel for the grasshopper's plight. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Keith Olbermann that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and all three call for a tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share and "spread the wealth around."
No longer able to pay his employees or his mortgage because of the tax burdens that have been imposed on him, the ant has to sell both his business and his home which the government buys and gives to the grasshopper because a job and a home are human rights.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his friends, sleeping till noon, and then finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the business fails and the house crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.
The ant has dropped out of sight, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is eventually found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful neighborhood.
The moral of the story, of course, is that we get what we vote for.
President Obama is determined to make the ants, which comprise about 25% of the population and which pays about 87% of the nation's income taxes, pull the wagon full of grasshoppers which make up about 50% of our nation and pay almost no income tax. On top of that the top 25% will now have to pay the health insurance costs for 30 million people (50 million if they pass amnesty for illegal aliens). Ants are strong. They can carry loads a hundred times their own weight, but they can't carry all those grasshoppers.
My brother Bill, who maintains our site on his server, sends along some info about Viewpoint's reach. We are apparently ranked number 7,851,667 in the world for traffic (I don't know how many blogs there are around the world. Probably about 7,900,000.). We've also received visitors from over 100 countries since January 1st. Here's the breakdown of countries from which we've had at least ten hits in the last three months:
19699 United States
632 Russian Federation
525 France
466 United Kingdom
407 Canada
354 China
245 Sweden
152 Australia
126 India
124 Netherlands
121 Philippines
118 Germany
111 Ukraine
67 Italy
56 Poland
53 unknown
52 Burkina Faso
49 Brazil
44 Japan
43 Israel
40 Iran, Islamic Republic of
39 Korea, Republic of
36 Iraq
30 Belgium
30 Czech Republic
30 Norway
29 Denmark
29 Hungary
29 Ireland
29 Romania
28 Mexico
25 Greece
24 South Africa
23 Pakistan
22 Luxembourg
22 United Arab Emirates
21 Malaysia
20 Turkey
18 Finland
17 Portugal
14 Belize
14 Egypt
14 Indonesia
14 Saudi Arabia
14 Slovenia
13 New Zealand
13 Thailand
12 Croatia
12 Taiwan
11 Switzerland
10 Bulgaria
I don't know what this means, if anything, but I thought it was interesting.
My friend Byron passes along an email from the left-wing group MoveOn.org demanding that the Republican leadership disavow all hateful rhetoric and violent actions allegedly emanating from the right in the wake of the health care debate.
Now, to the extent that anyone on the right actually threatened anyone in Congress, it's certainly reprehensible. To the extent that some members of Congress were called names, it's disappointing. That said, these people at MoveOn.org make me laugh. They were utterly silent when tea-partiers were being called "tea-baggers" (a sleazy sexual reference) over and over again on MSNBC and elsewhere, but now they're outraged that some tea-partier allegedly called Barney Frank a "fag." They were outraged that a protestor may have called John Lewis a "nigger" last Saturday (though nobody but Lewis seems to have heard it), but were utterly silent when two SEIU thugs called Kenneth Gladney a nigger, knocked him to the ground and kicked him, putting him in the hospital last summer. Gladney, a 130 pound diabetic, was simply handing out flags at a town hall meeting.
The MoveOn.org crowd are beside themselves that congressmen are receiving hate mail and people are turning up outside their houses to protest their health care reform vote, but they uttered not a peep when Sarah Palin and George Bush were burned in effigy and when protestors were gathering outside the homes of AIG executives and menacing them and their families.
Nor did the Left have anything much to say when Alec Baldwin told a late-night television audience that they should all go to the home of the late pro-life Congressman Henry Hyde and stone him to death, him and his family. Nor was the Left moved to object when Julianne Malveux, a television personality, told her viewers that she hoped Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife would feed him lots of artery-clogging foods so that he'd have a heart attack and die.
Some of the mail our congresspersons are receiving is no doubt disgusting, but it's like being sent Valentine's cards compared to what people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, et al. are subjected to every day, yet no one at MoveOn has done anything I'm aware of to persuade Democrats to disavow the hate directed at conservatives. Indeed, Chris Matthews once said on a morning news show that he'd like to see Rush Limbaugh blown to pieces like a character in a James Bond movie. Then there was the Nobel Peace Prize winner who told a class of school children that she could kill George Bush. What did MoveOn.org have to say about that? Nothing that I remember. Our President even counts among his friends people who bombed buildings and, in the case of Bill Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were implicated in terrorist murder. Yet MoveOn has never bestirred itself to demand that Mr. Obama disavow his violent friends.
MoveOn is indignant that some Democrats' campaign offices were vandalized, but they said nothing when John McCain's campaign offices were trashed. They're irate that a coffin was left in a congressman's yard, but the people who left it were actually conducting a prayer vigil for the congressman, and the coffin was used to symbolize the death of liberty. The Left is angry that people called Bart Stupak and wished he'd drown himself, but this happened before he caved on the health care bill's abortion language. The caller was apparently a Democrat angry that Stupak stood in the way of passing the bill.
I very much regret the turn that our public discourse has taken, but vitriolic attacks are almost exclusively a phenomenon of the Left going back to the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. MoveOn itself has contributed to the degraded tenor of our discourse by sponsoring an ad two years ago that called General Petraeus a traitor to his country.
And now they're in a snit because someone in a crowd of demonstrators may have responded to what seemed to be a deliberate provocation by a group of black congressmen by casting a slur? They're incensed because one of the congressmen was apparently sprayed with spittle from an over-exuberant protestor shouting his demand that congress "kill the bill?" They're upset because a woman called a congressman and told him that a lot of people wish him ill? Talk about straining gnats and swallowing camels.
Go to Hot Air for more on the coffin and supposed spitting incidents. You can witness the heinous crime here at about the 1:30 mark:
What may be most disturbing about the over-the-line rhetoric afflicting our politics is that the liberal media and the Democrats seem to be sensitive to it only when it comes from the right. In defense of the media, though, perhaps there's a legitimate reason for that. Perhaps it's because it's so unusual to find people on the right acting poorly that it's startling and thus newsworthy when it happens. On the other hand, maybe the media simply expects such behavior from the Left and regards it as nothing unusual and thus not particularly worthy of comment.
David Coppedge places tongue in cheek and chides University of Kansas anthropologist John Hoopes for concluding that the stone spheres he's studying in Costa Rica were intelligently designed:
Coppedge writes:
An archaeologist has been studying stone spheres in Costa Rica and has concluded they were designed.
According to PhysOrg, he doesn't know who made the spheres, when they were made, or why they were made. Why is he jumping to a conclusion of intelligent design? He should be considering natural explanations. There are plenty of natural forces that can make a sphere and even simulate hammer marks. By concluding design, he has brought the scientific investigation of these stones to a standstill.
To be a scientist, you can't take the easy way out and assume design every time you see something you can't explain. Some designer, too; some of the stones are up to two inches out of round. Who is the designer? And who designed the designer? Science is supposed to be about natural explanations for natural phenomena. These stones are perfectly natural; they are not made up of some angelic material or something. If this professor doesn't have a good enough imagination to make up a naturalistic story, he doesn't belong in science.
Every sentence in Coppedge's little satire is taken from arguments that have been used by Darwinians against those who believe that the enormous complexity of the hundreds of molecular machines which perform incredibly sophisticated operations in living cells is the product of blind chance and natural forces. There is no justification, the Darwinian insists, for thinking that these biomachines are the product of an intelligent agent, but simple round rocks, on the other hand, well, they're obviously the work of purposeful artisans.
Philosopher Michael Ruse offers a very odd argument on behalf of the proposition that we don't need God to have morality.
Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra he announces that there is no God. He also proclaims that there are, therefore, no grounds for morality. Morality is an illusion, he avers, but, and here's where the argument begins to go seriously awry, he insists we should be "good" anyway. Why? Because natural selection commands it. This is, to say the very least, an unpersuasive claim.
Here's Ruse:
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all.
Ruse here assumes that there actually is a "good" and a "bad," but what could they be? Perhaps it is good to promote human happiness, but then why is it bad to promote only my happiness? Why is it bad to be selfish? Is it bad because it hurts others? Well, why is hurting others bad? Is it bad because they don't like it? Why should anyone care what others like?
Ruse again:
Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection.
So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective. "Why should I be good? Why should you be good? Because that is what morality demands of us. It is bigger than the both of us. It is laid on us and we must accept it, just like we must accept that 2 + 2 = 4."
This has all the symptoms of a tautology. Ruse says in essence that we should be good because, well, we should be good. We should obey the demands of morality because morality demands that we obey them.
He goes on:
Am I now giving the game away? Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what's to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense. But you are still a human with your gene-based psychology working flat out to make you think you should be moral. It has been said that the truth will set you free. Don't believe it. David Hume knew the score. It doesn't matter how much philosophical reflection can show that your beliefs and behaviour have no rational foundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner.
Ruse's argument seems to be that what people call moral behavior is a non-rational illusion but that we should go along with the illusion because it's psychologically satisfying. Well. What if my psychological impulses direct me to exterminate people unlike myself (a very Darwinian possibility), or what if my psychological yearnings induce me to rape, steal, and torture? If these behaviors are a product of my psychology how would Ruse judge them to be bad? Are all psychological inclinations worth following or just some? How do we discern which should be followed and which should not? Neither our psychology nor our genes tell us we should care about strangers. Indeed, they tell us over and over again in a myriad of ways that we should be selfish, so why should we not be?
In any case, Ruse's whole argument is based on a fallacy called the naturalistic fallacy. It's the error of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is." It's the error of saying that because nature is a certain way that therefore it should be that way. It's the error of saying that a behavior must be right if it's found in nature. Most atheists gave up trying to base morality on nature and nature's evolution a long time ago, but since they've nothing else to justify their moral judgments some of them, like Ruse, try every now and then to sneak it back in.
Ruse concludes with this:
God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality.
If God really is dead, Dostoyevsky reminds us, everything is permitted. There simply are no moral duties. Moral judgments are nothing more than statements about our likes and dislikes. To say that cruelty is wrong is to say only that I don't like cruelty. If morality is subjective, as Ruse claims, then right and wrong are just matters of personal taste. To assert that slaughtering whales is wrong is like asserting that liking anchovies on one's pizza is wrong. To insist that kindness is better than cruelty is like insisting that Coke is better than Pepsi.
Contra Ruse, if God is dead then so is the notion of moral obligation, moral good and bad, and moral judgment. The only way one can hold onto any meaningful morality, the only way one's moral judgments can have force, the only way the claim that some act is morally wrong can have any significance is if there is a transcendent moral authority who has established an objective moral law.
Ruse's essay affords us an excellent illustration of the futility of trying to have morality while rejecting it's only possible foundation.
* Concerning matters of taste there is no dispute.
Byron links us to an article by Chris Hedges, a leftist writer, who offers us an analysis of Obamacare from the perspective of the far-left. They're not happy campers and they shouldn't be. What the media is calling health care reform is, in Hedges' view, little more than a massively expensive pork barrel project that will wind up helping very few people:
The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014.
Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.
The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: "This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?" Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get?
As is sometimes the case the value of the Left is that they often make us aware of problems we might otherwise have overlooked. They were right to call our attention to the need to reform health care. The problem is that their solutions to the problems they diagnose are often awful. In this case Hedges' solution is total government control of health care, a solution which is crushingly expensive and which has worked well nowhere else in the world.
In order to pay for the current plan, Charles Krauthammer predicts, there will by next year be a massive effort to pass a national European-style sales tax. This, if it transpires, would violate another of President Obama's pledges to the American people, i.e. his promise that no one making less than $250,000 would see their taxes go up.
This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. See here and here for the two previous posts on his essay.
Bottum writes that:
Believers should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key - the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.
Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times. The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack-the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.
Premoderns are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on the modern belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the shifting sands of positivism, or the scientific method, or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.
We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history.
Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.
We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals and human nature into our present era.
A number of strategists, including John Hawkins at Right Wing News, have laid out a simple plan Republicans could follow in 2011 to effectively neuter Obamacare without having to achieve a supermajority in the Senate. They would, though, have to recapture the House.
Here's Hawkins:
The problem with doing a full repeal of Obamacare is that it will take a majority in the House, the presidency, and 60 votes in the Senate.
Were I a betting man, I'd say condition one is very likely by 2012, condition 2 is definitely possible, but condition 3 is basically out of reach given that we only have 41 Senators right now. By 2014? Maybe, but under any circumstances, getting to 60 Senators is always extraordinarily difficult. Of course, we may be able to peel off some Democratic votes, but there's no guarantee that will happen.
So, how do we kill Obamacare?
The IRS might have to hire as many as 16,000 new employees to enforce all the new taxes and penalties the bill calls for! And that doesn't include all the other government jobs from the 159 new agencies, panels, commissions and departments this bill will create.
What does it take to fund all those government jobs, agencies, panels, and commissions? Tax dollars.
Now, who controls the purse strings? Congress. How many votes do we need via reconciliation to make budget changes? 51.
Hawkins suggests that if the GOP controls the House they could effectively end Obamacare even without a senate supermajority, and even with President Obama still in office, simply by refusing to fund the bureaucracy that sustains it. Read the rest at the link.
The most important thing, though, is to continue explaining to the American people exactly how this bill will harm Americans as it is implemented, and to convince them through clear, calm argument why it needs to be reversed, and to persuade them that they can help by voting for people in November who'll work to reverse it.
