New Moral Categories

Dennis Prager observes that those who are miffed with the tea party folks who oppose expnsive government power regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This criticism, Prager claims, is intended by opponents to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration (MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann come immediately to mind in this regard.). In the course of explaining his case Prager notes something about the way lefties often think that's helpful to those who wish to understand how the liberal mind works.

He writes:

The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers.

It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of race, gender and class rather than through the moral prism of right and wrong.

One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor (class).

Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color -- and gender (not just "whites" but "white males") -- of the tea partiers rather than to their ideas.

As a Leftist rule of thumb -- once again rendering intellectual debate unnecessary and impossible -- white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one additional division on the Left -- strong and weak -- to which the same rule applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the Israelis (strong), for example.

Presumably, then, in the eyes of many on the Left if you're a rich white male you're automatically suspect (despite the peculiar fact that so many Lefties are themselves rich, white males). If a powerful nation has a grievance with a weaker nation then the powerful nation is assumed to be in the wrong until they prove themselves innocent. If a largely white American legislature passes a law that would prevent poor, dark-skinned people from pouring across the border, it's the white legislature that's assumed to be wrong, not those who break the law to enter the country.

I can see why some people would find this an attractive formula. It has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it relieves those who embrace it of the responsibility of having to actually think.

Read the rest of Prager's column at the link.

RLC

O Brother Where Art Thou?

A lot of folks in the conservative media are wondering where the President has been while Nashville suffered through a major disaster last week.

Mr. Obama was quick to send aid to Haiti and to claim that the government is doing all it can to force BP to clean up the Gulf oil spill. Yet a once in a century flood has devastated Nashville, and it doesn't seem to be prominently featured on his radar screen. Some cynics think that the reason the man who was quick to criticize President Bush for waiting a day or two too long to rush aid to New Orleans has been dilatory on Tennessee is because Tennessee is a red state and not likely to vote Democratic. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it's not. I don't like to think that our president is that small-minded and vindictive. Such a motive would, moreover, be counterproductive for the president since administrative indifference is a good way to insure that Tennessee never votes Democratic.

I think, though, that the reason for the lack of apparent concern for the people of Tennessee in the administration and the media may be something that is at once less political and more subconsciously sinister. Perhaps, as with the Mississippi river floods a couple of years ago, people just assume that the victims in these regions don't need government help to cope, that they're a self-reliant, proud breed capable of taking care of themselves, which may well be true. But if this is what's in the back of the minds of administration officials what does that say about their attitude, no doubt subliminal, toward the victims in New Orleans and elsewhere as a result of Katrina? Were those people helpless to do anything to help themselves? Why, with fleets of school busses available couldn't the local authorities evacuate their people? Why couldn't the citizens of the city provide care for each other? Were they so lacking in initiative, so dependent on the federal government, that they just sat around in their City Hall offices and their houses waiting for the government to come in and rescue them?

If that's so, then we need to ask why it is so. Is it because the New Orleans victims were poor, or is it because they've been behaviorally conditioned by a paternalistic welfare state to accept a permanent lassitude, indolence and child-like dependency that the proud people of Nashville and elsewhere disdain? Just wondering.

RLC

No Evidence Required

A friend writes to chide me for making the claim that many liberals don't require evidence to believe what they believe. They often think as they do, I averred, simply because it comports or coheres with their liberal worldview. My friend thought this was tantamount to calling liberals liars. On the contrary, I certainly was not saying that many liberals are liars - although if pressed I'd have to agree that some surely are and that many of these even endorse lying as a strategy (read, for instance, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals).

In my post, however, I was making the more modest claim that many on the left are simply uncritical and gullible. For example, here's a list of ten beliefs many liberals hold, sometimes devoutly, despite the fact that they have little or no evidence for them:

1) That candidate Obama was qualified to hold the highest office in the land.

2) That President Obama is a natural born citizen of the U.S. (This is not to say he isn't, but rather that belief that he is requires an act of faith since he refuses to present his birth certificate).

3) That the Democrats' health care reform proposal will be good for the country.

4) That global warming is caused by human activity and is an imminent threat to the world.

5) That the Arizona law will result in oppressive police tactics against innocent Americans.

6) That intelligent design is just gussied up creationism (Most lay-people who believe this know nothing about ID. They just know that it's wrong.).

7) That tea-partiers are racists.

8) That George Bush and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks on New York.

9) That the Palestinians genuinely desire to live in peace with Israel.

10) That an unborn child is nothing more, ontologically speaking, than a blob of tissue.

You can probably think of more examples. If so, please feel free to share them with us.

RLC

Not Funny, Mr. President

Arizona governor Jan Brewer responds to President Obama's criticism of her state's attempt to get a handle on the problem of illegal immigration with this ad:

Perhaps the president's disdain for Arizona's frustration lies in part in the fact that he's pretty much sympatico with the organization La Raza, a radical racial supremicist group which opposes all attempts to limit the flow of Hispanics across our southern border and which holds that much of the southwest actually belongs to Mexico.

HT: Right Wing News

RLC

Interests and Desires

Here are some questions for the metaphysical naturalist: On naturalism (or materialism) what is it that gives human beings inherent value? Where do the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come from? Why should we think that all must be equal before the law? What gives us the right to to be treated respectfully and justly?

Some naturalist philosophers have answered that it is the fact that human beings have "interests and desires" that confers upon them these rights, but it's a mystery as to how that could be. What does the existence of our interests and desires have to do with the obligation of others to treat us respectfully? It's hard to see what the connection might be. If one asks why, exactly, I should care about the interests of others, the answer is likely to amount to some variation of "We just should." The attempt to ground my moral duties in the fact that others have interests and desires strikes me as a purely arbitrary, and desperate, attempt to salvage human rights from the nihilism to which naturalism inevitably leads.

But suppose for a moment that we accept the answer. What follows? Are not some interests and desires more valuable than others? Is not the satisfaction of some interests and desires more worthy than others? If so, then what obligates us to respect equally the life, liberty and happiness of those whose interests and desires are less worthy?

The fact of the matter is that unless our worth and our rights derive from a transcendent source, then they are grounded in nothing. Apart from a transcendent ground we have no dignity, no inherent value, no matter how many interests and desires we have. John Locke and Thomas Jefferson both recognized this which is why both men based human rights in a Creator God.

When secularists and atheists go blathering on about human rights and equality they are like men who are attempting the intellectual equivalent of walking on water. It would pretty remarkable if they could pull it off, but we, and they, are pretty sure they'll accomplish nothing more than making themselves look foolish.

RLC

Twenty Most Brilliant

College Crunch, which bills itself as "the best college resource online...ever," features a listing of the Twenty Most Brilliant Christian Professors. I don't know how they arrived at their selections, but it is indeed an impressive list.

Unfortunately, many of the luminaries are either retired or semi-retired, but there are others, many others, I'm sure, who are currently in the prime of their careers and who merit being on such a list.

Lucky is the student who gets the chance to study under one of them.

RLC

Family Tree

One of the difficulties with most theories of human evolution is that they assume that many of the alleged early hominids were members of different species, and that each of these species gradually gave way to another over millions of years on the way to producing modern man.

The problem is that the concept of a species is so nebulous as to be almost useless in these speculations. The textbook definition of species is a reproductively isolated population. In other words, if members of two disparate populations are unable, for whatever reason, to produce fertile offspring they are said to be reproductively isolated and thus belong to different species.

This definition entails that organisms isolated by geographical, physical, behavioral, or even temporal factors would be different species even if they were genetically compatible. Two individuals would be reproductively isolated if they were separated from each other by either distance or time (as are members of different generations of humans), or if they were physically incompatible, or if behavioral idiosyncrasies prevented synchronization of mating cycles.

This being the case it's a little absurd to think that just because two different hominids were physically different and/or lived at different times that they were therefore different species, but that's the assumption that's almost always made in the study of human evolution. Now, however, comes a story in the New York Times that bodes ill for this assumption. The report explains that indeed two different lines of hominids actually did interbreed and, though the Times never draws this conclusion, were thus conspecific:

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals.

It's interesting that the implications of this discovery are not mentioned in the article which insists on referring to "human-Neanderthal" interbreeding as if Neanderthals were not humans. The fact is that if such unions produced viable offspring then Neanderthals were human, and if that's the case then there wouldn't seem to be much warrant for treating Homo habilis and Homo erectus as different species from H. sapiens.

RLC

Only in America

This may be very hard for those still in possession of their rational faculties to believe but five high school students were threatened with suspension by their high school administrators the other day because they wore T-shirts that sported an American flag and refused to turn them inside out. Why were they told to turn them inside out? Because it was Cinco de Mayo and the California school they attended has a large Mexican-American population, and the principals were afraid that the Mexican students would be insulted by the shirts, which, of course, some of them were.

Here's an excerpt from the news report:

But to many Mexican-American students at Live Oak High School, this was a big deal. They say they were offended by the five boys and others for wearing American colors on a Mexican holiday.

"I think they should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day," Annicia Nunez, a Live Oak High student, said. "We don't deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn't do that on Fourth of July."

As for an apology, the boys and their families say, 'fat chance.'

"I'm not going to apologize. I did nothing wrong," Galli said. "I went along with my normal day. I might have worn an American flag, but I'm an American and I'm proud to be an American."

Let's understand. These were American kids in an American school paid for by American taxpayers, but they weren't allowed to wear an American flag T-shirt because it was offensive to Mexican-American students who came to this country ostensibly to be Americans, or so we're always told.

I wonder if the school also took down the American flags around campus so as not to offend the sensibilities of Mexican students. I wonder if they ran a Mexican flag up the flag pole that morning. I wonder if they recited the pledge of allegiance in their classrooms to start the day.

Can you imagine Mexican officials threatening Mexican students for wearing Mexican flags on their shirts on the Fourth of July in a school in which there's a sizable minority of American students? Me neither.

At any rate, the district administrators were apparently appalled by the poor judgment and shameless, abject political correctness of their building principals. In a move that must have been a considerable embarrassment to the principals the district overruled them:

The five boys and their families met with a Morgan Hill Unified School District official Wednesday night. The district and the school do not see eye-to-eye on the incident and released the following statement:

The district does not concur with the Live Oak High School administration's interpretation of either board or district policy related to these actions.

The boys will not be suspended and were allowed to return to school Thursday. We spotted one of them when he got to campus -- and, yes, he was sporting an American flag T-shirt.

At least someone in that district has some common sense.

RLC

How Liberals Think

Robin, the Berkeley psychoanalyst and recovering liberal, is back with another penetrating analysis of the liberal mind. It'd be hard to argue with her even were I inclined to do so.

She offers a lot of interesting and humorous insights into the mysteries of the liberal psyche, one of which is her explanation of why liberals so despise Sarah Palin: Apparently it's because she's more of a man than they are, and they know it.

Anyway, read the rest of Robin's ruminations at the link.

Meanwhile, this is making the rounds - McDonald's new Obama Value Meal: The guy ahead of you in the drive-thru orders anything he wants and you have to pay for it.

RLC

Race Matters

A report out of Ann Arbor, Michigan simply defies belief. Apparently, an elementary school took students to hear a successful scientist speak on how one becomes a successful scientist. Astonishingly, though, since the scientist was white, the principle, who is also white, did not allow black students to go along. He felt they would not be able to relate to what was essentially a white experience.

I think we can all agree that this man is either incredibly stupid or deeply bigoted, or both. In either case he should not be the principal of a dog kennel let alone an elementary school.

The principal even allegedly belittled a Muslim girl who complained about being excluded from the trip.

He defended his decision to irate parents of black students by explaining that those who were selected to go on the field trip were members of a club exclusively for white students who the school felt needed to have an experience that would expose them to successful role models. As such, black students would be out of place. As you might imagine, this did little to mollify the parents.

Perhaps you think this episode is so bizarre and outrageous that you doubt that it really happened, but you can read about it for yourself here.

I don't know why this story isn't national news and this principal isn't being pilloried in the press.

Well, that's not quite true. I think I do know why. I cheated by switching the races in the story. In point of fact, the principal, students and scientist were all black and the excluded students, including the Muslim girl, were not. In our race-obsessed society, and the media which services it and abets the obsession, it makes a huge difference which race is being favored and which discriminated against. The story has gained little purchase in the media, I suspect, because discrimination against white students is acceptable, or at least understandable, in the ideological waters in which they swim.

This is the sort of attitude, however, which only serves to exacerbate racial friction in this country. We'll never get past these frictions until we get over our preoccupation with skin color. Indeed, in my opinion, one way to tell if one is a bigot is by reflecting on your reaction to this story. If you were outraged by the way the story was represented in the above paragraphs but not so outraged when you learned the truth then you're probably a bigot. You can also tell if someone is arrantly liberal if he thinks the race of the students and the principal in this tale should actually matter.

RLC

A Pair of Rarities

I had the pleasure in the last several days of viewing two birds which are both very uncommon in my part of Pennsylvania. The first find was a Wilson's phalarope discovered in a pond near the town of Hershey.

The phalarope is not only rarely seen in south central Pennsylvania but is also very unusual in that the female is the more brightly plumaged of the two sexes and leaves to the male the tasks of nest-building, incubating the eggs, and raising the young. I don't know if this is what people mean by "transgendered," but it's certainly unusual behavior in the animal kingdom, and one wonders how this sex-role switch ever came about. They also have an odd way of feeding. They'll sometimes paddle quickly in a tight circle in the water causing insects and other food items to be drawn to the surface where they can be easily caught and eaten.

The second bird is an Upland sandpiper found in a grassy, reclaimed landfill in southern York County. The Upland sandpiper is related to the shorebirds one sees on beaches and mudflats, but it itself is rarely seen near water. Instead, this is a bird of dry, grassy, upland fields. They're very uncommon in Pennsylvania and especially so in the south-central part of the state.

The Upland sandpiper gives a unique call that sounds almost exactly like a "wolf-whistle," which is a little disconcerting when you hear it because it doesn't sound like something that would come from a bird.

RLC

Heading South

While Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their merry band in Congress continue their transformation of America and rub their hands in anticipation of transformations yet to come, others are much less sanguine at the direction in which they are taking the country. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is an organization of political libertarians who are growing increasingly dismayed at the rapid growth of the state and some are so exasperated that they're now talking seriously about expatriation.

Libertarians are people who believe that government should be minimally intrusive in people's lives, including their economic and moral lives, and that the Obama administration has greatly accelerated a process of state expansion that has been ongoing since WWII.

In an article sent along by brother Bill, libertarian Lew Rockwell writes:

[T]he rise of emigration, expatriation, and citizenship renunciation is a trend that is not going away. It is rising and will get more significant. In some ways, it is completely expected. When regimes overcontrol, overtax, overregulate, they gnaw at the innate sense of the right to be free. When this gets worse and worse, people tend to look around for better environments.

We've all known people who talk about it openly. It is becoming cocktail conversation, the once unthinkable now standard fare. It's not just an impression. State Department records show that 502 people gave up citizenship in just the last quarter of 2009. That is more than twice the total for 2008. That might not seem like a lot, but what stands out here is the trend line, which is soaring. I also hear reports of year-long bureaucratic delays in approval, and, of course, plenty of people leave without permission.

What does Rockwell attribute this exodus to? Take a look:

Far more frightening is the sense that financial calamity is around the corner. A look at the data seems to suggest that. Vast reserves are sitting in the banking system, waiting to be unleashed to create what could be total destruction of the dollar. The deficit is rising so fast that it is hard to chart.

The jobs situation is terrible, especially for young people (and adults often make decisions based on what is best for their kids' future). Personal income is falling and falling. Investment is not recovering after its cliff dive in 2009. The social-welfare state is broke. Private debt is rising even though lending has not restarted.

The policies of the fiscal and monetary authorities are absolutely terrifying. The Fed is keeping rates at zero. The government is spending and spending beyond belief. Tax receipts are falling as never before, unleashing the greedy hand of the predator state to extract every last dime.

And look at what the US Congress and president are doing about this terrible mess: they are working to socialize healthcare, start a war with Iran, impose tariffs on China, and otherwise tax, regulate, inflate, and control more more more. An economy that is heavily capitalized and driven by the entrepreneurial spirit can stand a surprising amount of abuse. But that reserve capital is being drained away into new bubbles, and the entrepreneurial spirit is being crushed at every turn.

Based on all these facts, the sense of impending doom is hard to avoid. And consider that most people are thinking only about today, this month, and this year. But among the rich and entrepreneurial we find a class of people who specialize in thinking outside the box, and for the very long term. It is among the ranks of these people that we are seeing the renunciation trend take hold. The smart money is giving up on the US political system.

Whether Rockwell is correct or not I certainly can't say, but it would be interesting to know whether he himself is preparing to leave. In any event, if the geese that lay the golden eggs in our economy all start migrating south the U.S. will be pretty much dead in the water as a vibrant haven of prosperity and freedom. It will instead start to resemble one of those European basket-cases like Greece or Portugal, or maybe even Mexico.

That's not the hope and change that most Americans voted for.

RLC

Time Travel

The faster one travels the slower time passes for the traveler. This is a fundamental, if bizarre, entailment of Einstein's theory of relativity, and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, his brilliant mind still active despite a body wracked by Lou Gehrig's disease, thinks this makes time travel into the future possible.

Of course, this isn't a new idea. It's been the premise for movies like Planet of the Apes and others of that genre for decades.

Even so, it's interesting to read Hawking's thoughts on it and why he doesn't think travel into the past is possible. Read the story here.

RLC

Stupid Reasons

Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson spends an entire column arguing rather desultorily against constructing a wall along the border with Mexico. His brief against the barrier is summarized by this paragraph:

It would be possible to build a 2,000-mile-long Berlin Wall, complete with watchtowers. But it would be stupid and counterproductive. The U.S.-Mexico relationship is vitally important, economically and politically, and the border has to be permeable enough to permit a massive legitimate daily flow of goods and people.

That building the wall would be stupid, Mr. Robinson is certainly entitled to believe, but anyone who offers the sorts of arguments he does in this essay should be more judicious about how he employs the word.

In the first place, the analogy to the Berlin Wall is at best awkward. The Berlin Wall was built to imprison people, to keep them from getting out. The border wall would keep no one in but rather keep out those seeking to enter the country illegally. It's like having a lock on the front door of your house.

In the second place, despite what Mr. Robinson evidently believes, our commerce with Mexico does not transpire in the desolate areas of the desert, it occurs at entry points on highways supervised by customs agents. These would still exist whether a border fence were built along the desert or not. The only commerce that would be effected by a fence would be the nefarious trafficking in drugs and human beings.

One could, perhaps, make a case against building a wall by arguing that it would be prohibitively expensive and/or it wouldn't work, but both of these are very difficult cases to support. Compared to the trillions that the current administration is spending to bail out the unions at GM and their cronies on Wall Street a couple of billion for the fence would be relative pocket change. Whether a wall would work or not would depend, of course, on how it is patrolled and maintained, but none of these details matter to Robinson who sees no problem on our borders in the first place.

He cites the fact that a police chief in the border town of Nogales tells him that violence isn't high in his jurisdiction, and concludes from this that there's no real reason for concern about illegal immigration. This is breath-takingly obtuse. Arizona has become known as the kidnapping capital of the world, and the perpetrators are almost all illegal aliens. Moreover, contrary to what Robinson must think, the bad guys don't settle in the border towns, they move on to America's heartland cities where there's more profit to be made from their mischief. Finally, the problem is not just the criminals that are coming across illegally, but the vast hordes of poor people who flow into this country in need of goods and services which the taxpayer has to provide.

Trying to solve our illegal immigration problems without turning off the spigot is like trying to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil slick without capping the gusher that's producing it. Thankfully, the people trying to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf don't think it's "stupid" to do so.

RLC

Racist Assumptions

Justin sends along a link to a site called Philosophical Misadventures which documents the racist assumptions of two giants in Western philosophy, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The views they express would get them both thrown out of any modern day university, one would assume, but then again, maybe not. After all, Charles Darwin held similar views, and I can't imagine any American college so audacious as to give the great naturalist the boot.

Anyway, here are a couple of relevant passages from Hume and kant:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered the symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.

The above quote comes from a footnote in Hume's essay Of National Character. Kant plays off of Hume in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime:

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was every found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird's feather, a cow's horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks are very vain but in the Negro's way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.

Can you imagine such sentiments being written by an academic today? Keep these quotes in mind so that when people insist on telling you that we live in a racist country you can show them what real racism looks and sounds like.

RLC

Mind/Brain Thought Experiments

The debate between those who believe that everything is reducible to material substance and those who believe that there's more to reality, especially the human being, than just matter is one of the most interesting of the perennial controversies in philosophy. It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks and has popped up repeatedly throughout the history of Western philosophy.

In 1714 Gottfried Leibniz, one of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians in history invited us to consider an interesting thought experiment that he, and many others, believed shows the inadequacy of physicalism (i.e. the belief that everything is explicable in terms of purely physical or mechanical processes):

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed you might visit its inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything which could explain perception.

The machine, of course, is analogous to the brain. If we were able to walk into the brain as if it were a factory, what would we find there other than electrochemical reactions taking place along the neurons? How do these chemical and electrical phenomena map, or translate, to sensations like red or sweet? Where, exactly, are these sensations? How do chemical reactions generate things like beliefs, doubts, regrets, certainty, or purposes? How do they create understanding of a problem or appreciation of something like beauty? How does a flow of ions or the coupling of molecules impose a meaning on a page of text? How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?

Regarding the first question in the preceding paragraph, consider another thought experiment, this one a paraphrase of one authored by philosopher Frank Jackson:

There is a distant planet in which there are no colors except shades of black and white. A brilliant scientist who has lived his entire life on that planet has spent his career receiving radio transmissions from colleagues on earth explaining to him the chemistry and physics of color and what it does to the neurochemistry of the brain so that the scientist knows everything there is to know about the color red. One day he has the opportunity to come to earth where he finds himself surrounded by colors as he disembarks from his spaceship. As he looks around would he be able to identify red or distinguish it from blue? Would there still be something about red that he doesn't know, namely, what it looks like?

The point is that you can know everything about the physical characteristics of a phenomena, you can know what effects are triggered by certain wavelengths of energy in your brain, but still not know what red actually is. An exhaustive physicalist description of red is still incomplete. It does not tell us everything there is to know about red. This suggests that no amount of physical understanding of the material brain can account for qualia, i.e. the sensations we experience by virtue of the functioning of our senses. There is, therefore, good reason to think that there is more to our conscious experience than just the workings of the brain.

If you believe you have a mind (or a soul) nothing in the materialist point of view should intimidate you into giving that belief up.

RLC

A Modest Proposal

Over the next couple of weeks there will be much talk about immigration reform, but the prospects for achieving meaningful reform are muddled by the divergent wishes of the two parties. Democrats want amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegals, Republicans want a secure border and, most of them, no amnesty. There is a middle ground, perhaps, which would be fair to everyone involved in this awful situation, including the illegals themselves, the businesses which hire them, and the people who must foot the bills for them. It starts with the premise that any plan that fails to secure the border is a non-starter, as is any plan that grants citizenship to twenty million people who are here in violation of our laws.

With these things in mind I think the following two-stage proposal has the merit of being compassionate, just, and politically doable. I also think it would have a lot of support among the American people. It would look something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border fence be built and the border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking. Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed - but not until.

After the border is secured, a plan for those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst consequences of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living. To that end, once we have taken control of our border, Congress should enact legislation that would allow illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if, and only if, the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card. After a reasonable grace period anyone found to be without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, medicare, etc. They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish, particularly in providing for medical care. Whatever taxes the workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This would, unfortunately, require a constitutional amendment), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any criminal activity, past or future, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation, as would any serious infraction of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of ICE. In other words, anyone with an ID card would no longer be in the country illegally and families would no longer have to fear being split up due to one member being deported.

This is just an outline, of course, and there are details the lawyers would have to work out, but it's both simpler and fairer than other proposals that have been floated by Congress. Those who've followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and guest workers who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear. The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants. It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be those politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems a more simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem than most other plans that have been suggested.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as have previous proposals. The "amnesty" is contingent upon first stopping the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, the conditions for being allowed to stay and work in this country sound too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

RLC

Pig Latin Epithets

You recall the allegation made by Representative Andre Carson that he had heard the "N-word" hurled at him and Representative John Lewis at least fifteen times by racist tea-party protestors demonstrating against passage of Obamacare. The tea-party housewives and grandparents were so intimidating that Mr. Carson fully expected to have "rocks thrown" at him. Well, in this postmodern world when an allegation is made that confirms the liberal narrative it becomes their "truth" whether there's any substance to it or not. Thus, Rep. Carson's allegations have become part of "what everyone knows to be true" about the tea-party movement.

Unfortunately, for the diminishing remnant of liberal Americans who still think that serious allegations should have at least a little bit of supporting evidence in their favor beyond just one politician's sayso, it turns out that Mr. Carson's version of events lacks what might be called empirical warrant. Some folks at Patterico did a little investigating and here's what they came up with:

Of course we must keep in mind two things: First, to many on the left evidence simply doesn't matter. It just clutters and complicates things. What matters is whether an allegation has purchase, whether it's useful, and charges of racism are, of course, always useful. Second, the lack of evidence in these videos only proves how subtle and sneaky these white bigots really are. You can't hear the "N-word" because people were probably yelling it in pig latin so that it was garbled on the video, but resonated with perfect clarity in Mr. Carson's finely-tuned ear.

RLC

What the Law Actually Says

Those who find themselves in the position of not knowing what to believe about the Arizona immigration law might want to read a New York Times op-ed written by one of the drafters of the measure. It offers an excellent summary of the law's provisions. The author is Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri. Kobach begins with this:

On Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law - SB 1070 - that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a "reasonable suspicion" that a person is an illegal alien verify the person's immigration status with the federal government.

Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it "misguided" and said the Justice Department would take a look.

Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don't seem to have done. The arguments we've heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually.

Read his response to the critics at the link. I think the dissenters know that the law is not the totalitarian bogeyman they're making it out to be, but they're upset because they don't want any enforcement of immigration laws. They want amnesty and open borders, and the Arizona legislature seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Thus the hue and cry about racial profiling, arbitrary searches and all the rest.

The law makes sense, Arizonans and other Americans overwhelmingly support it, and I imagine other states are looking to adopt similar legislation.

RLC

Re: Nerdiness

Lest anyone have thought my comments in the Nerdiness post concerning the low priority given to education by the administrators of our public schools a bit exaggerated, one of my students, writing of her own high school experience, said this:

Sadly, I would agree with your statement that education is usually not the first priority in most high schools. A prime example of this in my high school happened during the musical season of my senior year. Our show that year was "The Secret Garden," and many of the songs (even those for the chorus) were high and complex. As a result, the choral director for the show began scheduling rehearsals for the songs during the school day in addition to our after-school rehearsals. Many of the teachers did not complain about this; however, my AP English teacher did. Our AP English class had about 12 students in it - 8 of us were involved with the musical. When we all asked to be excused for the mandatory rehearsal, he was outraged. Not only were we not allowed to go to the rehearsal, but we were also forced to sit and listen to him rant about how extracurricular activities seemed to take precedence over his class, and other classes for that matter. (The irony is that he wasted his valuable class time ranting).

At the time, his refusal seemed unfair and silly; however, looking back now I realize how right he was. Extracurricular activities often were given higher priority over classes. In addition to the choral director pulling us for rehearsals, we also missed almost an entire day of classes to perform the show for senior citizens. In addition, the band director pulled kids for individual lessons, and the sports teams were excused early for away games. Students involved with SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) and STAAT (Students Taking Action Against Tobacco) were allowed to miss class to visit other schools to talk about their causes. Student Council always took a day long trip to New York City (mostly for shopping), and chorus members went to see a show on Broadway. Additionally, pep rallies often caused shortened instructional periods in order to allow ample time for showing off the football or basketball teams.

As an education major, of course, I do not believe that learning should come after extracurriculars on the priority list. However, I think that extracurricular involvement plays a vital role in the college application and acceptance process; perhaps this fact is partially to blame for grades and smarts being knocked down a few notches. I remember that throughout high school we were constantly being told to be well-rounded individuals, to be involved. It was not enough just to get the good grades. When we applied to colleges, they weren't just looking at GPA-they wanted to know our extracurricular activities. Scholarship applications were like this, too. I know it is important to be involved, but high schools cannot let their students lose sight of the fact that extracurriculars aren't the only things that matter. Chances are that the singing stars and the football quarterback aren't going to have opportunities to excel in those activities forever. High schools need to find away to bring the focus back to education and keep extracurriculars as afterschool activities. Perhaps then nerds will have a chance to show how their intelligence and good grades are the popular things to have.

This student didn't go to the high school at which I taught, but judging from her experience she could have. In fact, she could have gone to just about any high school with which I'm familiar. If taxpayers want better educated students they might campaign to have schools keep students in the classroom. It would increase the amount of learning that takes place, and it wouldn't cost a cent.

By the way, I would have been honored to have had her AP English teacher for a colleague. He sounds like a man after my own heart.

RLC

Why Illegal Immigration Is Troubling

Hispanic groups are forecasting huge rallies across the country this Saturday on behalf of amnesty and in protest of laws like that recently passed in Arizona. President Obama has expressed profound concern about the rights of illegal aliens flooding into Arizona. There have been few expressions of concern, however, about the right of Americans to live in safety and security in their own country, and few media commentators seem interested in publicizing the frustrations and fears that have led the people of Arizona and elsewhere to support this law by huge majorities.

Here are some statistics from Pat Buchanan's book State of Emergency that should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks that the Arizona law is too draconian:

� In 2005 there were 687 assaults on border agents, twice the figure for 2004.

� In 2004 160,000 non-Mexicans were caught illegally crossing our border. Only 30,000 were returned.

� Federal agents are required to release illegal immigrants if their home countries refuse to take them back.

� In George Bush's first 4.5 years in office approximately 4 million people entered this country illegally.

� Police in so-called "sanctuary cities" are prohibited from apprehending known illegal or criminal aliens. Gang members in L.A. who are in violation of deportation orders may not be arrested by police.

� In L.A. 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide, some 1200 to 1500, are for illegal aliens.

� 66% of the 17,000 outstanding fugitive felony warrants in L.A. are for illegal aliens.

� 12,000 of the 20,000 members of the 18th Street Gang in California are illegals.

� Between 300,000 and 350,000 "anchor babies" are born to illegal aliens each year. These children, one in every ten babies born in the U.S., are automatically citizens and qualify for all benefits of citizenship.

� Between 10% and 20% of all Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean peoples have moved to the U.S.

� One in twelve illegals caught by the border patrol has a criminal record. It's estimated that 300,000 felons have crossed into the U.S. in the last five years.

� Mara Salvatrucha, a gang responsible for numerous rapes, murders, mutilations and other crimes, has 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states. The illegal aliens in this gang are almost immune to police arrest and deportation because they operate in sanctuary cities. The gang is comprised primarily of El Salvadoran illegals.

� Illegals are bringing diseases that had been virtually eradicated in the U.S. Malaria, polio, hepatitis, tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis and other diseases are all skyrocketing in the southwest. From 1960 to 2000 there were only 900 reported cases of leprosy in the U.S. In the first three years of the 21st century there were 7000.

� Since few illegals have health insurance and since hospitals are obligated to care for them, 84 California hospitals closed their doors between 1994 and 2003 because they could not afford to provide free medical care for the numerous illegals who needed it.

� Immigrants in general, and illegals in particular, are depressing the wages of low-skilled Americans by almost 8% according to Paul Krugman of the NYT.

� It's a myth that immigrants help the economy by paying taxes. The cost of schooling, health care, welfare, social security and prisons, plus the costs of pressure on resources like water, land, and power far exceed the revenue that immigrants, legal and illegal, contribute. The net cost to the taxpayer, imposed by immigrants, has been estimated at around $108 billion for 2006.

Moreover, while our economy lost five million jobs last year there are still eight million jobs currently filled by illegal aliens that could go to unemployed Americans. Why we should not only permit, but actually encourage, this state of affairs to continue is a mystery. We're losing control of our country and the dereliction in Washington has been bipartisan.

RLC

How Mexico Treats Aliens

Michelle Malkin, commenting on the outcry from Mexican authorities over the recently passed Arizona law that empowers local police to enforce the nation's immigration laws, writes that:

Mexican president Felipe Calder�n has accused Arizona of opening the door "to intolerance, hate, discrimination, and abuse in law enforcement." But Arizona has nothing on Mexico when it comes to cracking down on illegal aliens. While open-borders activists decry the new enforcement measures signed into law in "Nazi-zona" last week, they remain deaf, dumb, or willfully blind to the unapologetically restrictionist policies of our neighbors to the south.

The Arizona law bans sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce immigration laws, stiffens penalties against illegal-alien day laborers and their employers, makes it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to complete and carry an alien-registration document, and allows the police to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they are in the U.S. legally. If those rules constitute the racist, fascist, xenophobic, inhumane regime that the National Council of La Raza, Al Sharpton, Catholic bishops, and their grievance-mongering followers claim, then what about these regulations and restrictions imposed on foreigners?

Read the rest of Malkin's column to find out how Mexico treats its illegal aliens. Mexican policy makes Arizona's law by comparison seem like a borough ordinance to purchase parking meters.

RLC

Death of God, Death of Liberty

Philosopher Daniel Fernand adumbrates the long war against God waged by materialist philosophers from Thales to Nietzsche and argues that the death of God will lead inexorably to the death of liberty.

He concludes his pr�cis with this:

In George Orwell's 1984, Comrade O'Brien describes The Party as "the priests of power," with power itself as their god. Power is simultaneously the method and goal of this new secular religion. As O'Brien tells Winston Smith, "Power is not a means; it is an end. ... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever".

I've been seeing that picture quite a bit, lately. It is the quintessence of the present-day power-mad, anti-intellectual radical left. In "killing" God, the left was merely taking out the competition, Tony Soprano-style -- and now they've upped the ante.

That metal-on-metal sound you hear every time you are careless enough to waste precious, irredeemable seconds watching CNN, MSNBC, or Robert Gibbs' smarmy mug is the left sharpening its knives for Liberty herself.

Indeed, once God is banished from human ethics there's nothing left but the exercise of power. In the might-makes-right world without God whoever possesses power is free to do whatever he wishes. The secularists don't intend it, perhaps, but the world they would create is the world described by Thomas Hobbes as a war of every man against every man. A world in which life will be inescapably nasty, brutish and short.

That's the trajectory the secular impulse propels us along and the omega point toward which our post-modern world is headed. We should not go gently, or quietly, into that dark night.

RLC

Closer to the Truth

I've recently come across a great website run by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an MIT PhD in brain science and author of over 30 books. The site is called Closer to the Truth and consists largely of a library of 4 minute PBS interviews with philosophers and scientists who address questions of God, Consciousness and the Cosmos. Kuhn himself is a theological agnostic seeking answers on these important questions, and his search has led him to interview people all across the theological spectrum from theists to atheists.

It's good stuff, and you'll want to bookmark the page. Those who love thinking about these matters could spend several evenings going through all the videos. Here's one chosen pretty much at random featuring theistic philosopher William Lane Craig talking about the concept of the multiverse.

Enjoy.

RLC

Irresponsibility

This is beyond parody. Weary of the futility of pleading with Washington to do something to get a handle on the tidal wave of human poverty flooding their state, Arizonans, with vast public support, passed a tough measure on their own to enable them to enforce laws against illegal immigration.

But the president who has irresponsibly failed to enforce the laws that control the flow of immigrants across our borders, the president who has irresponsibly burdened our children and grandchildren with a debt they'll never be able to repay, the president who called Massachusetts police "stupid" for arresting Henry Gates, the president who has let Iran and North Korea develop nuclear weapons which will almost surely be used somewhere in the world, the president who embarrasses our allies and grovels before those who wish us ill, that president is calling the citizens of Arizona "irresponsible" for passing a law that will take back a little bit of the control the feds have forfeited:

Obama said [Friday] the federal government must act responsibly to reform national immigration law - or "open the door to irresponsibility by others."

"That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe," Obama said.

Keeping us safe is one thing Mr. Obama seems disinclined to do. As illegal immigration has boomed, so, too, have crimes like kidnapping, rape, and murder, not to mention automobile accidents caused by unlicensed motorists. Vicious gangs now roam the streets of once sleepy cities and towns striking fear and intimidation into the hearts of their citizens.

The economic burden incurred by those towns as they struggle to deal not only with crime but also the stress that immigrants place on schools, housing, and medical care facilities is crushing.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama expresses concern about none of this. All he seems to care about is the putative irresponsibility of Arizonans who have given up hope that the federal government will do its job and have decided instead to try taking control of their lives themselves.

One wonders who it is in this contretemps who has the corner on the market of irresponsibility.

RLC

Real Hate

You may have heard that Lance Baxter, the voice of the Geico gecko was fired by Geico for placing a call to the tea-party group FreedomWorks and leaving an insulting message on their voice mail.

What you probably didn't know is that his firing so incensed the gentle folks on the left that, taking their anger out on FreedomWorks, filled their voice mail with the most vile messages imaginable. Tabitha Hale who works at FreedomWorks put together a montage of the messages and emails along with some classic photos of lefty protest images in a video that can be viewed here.

I must caution you, though, that the language and hate speech are pretty bad - though standard stuff for the secular left, I suppose. It's so disgusting, in fact, that I can't in good conscience put the video on Viewpoint.

I direct your attention to it because the media, and even the White House, would have us believe that it's the tea-partiers who are promoting hatred and divisiveness in this country. They want us to think that it's people like Rush Limbaugh who are inciting acts of violence. What is happening, however, is that the vulgarian left, in an act of desperation, is projecting their own worst character flaws onto their ideological opponents in order to smear them in the eyes of the public.

I guarantee that nothing you've ever heard on talk radio or seen at a tea party comes anywhere close to what's on Hale's video. If you watch it you'll want to take a shower afterward. Being in the presence of these people, even across cyberspace, makes you feel like you need one. The next time someone calls some conservative a racist, or a bigot, or a hater, because the conservative is upset about what's happening to his country, you can laugh at their ignorance and link them to this.

Unfortunately, you won't be hearing about the video from the major media. When they're not reporting on alleged slurs hurled by tea-partiers that no one heard, they're all caught up in the Tiger Woods and Ben Rothlisberger sagas.

One other caution: I can't prove that this video isn't fabricated. I'm taking FreedomWorks at their word that they actually received these messages. If anyone has solid evidence to the contrary please let me know about it.

RLC

Eyjafjallajokull

The Big Picture has a series of 35 photos taken of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull. Some of them, like the one below, are absolutely stunning:

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the link.

RLC

Golden State No Longer

City Journal has a fine column by Steven Malanga which explains how California has been brought to the brink of economic collapse.

The Cliff Notes summary is this: A triumvirate of greedy unions (teachers, SEIU, and public safety workers) have managed to buy enormous influence in the California state legislature and have thwarted almost all attempts at reforming the enormous salaries and pensions they have inveigled from the taxpayers of the state. In order to pay these contractual obligations municipalities have raised taxes which has in turn driven businesses out of the state thus depleting the tax base. Meanwhile, the unions still gorge themselves at the public trough.

Here's a taste:

Only too late have Californians recognized the true magnitude of their fiscal problems, including a $21 billion deficit by mid-2009 that forced the state to issue IOUs when it temporarily ran out of cash. In the municipal bond market, fears are rising that the Golden State could actually default on its debt.

Municipalities around the state are also buckling under massive labor costs. One city, Vallejo, has already filed for bankruptcy to get out from under onerous employee salaries and pension obligations. (To stop other cities from going this route, unions are promoting a new law to make it harder for municipalities to declare bankruptcy.) Other local California governments, big and small, are nearing disaster.

The city of Orange, with a budget of just $88 million in 2009, spent $13 million of it on pensions and expects that figure to rise to $23 million in just three years. Contra Costa's pension costs rose from $70 million in 2000 to $200 million by the end of the decade, producing a budget crisis. Los Angeles, where payroll constitutes nearly half the city's $7 billion budget, faces budget shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars next year, projected to grow to $1 billion annually in several years. In October 2007, even as it was clear that the area's housing economy was crashing, city officials had handed out 23 percent raises over a five-year period to workers.

There are lessons to be gleaned from all this, not the least of which is that modern liberalism, the ideology in which public employee unions are marinated, is totally hostile to the economic well-being of the people who pay their salaries. One gets the distinct impression from Malanga's essay that virtually every ill that afflicts California was aided and abetted by liberal Democrats and their union masters.

Read the article and catch a preview of the peril much of the rest of the country will find itself struggling to escape over the next decade.

RLC

Obama's Boondoggle

Grace-Marie Turner at National Review Online summarizes a startling report on Obamacare by HHS Chief Actuary Richard Foster and the prognosis looks bleak.

Turner opens with this assessment:

Not one of its major programs has gotten started, and already the wheels are starting to come off of Obamacare. The administration's own actuary reported on Thursday that millions of people could lose their health insurance, that health-care costs will rise faster than they would have if the law hadn't passed, and that the overhaul will mean that people will have a harder and harder time finding physicians to see them.

She goes on to itemize some of the liabilities. Here are just a few:

People losing coverage: About 14 million people will lose their employer coverage by 2019, as smaller employers terminate their plans and workers who currently have employer coverage enroll in Medicaid. Half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage could lose their coverage and the extra benefits the plans offer.

Huge fines for companies: Businesses will pay $87 billion in penalties in the first five years after the fines trigger in 2014, partly because they can't afford to offer expensive, government-mandated coverage and partly because some of their employees will apply for taxpayer-subsidized insurance.

Higher costs for consumers: Tens of billions of dollars in new fees and excise taxes will be "passed through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and devices prices and higher premiums," according to Foster. A separate report shows small businesses will be hit hardest.

Spending increases: Under the new law, national health spending will increase by $311 billion over the coming decade. And instead of bending the federal spending curve down, it will move it upward "by a net total of $251 billion" over the next decade.

There's much more in Foster's report, which, be it remembered, was written by administration actuaries, using actual costs and revenues, not the numbers contained in the bill which the CBO has to use. Moreover, it was on the news today that this report was in the hands of the administration a full week before the vote, but the most transparent administration in history chose not to make it public.

Obamacare is shaping up to be a fiscal disaster. It should be repealed and every congressperson who foisted it upon us deserves to be turned out of office for their incompetence and irresponsibility. They knew the plan was deeply flawed, but they did as their leadership advised and repeated like robots that it would reduce spending. As the Foster report makes clear this was totally false.

They had every reason to know they would be enacting a massive failure, they had plenty of precedents to examine in Europe and elsewhere, and still they voted to saddle us with this millstone because either they lacked the courage to buck Obama, Reid, and Pelosi or they were simply bought off.

With luck they will all be sent back to private life at the earliest possible date which, I don't need to remind you, comes up for many of them on the first Tuesday in November.

RLC

Harsh Law?

Is it immoral to enforce our immigration laws? Sojourners' Jim Wallis thinks so. In the sort of essay that gives liberalism a bad name Wallis writes:

The harshest enforcement bill in the country against undocumented immigrants just passed the Arizona state House and Senate, and is only awaiting the signature of Governor Janet Brewer to become law [Update: She signed the bill into law on Friday].

Senate Bill 1070 would require law enforcement officials in the state of Arizona to investigate someone's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person might be undocumented. I wonder who that would be, and if anybody who doesn't have brown skin will be investigated.

Wallis wastes no time poisoning the well with unsubtle intimations of racism. This is a classic ploy of the left. When you have no argument substitute for the deficiency with allegations of racist motivations lurking in the dark hearts of your opponents. It used to work but somebody should tell Wallis that the tactic has worn threadbare and has become risible in all but the leftmost precincts of the progressive fever swamps.

He continues:

Those without identification papers, even if they are legal, are subject to arrest; so don't forget your wallet on your way to work if you are Hispanic in Arizona. You can also be arrested if you are stopped and are simply with people who are undocumented - even if they are your family. Parents or children of "mixed-status families" (made up of legal and undocumented, as many immigrant families are out here) could be arrested if they are found together. You can be arrested if you are "transporting or harboring" undocumented people. Some might consider driving immigrant families to and from church to be Christian ministry - but it will now be illegal in Arizona.

Of course this is as it should be. It should be a crime to harbor and transport illegal aliens (Wallis prefers to call them "undocumented" which is simply a sophism that allows him to refer to them without calling attention to the fact that they are here illegally. He doesn't seem to want to admit that they are breaking the law.).

For the first time, all law enforcement officers in the state will be enlisted to hunt down undocumented people, which will clearly distract them from going after truly violent criminals, and will focus them on mostly harmless families whose work supports the economy and who contribute to their communities. And do you think undocumented parents will now go to the police if their daughter is raped or their family becomes a victim of violent crime? Maybe that's why the state association of police chiefs is against SB 1070.

How does Wallis know that enforcing this law will be a distraction? Here's a more realistic scenario: A policeman investigating a motor vehicle accident finds that the driver is an illegal alien so instead of letting him go, as they do now in many places, he simply hauls him in and turns him over to Immigration and Customs. Doesn't sound like much of a distraction nor does it sound like the police are focussing on "harmless" families.

As an aside, my brother was almost killed in an accident by an illegal alien driving without license or insurance. Nothing happened to the guy because for some reason illegals have in his state become a favored minority.

At any rate, Wallis has thus far failed to give a single reason why the law itself is bad. Everything he's said is an irrelevant appeal to pity, camouflage for the fact that Wallis favors an open border that people can cross freely.

This proposed law is not only mean-spirited - it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe. This radical new measure, which crosses many moral and legal lines, is a clear demonstration of the fundamental mistake of separating enforcement from comprehensive immigration reform.

Everyone will be more fearful and less safe? What world does Wallis live in? Seventy five percent of Arizonans favor the law including a majority of Hispanics. As things now stand many Arizonans living along the border fear for their lives. Indeed, a prominent rancher was murdered by illegals a couple of weeks ago. Wallis' speculation notwithstanding, I think American citizens are going to be quite relieved that their government is finally doing something to protect them.

Moreover, what moral and legal lines does it cross? Wallis hasn't yet told us. How is it mean-spirited to require people who come here to do so legally? Is it mean-spirited to ask of people who call at your house to refrain from just walking in and helping themselves to your refrigerator? Is it mean-spirited to lock the doors to your home and car? Is it mean-spirited if you return to your home and find that a stranger has taken up residence in your kitchen to ask that he please leave?

Wallis will say we are supposed to be hospitable to strangers and so we should, but our hospitality should be on our terms, not the stranger's. Our wish to help someone should be our choice, not his entitlement.

We all want to live in a nation of laws, and the immigration system in the U.S. is so broken that it is serving no one well. But enforcement without reform of the system is merely cruel. Enforcement without compassion is immoral. Enforcement that breaks up families is unacceptable.

We can all agree the system needs reform and we can all agree that cruelty is bad and compassion is good, but how is that relevant? If family members of legal residents are sent back home then those who love them and are here legally are free to go with them if they wish. Wallis makes it sound as though babies will be ripped from their mother's arms and forever separated from her bosom. He has no reason to say this other than he wants to put the Arizona law in the worst possible light.

And enforcement of this law would force us to violate our Christian conscience, which we simply will not do. It makes it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona.

This is, of course, absurd. Nothing is stopping Arizonans from loving their neighbors. Nothing prevents them from giving of their resources to help meliorate the sometimes desperate conditions of others, but this can all be done without flooding the country with millions of people who place unsustainable burdens on public services, hospitals and schools.

There's much to lament in the rickety logic of Wallis' brief against the Arizona law, but it at least has the merit of confirming the suspicion of those who wish for stronger enforcement of our borders that there's no good argument against that position.

RLC

Why Isn't the Media Interested?

David Klinghoffer wonders, with more than a little justification, why the major media is so uninterested in the David Coppedge story we wrote about a couple days ago here. After summarizing the tale of blatant religious discrimination against Coppedge, Klinghoffer writes:

[H]ere we have government and government-contracted agencies, NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), denying constitutional rights to a citizen, punishing and humiliating him for exercising his right to free speech. Yet the story as of yet has merited no significant attention from any prominent local or national news source. Why not? Well, obviously because this isn't a story that fits the larger narrative as favored in prestige circles like those of the media. In that favored narrative, it's always Darwinists, never Darwin doubters, who fall afoul of censors, persecuted by powerful forces in academia arrayed against orthodox evolutionary theory. Yeah, you know those powerful forces. They're over there, in a shoebox under the bed.

Fictionalized to begin with, this story was first told fifty years ago in Inherit the Wind. In the social demographic that champions it, it hasn't been looked at critically since. Thus, as readers of ENV know well, you can have a string of genuine and grievous cases of discrimination and suppression directed at Darwin doubters in research and teaching positions -- Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, Marks, Minnich, Dembski, now Coppedge, along with other suppressed scientists yet to be named and still others too worried about reprisals to let themselves be identified -- and this entirely escapes liberal media attention. It's like a dog whistle. The favored narrative sets an audible frequency range beyond which, blast away as long and as "loud" as you like, a dog's owner simply can't hear anything even as the dog himself comes running.

On the other hand, if a story can be squeezed, molded, and manipulated so that an editor or news gatherer is reminded of the Scopes trial as depicted in Inherit the Wind, then yes -- that does merit attention. Thus when Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke resigned from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, after the BioLogos Foundation trumpeted a video interview with him on "Why the Church Must Accept Evolution," that won Professor Waltke a phone call from Diane Sawyer with ABC News. Waltke had not been forced out for endorsing evolution -- he had not been forced out at all -- and indeed he hit the ground running (at age 79) with a teaching offer from another seminary. But there was an imagined scent of Scopes about the matter and so, despite the fact you can be sure no one on Diane Sawyer's producing staff previously had any clue who Bruce Waltke or the Reformed Theological Seminary is, it merited attention from ABC World News. (To his credit, Waltke declined to be interviewed by Sawyer and sought to clarify his views on Darwinism.)

The media, of course, are just being what they are. To borrow Klinghoffer's metaphor they're simply deaf to the dog whistle of discrimination coming from the Darwinian left. They hold stereotypical views about who intelligent design advocates are and what they believe, and they lack the wit or motivation to question their own stereotypes.

Exit exercise: Raise your hand if you think Coppedge would have been demoted by the JPL had he been a Muslim (See below). Me neither.

RLC

Selective Courage

The bold, brash, intrepid souls at Comedy Central frequently, I'm told, exhibit their fearlessness for all to see by mocking Christianity on shows like South Park. Of course, it takes no courage at all to mock Christianity because there's no price to pay for it. Christians don't issue fatwas. They don't threaten murder. They simply pray for those who go out of their way to offend them.

So to get an accurate gauge on CC's courage we need to look at what they do when faced with genuinely dangerous people, like, say, angry Muslims. Well, it seems the steel spines at Comedy Central suddenly turn to wet pasta when members of the religion of peace give them the evil eye.

It's still okay, apparently, to satirize Jews, Christians, tea-partiers, and anyone else who'll turn the other cheek, but the cringing execs at Comedy Central would not dream of being so insensitive as to offend the religious sensibilities of our Islamic brethren whose religion must by all means be treated with utmost respect.

Hot Air reports:

Comedy Central bleeped out all references to the Prophet Muhammad in Wednesday night's episode of the animated show "South Park."

In addition to bleeping the words "Prophet Muhammad," the show also covered the character with a large block labeled "Censored."

Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post [on the Muslim website threatening the creators of the show], told Foxnews.com he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of [Theo] van Gogh [a Dutch filmmaker who spoke out against Islam and wound up being murdered by a Muslim] was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone [South Park's creators] did by mocking Muhammad.

"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."

What a bunch of poltroons those Comedy Central folks are - brave, courageous, and bold against gentle Protestants and Catholics and quivering blobs of jelly in the face of murderous Muslims. If they lack the guts to mock Islam then they should have the decency not to mock any other faith.

By the way, those of a certain age will recall a time when it seemed like every other day liberals in this country were self-righteously proclaiming their willingness to fight to the death for the right of people to say things with which the liberals themselves disagreed. They apparently never thought, however, they might be called upon to actually do that. It's certainly rare to hear a liberal declare such devotion to the principle of free speech today. Perhaps it's because, like good dhimmis, they're too focused on groveling before their Muslim masters.

RLC

The Real Enemies

Who does the president consider the real enemies of our nation to be? To answer that perhaps we should look at whom he directs his harshest rhetoric and at whom he appears most antagonistic.

Lisa Benson and Ramirez think they've discerned the answer to the question:

RLC

Small Minds, Closed Minds

Why is it, if Darwinians are so confident that they have truth on their side, that they feel the need to censor, stifle, demote and fire anyone who disagrees with them? What are they so afraid of?

The movie Expelled documents how the spirit of free enquiry and free speech has been trampled by academic Darwinists, and there are numerous examples of it beyond those discussed in the film. Guillermo Gonzalez, a much published astronomer at the University of Idaho, was denied tenure a year or so ago, largely through the efforts of an atheist colleague, because he co-authored the book The Privileged Planet which argues that the earth is uniquely, and perhaps, deliberately situated for the study of the heavens. Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian was punished because the journal he edited ran a paper that argued on behalf of intelligent design.

The most recent casualty of the Darwinian thought police is David Coppedge, a project leader at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coppedge has been demoted for nothing more, apparently, than offering to share some intelligent design DVDs with co-workers.

Philosopher Jay Richards comments:

It's hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn't proselytizing. He wasn't even, so far as I can tell, actually doing anything naughty that he had been told not to do. It's not like he had been told not to lend out copies of the documentaries and had continued to do so (even though such an order would itself have been outrageous). Can you imagine any other legal subject on which such an action would be treated as anything other than unjust discrimination?

To read more on this travesty go to Evolution News and Views and scroll down.

When people know that their side of an argument is persuasive they rely on their argument in open debate to win the hearts and minds of their audience. On the other hand, when they know that their case is weak and unpersuasive they often resort to just shutting up the other side whenever they can. It's interesting that so many Darwinians feel they have to follow the latter course.

RLC

The Piety Gene

Michael Shermer surveys the ubiquity of religious belief around the world and concludes that it must all be a result of evolution:

Of course, genes do not determine whether one chooses Judaism, Catholicism, Islam or any other religion. Rather, belief in supernatural agents (God, angels, demons) and commitment to certain religious practices (church attendance, prayer, rituals) appears to reflect genetically based cognitive processes (inferring the existence of invisible agents) and personality traits (respect for authority, traditionalism).

Why did we inherit this tendency? Long, long ago, in a Paleolithic environment far, far away from the modern world, humans evolved to find meaningful causal patterns in nature to make sense of the world, and infuse many of those patterns with intentional agency, some of which became animistic spirits and powerful gods. I call these two processes patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data) and agenticity (the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency).

Yes, well, the clunky neologisms aside, one wonders: If religious belief is the norm, and if it is the product of our genes, does that not imply that those who don't have a religious belief are genetic mutants and deviants? Just asking.

RLC

The Head of the Snake

Apparently, after years of false reports of the deaths of these two thugs, it seems the good guys finally caught up with them.

Here are some highlights from the report in The Long War Journal:

Iraq's Prime Minister and the US military confirmed that al Qaeda in Iraq's top two leaders have been killed during a raid in a remote region in the western province of Anbar.

"Abu Ayyub al Masri, Abu Omar al Baghdadi and a number of other al Qaeda leaders in Iraq were killed during a security operation in al Thar Thar region in Anbar," Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki told reporters at a press conference in Baghdad, according to Voices of Iraq.

"A series of Iraqi led joint operations conducted over the last week resulted in the Iraqi Forces with US support executing a nighttime raid on the AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] leaders' safehouse," the press release stated. "The joint security team identified both AQI members, and the terrorists were killed after engaging the security team. Additionally, Masri's assistant along with the son of al-Baghdadi who were also involved in terrorist activities were killed."

During the operation, one US soldier was killed in a helicopter crash, and 16 al Qaeda associates were detained.

The deaths of al Masri and Baghdadi are a major blow to al Qaeda in Iraq, as the terror group has suffered major losses in its leadership network over the past four months. Since January, the US has picked apart the top leaders of al Qaeda's northern network. Among those killed or captured are the last two emirs, or leaders, of the northern Iraq network, the last two emirs of Mosul, the top facilitator operating in the Iraq-Syria border areas, and other senior members of the network.

The NYT reports that among the documents seized at the scene were communications from Osama bin Laden. That's a bit surprising given that we've been told over and over again by the left that al Qaeda is not really involved in Iraq and that we should get out of Iraq and hunt al Qaeda down elsewhere.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of the dilemma which we stated as follows:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands? Would cruelty be good if God commanded it?

If we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent and that good is that which conduces to human happiness then the latter question seems to me to be an incoherent act description.

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a being whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There seems to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is in opposition to his own nature. It's like asking whether there is something which a being which knows everything doesn't know.

So, the answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. I)

Many freshman philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a question often posed to convince us that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good."

Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for there to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design.

We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers made the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or even if we worked against the good of others, we wouldn't be committing some grievous moral offense. Just because something is good doesn't mean we ought to do it, at least not unless we are assuming that we ought always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this premise come from? Why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? Without God there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for our duty to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command, say, kindness because kindness is good? Is the good of kindness independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than a triangle is separable from the property of having just three angles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of loving God were hateful and cruel? Would hate and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

RLC