Scrooges

Susan Jacoby, an atheist and secular humanist (secular humanists are almost always atheists), wonders why secularists are such tightwads. She writes this:

Tis the season when snailmail and e-mail boxes are filled with exhortations to give to charitable causes of every kind. If you go to religious services at least once a week, you will probably add a donation to a secular nonprofit on top of what you have already given to your church. But if you have few ties to religion (whether you are an atheist or simply a lapsed churchgoer), this may well be the only time when you write checks to charities. Giving — unless a natural disaster catches your attention — is an annual event rather than a part of your everyday budget.

As an atheist and secular humanist, I find this scenario basically accurate (although there are many exceptions) because it used to fit me perfectly. I have changed in recent years because, like many secularists, I became disturbed by the gap between my values and my erratic giving. There is no doubt — although the gap has been exaggerated by some on the religious right to support its view of secularists as morally inferior — that the nonreligious give less than religious Americans.

But even allowing for the fact that most Americans spend most of their charitable dollars close to home, the religious give a higher percentage of their income, and are about 25 percent more likely to give, than do secularists. Indeed, believers are 10 percent more likely than secularists to give to secular causes (although they do not support these programs as generously as they support religion).

The question is why.

Well, the answer is simple. Religious people have two motivations for helping people that secularists don't. First, they believe themselves morally obligated to care for the poor. A secularist has no moral obligation to do anything for anyone. They may choose to help someone because they just feel they should, but they have no real duty to do so.

Second, Christians, at least, give to others from of a sense of gratitude to God for what He has done for them in Christ. He has lavished an incomprehensible love upon us and asks only that we love what He loves. He loves people, especially the poor, so we should, too. For the secularist the poor are really losers in a Darwinian lottery of survival of the fittest. They drag the species down and there's no reason to help them continue to do it. People like Ms Jacoby might never think that way, but that is certainly one logical consequence of her atheism whether or not she realizes it. Just read Ayn Rand.

She continues:

Arthur C. Brooks, in a 2003 Policy Review essay on faith and charitable giving, connects liberal secular support for government programs with personal stinginess. Yet Brooks acknowledges that religious involvement, not political ideology, plays the dominant role. Religious liberals are 19 percentage points more likely to give than secular liberals, and religious conservatives 28 percent more likely than secular conservatives.

[B]ut the death of my longtime partner was a more powerful motivator. There is nothing like losing the person you love most to make you understand the truth of all of those clichés about the finite time we have to make an impact in this world.

Yes, we have a finite time to make an impact, but worrying about it only makes sense if what we do here in this world matters for eternity. If our impact doesn't last more than a generation or two beyond our demise then what difference does it make? What will it matter once we're dead whether we gave money to feed the hungry in some far-off country so that those poor unfortunates could live a few more years until they die of something else? Why should Ms Jacoby, or anyone, care about the impact she makes if her life is really no more than a footprint in the sand at the edge of the surf?

If she wants to know why atheists are such scrooges the answer is that many of them simply live consistently, at least in this regard, with their fundamental assumptions that there is no God, there is no life after death, and there's no good reason why anyone should care about others, especially those who are in no position to return the favor.

Static Time

Mark Vernon contemplates the relationship between God and time at Big Questions Online. He writes:

Augustine made one of the best known and most insightful comments about time. “What then is time?” he wondered. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

He puzzled over this most fundamental, and yet mysterious, aspect of the human condition in his Confessions, and arrived at a notion that was similar to Plato’s: the ancient Greek sage had defined time as “the moving image of eternity.” That fitted with Augustine’s conception of God, who had created time when He created the universe. To ask what God was doing before that great act is simply meaningless.

It’s an idea that’s stuck. And to some, it is entirely commensurate with the way modern physics grapples with the mystery. Here, time is typically envisaged as a relationship between events. Einstein presented what is referred to as the “block universe” – the notion that all times exist equally. (For comparison, Augustine wrote: “In the Eternal nothing passeth away, but that the whole is present.”)

So, what you see just depends on what you set t to in any given equation. “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent,” the genius of relativity mused. He was so clear about the illusory nature of time that the thought even provided him with comfort in the face of death.

This is fascinating stuff, to be sure, but in my opinion it's even more fascinating to think that if it's true that the universe is a "block" and the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion what would happen if there really is life after death? Do we pass out of this "block universe" and into an eternal present where all of cosmic history falls simultaneously before our gaze, like taking in an entire page of a book at once?

If so, if we are at that point conscious beings which transcend the space-time manifold, would not all events in the history of the world be in our present? If that's so, then when we die every future event, including the future deaths of our loved ones, must happen simultaneously with our death. If that's so, when we die we could be immediately united with those who, on earth, still grieve our passing. But this would mean that our loved ones must have a kind of dual existence.

They would exist here on earth awaiting the future and simultaneously they'd exist in eternity where the future is in the present. In fact, if this is the case, all of us must have a dual existence, like quantum particles which can exist in more than one place at the same time. Perhaps the self that exists "there" is just as unaware of our existence "here" as our self here is unaware of our existence there.

Who knows? It seems to me, though, that if time is a block, an objective reality, and if there's some sense in which we survive physical death, there's no reason why this couldn't be the way things are.

Anyway, I better stop speculating about all this before you start to think that I'm dabbling with some mind-altering substance while sitting at my computer.

Insect Migration

Cornelius Hunter relates some interesting facts about migratory insects like butterflies:

Anyone who travels much by air knows that pilots try to ride the wind. Flights may even deviate substantially from the shortest-distance route if the wind is strong enough elsewhere. But of course the wind is not likely moving exactly toward your destination. Add to this the fact that the wind also varies with altitude, and the problem of designing the optimal route of flight becomes highly complex.

It is a problem in the calculus of variations (optimizing functionals rather than mere functions) and is analogous to the optics problem of predicting the path of light through a medium with variant refractive index. But this approach requires analytical wind fields, described with functions, rather than numerically derived winds described, for instance, on a grid. In practice the optimal routing problem is solved using various iterative methods. Amazingly, migratory insects also solve this type of problem.

Research using entomological radar has found that migratory insects such as butterflies and moths perform their own flight planning in order to optimize their flights across continents. They select the right time to ride the wind, and they determine the right altitude and flight heading to reach their destination (rather than where the wind is going). As one of the researchers explained:

"Migratory butterflies and moths have evolved an amazing capacity to use favourable tailwinds. By flying at the heights where the wind currents are fastest, migratory moths can travel between their summer and winter grounds in just a few nights."

Luna Moth Caterpillar

This is certainly remarkable, but what's even more remarkable is the fact that butterflies have the ability to migrate and navigate at all. How and why did such a complex behavior arise in such a tiny nervous system? I'm sure it can all be explained by fortuitous genetic mutations being selected for because they conferred a reproductive advantage on the insects that had them.

Adult Luna Moth

I'm sure, too, that lepidopteran metamorphosis can be explained the same way. Somehow caterpillars developed mutations that caused them to spin cocoons around themselves (after they developed the ability to spin out the fibers that make up the cocoon). And then they had more mutations that caused all their tissues to dissociate and migrate around inside the cocoon and then reassemble in the form of a folded-up butterfly. Then more mutations gave the folded up butterfly the ability to break out of the cocoon at just the right time of year and then pump air into the veins in their wings and fly away a completely different creature than they were when they went into the cocoon.

What's that you say? It sounds like a fairy tale? That sort of talk just shows that you don't understand the omnipotent, omniscient character of blind, impersonal, random forces in nature.

Un-PC

Taking a cue from a recent column by Denis Prager at NRO I venture here to list ten claims which I think are almost indisputably true but which people are very reluctant to discuss in polite politically correct society:

1. People are not basically good.
2. Men are generally superior to women in some ways and women are generally superior to men in others.
3. African Americans are, in general, much better athletes than members of other groups.
4. Black males are disproportionately responsible for violent crime in America.
5. Jewish and Asian men are disproportionately successful over other groups in mathematics-related fields.
6. Some ways of living are better for human flourishing than others.
7. Many people are poor by choice.
8. America was founded on principles derived from a Christian worldview.
9. By almost any measure, America is the greatest nation in the history of the world.
10. Americans are the most generous people in the history of the world.

Are any of these propositions false? If not, why is it almost taboo in our society to voice them? Why do we seem so afraid to say things that are true? Or am I wrong in thinking that people feel a certain inhibition about discussing such things publicly?

Each of these statements has important implications. If they are true we shouldn't shrink from discussing why they are true and what their truth means for public policy and education.

Signature

A little over a year ago philosopher of science Stephen Meyer came out with a book that has completely reoriented the Darwinism/ID debate. The book was titled Signature in the Cell and it presented a massive amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that living cells, even the most primitive, contain massive amounts of information. It further argued that information is not a feature of blind random processes such as those which are believed to have produced the first living things.

Touchstone magazine has an article on Meyer's book which, inter alia, says this:

Signature in the Cell has been the subject of intense controversy, mostly in what is known as the blogosphere, meaning electronic publications on the Internet. In a way, the attacks are only to be expected, because another thing we know from our uniform experience is that Darwinists tend to be bitterly resentful of any thinker who challenges the fundamental theory on which their careers have been built.

In another way, however, it is peculiar that there is such a furious and often ill-informed objection to a learned volume that isn’t even about the theory of biological evolution. The book advances well-reasoned arguments based on solid evidence about a prior problem—the origin of the cell’s information content—concerning which most scientists would concede that they know very little.

The one thing that many of these scientists think they do know for certain is that, however the cell may have originated, the process could only have involved natural (i.e., unintelligent) causes. But this conclusion is not something these scientists know from the evidence. On the contrary, it is something they know—or rather, think they know— regardless of the evidence. For a long time, it has been the rule in evolutionary science that, if the evidence does not support a fully naturalistic theory about both the origin of life and its subsequent development, then there must be something wrong with the evidence rather than with the theory or its underlying philosophy.

This last paragraph shines a light on the way many people think about evolution. They work from a basic theological assumption, i.e. either God doesn't exist or, if He does, He doesn't meddle with the natural world. This, it should be noted, is not a conclusion that science is qualified to render. It's not based on empirical evidence. It's a purely theological assumption about the existence and nature of God.

From that basic conviction, though, it's argued that, since there's no divine intervention into the natural world, however life arose it must have been through exclusively natural processes and any theory that denies this must be wrong because it contradicts the basic conviction. If you sense that this has about it the odor of a circular argument you wouldn't be wrong.

It's ironic that the theory that is everywhere hailed as scientific - naturalistic evolution - is at bottom religious (and circular). Yet this theory, based as it is upon theological assumptions about God, can be taught in public schools but Intelligent Design, which does not require any assumptions about God, cannot. Why is that?

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the tip.

Doing Good and Feeling Good

Last week we did a couple of posts on helping the poor. I subsequently came across this article in The Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente titled Is Humanitarian Aid Bad For Africa? Here are a couple of key passages:

A growing number of humanitarian and development experts – including former true believers – argue that aid money frequently prolongs wars, props up dictators, impedes democracy, aids oppression and stifles human rights. Nowhere, they say, is this chain of unintended consequences more apparent than in Ethiopia.

The starving children of Ethiopia were not the victims of drought, as most people believed at the time. They were the victims of politics. The government of the time was using famine as an instrument of war, and the rebels were more interested in defeating the government than in feeding famine victims. As William Easterly, a leading aid skeptic, puts it, “It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers.” Political famines attract the food aid industry, with the consequence that governments or rebel groups are able to feed their own armies and divert resources to buy more weapons.

Most of us believe that humanitarian aid is a morally pure way to respond to suffering in the world. But what if our good intentions are just a newer version of colonialism? That’s what Mr. Gill thinks. “The colonial mindset of ‘we-know-best’ has surely persisted,” he writes. The trouble is that we haven’t learned the difference between doing good and feeling good. Until we do, many of our aid efforts will be worse than useless.

Let's do all we can to help the hungry and the sick, but let's make sure that the aid we send is getting to the people who need it and not being used to erect opulent palaces for the tyrants who run the country and crush their people.

Et Tu, Brute?

Morning Joe's Joe Scarborough, on the very liberal MSNBC mind you, reveals that the most powerful Democrats in the Senate are disenchanted with the President and criticizing him behind his back to media people like himself. This can't be good for the White House. If the President has his allies stabbing him in the back (It recalls to mind Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) how can there be anything but turmoil between the administration and the Congress for the next two years:

If it's true that the President has lost the confidence and loyalty of the Democrat committee chairs he may well be a lame duck with two years left in his first term. Indeed, there'll probably be a movement afoot to challenge him in the primary or to persuade him not to run*. Has a sitting president ever lost a primary challenge? Mr. Obama may be a historic president in ways he never imagined.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

* After I wrote this I came across this editorial. Prescience.

Gross Out

A couple of years ago, in one of the local parades hosted by the small city near which I reside, a local pastor marched with signs featuring photos of what happens to a fetus when it's aborted. The pictures were gruesome and repellant, which they were intended to be, and there was much tut-tutting by the local commentariat about the tastelessness and vulgarity displayed by the pastor. Children, after all, saw those signs and being too innocent to realize that it's okay to dismember unborn babies, they were upset.

Now comes word that HHS is considering requiring tobacco companies to put gross pictures of dead people on cigarette packs to try to discourage people from smoking.

Never mind the problem of having government insist on telling you what's good for you and compelling a legal business to incur the cost of packaging their product in such a way as to deter people from buying it. What I'd like to know is why it's okay to show photos of corpses on cigarette cartons to dissuade people from smoking, but it's over-the-line offensive to show people what happens to a baby in an abortion. Might the acceptability of the photos depend on the interest group which is being targeted?

If tobacco companies are forced to put these photos on their products shouldn't Planned Parenthood be obliged to put photos of aborted children in their brochures and on their walls? If not, why not?

The Free Exchange of Ideas

I was talking with a colleague the other day about what I think is an interesting aspect of paradigm shifts. It seems that when a new idea is struggling to gain a hearing its youthful defenders are wholly committed to the free exchange of ideas, open-mindedness, thinking outside the box, questioning authority, etc. but once the idea has been established as the new orthodoxy its now older advocates treat any alternative ideas which rise up to challenge it as heresies to be stifled, strangled, and crushed.

For example, in my undergraduate days, the Left was very big on freedom of speech. The dictum attributed to Voltaire that he may not agree with what you say but would fight to the death for your right to say it was on every young revolutionary's lips. The counterculture largely won the debate back then, and the notion that speech, any speech, might be censored, that some ideas be suppressed, was roundly repudiated. My hirsute classmates shaved, got a haircut (or went bald), donned a tie and percolated upward through academic and governmental hierarchies.

Now these former zealots for free speech comprise much of the "establishment", but somewhere along the road to power many of them have forsaken their idealistic reverence for the intellectual values they cherished as youths. Today those who challenge the reigning orthodoxies are often shouted down, denied tenure, or fired from NPR, by some of the same people who condemned the establishment forty years ago for being closed-minded, intolerant, and dogmatic.

In the back of my mind during the conversation with my colleague was a post I had read just the day before about the reaction of an evolutionary biologist named Jerry Coyne to an essay in NewScientist. An evolutionist named Ken Bennett who has, like a lot of other biologists, grown skeptical of the ability of natural selection to work the magic the Darwinian faithful believe it capable of, voiced his doubts in the new NewScientist article. Bennett's deviation from the Darwinian consensus didn't sit well with Professor Coyne who rent his garments and, like a character straight out of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, called for a boycott of NewScientist for the sin of publishing Professor Bennett's rather modest heresy.

When biologists were fighting to get evolution taught in schools back in the 1920s they argued that students should be able to hear ideas that challenge their religious beliefs, that this is the best way to sharpen young minds, etc. Now that the Darwinian paradigm is solidly ensconced in the academy all that talk of open minds and the free exchange of ideas is discarded like used tissues. Now the orthodox faith must be preserved and protected at all costs, freedom to express and consider contrary opinions is no longer useful and must be snuffed out. Books and journals that carry those opinions must be burned, or at least their publishers should be driven out of business.

Somebody should send Mr. Coyne a copy of John Stuart Mill's classic work On Liberty, or at least this excerpt:

"When a creed becomes hereditary, and is received passively, not actively - when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as when the creed was new, to exercise it's vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to ... give it a dull and torpid assent ... until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of teh human being....The creed remains as it were outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences...manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living convictions to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant."

You can read more about the brouhaha over Bennett's article at Telic Thoughts.

Bush Approved Waterboarding

We've talked about this topic in dozens of previous posts (as the results of typing the word "torture" into our search feature will show), but the release of former President George W. Bush's new book gives us occasion to bring it up again. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post article on the book:

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was "Damn right" and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

The human rights community and a lot of other people are aghast that Americans would have used "torture" on a terrorist, and even more appalled, perhaps, that Bush would seem so unrepentant about it, but I've never been sure why. Before I explain, I think it's noteworthy that no one did anything to Mohammed until it was approved at the highest levels. "Enhanced interrogation" was not undertaken lightly by American interrogators. Whether to use such methods was considered a matter of the utmost gravity.

But was Bush's decision wrong? Let's leave to the lawyers the question of its legality and focus instead on its morality. Pundits an several shows this week have asserted the immorality of waterboarding Kalid Sheik Mohammed as if it were self-evident that doing what is illegal is ipso facto immoral, but I'm not sure they're right.

Surely it is morally wrong to torture someone for the reasons that many thugs use torture around the world today. To torture someone for revenge, for punishment, for amusement, even for routine interrogation purposes, is simply evil.

But the assumption that is being made when the pundits say it is morally wrong is that it is absolutely wrong, that there is no circumstance, nor can there be, in which it would ever be justified. If they really believe this, however, then I question whether they have thought the matter through.

About a year and a half ago I did a post in which I argued that if we love people there may be circumstances, in this fallen world we inhabit, in which torture is morally right. That sounds paradoxical, I know, so let me share with you what I wrote and then you can tell me where my error lies:

In my philosophy class we talk about love, distinguishing the sort of love we have for our fellow man from eros or romantic love. We define the former as treating people with dignity, respect, and kindness.

With that background I was asked the other day by a student how I reconcile the notion that we owe that kind of love to others with my belief that torture is not absolutely wrong.

This is a fair question and deserved an answer. Here's how, had I had the time, I would have replied:

Our obligation to love is a prima facie obligation. By that I mean that we owe respect and kindness to every individual until such time as the obligation to treat one person with love comes in conflict with our obligation to others who also have a claim, perhaps a greater claim, on our love.

When a man threatens the lives of others, particularly those I have a special obligation to protect and for whom I have a special bond of love, then it would be unloving to fail to do everything in my power to stop him. He has nullified my obligation to treat him with respect and kindness and forced me to choose between loving him and loving those he threatens. The moral course in such a circumstance, the course that I believe is demanded by the obligation to love, is to protect the innocent and to stop those who would harm them.

If stopping the guilty entails doing him harm then so be it, but the harm done should, whenever possible, be never greater than what's necessary to remove the threat. Nor should it ever be something one feels good about inflicting. A government which feels compelled to use "torture" (I use quotes because the definition of torture is so broad as to include almost any kind of incivility - a fact which really renders the word almost meaningless) to save the lives of its people is justified in doing so as long as that's the only reason it's used and so long as it's never continued beyond the point where it accomplishes its purpose.

Love is not a warm feeling toward other people, nor is it sentimentality. Sometimes, as in the case of a surgeon operating in a Civil War field hospital without anesthetics, doing the right thing means causing great pain. Sometimes, as in dealing with modern terrorism, doing the right thing for one person entails causing pain to another.

Perhaps you disagree and would argue that "torture" is absolutely wrong, that there's never any justification for it. Before you commit to such a view, though, ask yourself whether you would condemn a man who saved the life of your child by causing her abductor pain in order to coax him to reveal where his accomplices were holding her (cf. the movie Taken).

Before you say that the man was wrong to do this, imagine looking your child in the eyes after she has been rescued from people who were abusing her and preparing to murder her or sell her into child slavery or the sex trade, and telling her that you would rather she not have been rescued than for her rescue to have entailed that pain be inflicted on the man who kidnapped, molested and planned to kill her.

Perhaps you could say that to your child, but if not, then you agree that torture is not absolutely wrong. If that's your position then the question that next needs to be answered is not "should we torture?" but rather, "how should we define torture?" and "under what circumstances is torture morally justified?" The sooner we have that debate the better off we'll be as a nation.

The question to pose to those who condemn Mr. Bush is, do they really think torture is absolutely wrong in the moral sense or was it just wrong in the circumstances in which it was used against Kalid Mohammed. If the answer is the latter then we should ask what it was about those circumstances that made it wrong in that case. For my part I think it would be very difficult to provide a compelling answer to that question.

Values and Duties

Frans de Waal has a follow up at The Opinionator to his post last month titled Morals Without God about which we commented here. Apparently de Waal has received a lot of angry emails from atheists taking him to task for being insufficiently hostile to religion.

His response affords an occasion to emphasize more explicitly than I perhaps did in the earlier post what I think is an important distinction in the discussion of whether God is necessary for morality.

Atheists will often insist that they can be, and often are, just as morally good as anyone else and that God is not necessary for them to be so. What they mean by this, I take it, is that they can hold the same values as does any believer without the concomitant belief in God. An atheist can be just as kind, generous, peaceful, gentle, loving, etc. as anyone else.

My argument is that this is certainly true, but it's entirely beside the point. The debate is not over whether an atheist can hold a particular set of moral values, the debate is over whether an atheist is constrained by any moral obligation to abide by one set of values rather than another. In other words, if atheism is true can there be moral duty?

The answer to that, it seems to me, is no. If there is no transcendent moral authority to impose an obligation on us to, say, care for the poor, then there is no such obligation. It might be objected that the individual himself can impose the obligation, but a self-imposed obligation is an illusion. If someone sets himself up as his own moral authority and imposes an obligation upon himself then he surely has the authority to rescind the obligation whenever it suits him. An obligation that can be repudiated whenever the person who is under the obligation chooses to cast it off is no obligation at all.

An atheist can choose to be kind and generous, but if he's right about God his choice simply reflects an arbitrary preference. Had he chosen to be cruel and selfish he would not be wrong. His values could not be said to be morally inferior, they're just different values.

An irony in all this is that the atheist lives by a superstition. She believes that something called moral right exists when in fact, on atheism, it not only doesn't exist, it cannot exist. But this means that an atheist should logically be a nihilist and most atheists cannot live with that conclusion even though its where their reason leads them. Instead they deny what reason dictates and live instead by their feelings. In order to believe that moral values matter, that some values are better than others, they must leave reason behind and make an irrational leap based upon their own personal moral tastes.

A further irony is that certain of their number (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris et al.) then scoff at Christians and other theists for holding what they allege is an irrational belief in God. They claim that the Christian is irrational despite the fact that a Christian can live perfectly consistently within his basic assumptions about God, whereas most atheists cannot live at all consistently with theirs.

It'd be funny were it not so tragic.

Reducing the Deficit

It looks like we're at least getting some movement on reducing spending and trimming entitlements. The two co-chairs of a presidential commission established to come up with ideas for reducing our government's enormous appetite for spending have produced a series of proposals that has in it something to antagonize pretty much everyone, but at least it should give us something to build upon:

A presidential commission’s leaders proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit-cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks including the mortgage-interest deduction.

The plan would throw out hundreds of tax breaks for items such as capital gains and child care. It would raise the gas tax, slash defense spending and bring down health-care costs by clamping down on medical malpractice suits. The Social Security retirement age would rise to 68 in about 2050 and 69 in about 2075.

None of the proposals would take effect next year to avoid disrupting the economic recovery. Under one option, income-tax rates would be reduced to three levels: 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent. Currently there are six tax levels ranging from 10 percent to 35 percent. The corporate income-tax rate would be cut to 26 percent from 35 percent.

Wiping out all tax breaks, including the home mortgage deduction, while lowering rates would cost taxpayers $100 billion a year under the plan.

Increasing taxes and cutting defense spending will not be popular with conservatives, although the simplified tax rates will be, and Nancy Pelosi has already voiced her objection to tinkering with Medicare and Social Security:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called the plan “simply unacceptable,” saying older Americans “are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare.”

This seems an odd objection since as far as I can tell from the article, few of today's "older Americans" will still be around when the new retirement age goes into effect.

Anyway, a detailed list of proposals can be found here. Something has to be done soon as one of the chairmen said when the proposals were released:

“This country’s out of money and we better start thinking,” said Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the panel created by President Barack Obama. Without “tough choices,” Bowles said, “we’re on the most predictable path toward an economic crisis that I can imagine.”

Indeed. If we don't do something to reign in entitlements and reduce the deficit the country our children and grandchildren inhabit will look very much different, and very much poorer, than the country we live in today.

Microfinance in China

Yesterday we talked about microfinance as a great way to help the world's poor improve their condition. I received this email in response, and I thought some of our readers might be interested in it:

To Viewpoint,

My name is Brendan Rigby, and I am a volunteer representative of Wokai a microfinance organisation dedicated to poverty alleviation in China. We are currently raising awareness of poverty and microfinance in China and how everyone can now get involved.

Essentially, Wokai is a peer-to-peer approach to microfinance that was created by two young social entrepreneurs. It is an innovative, contributor-driven microfinance website that connects contributors in the international community with borrowers in China. Contributors can choose borrowers to support, watch repayments, and pick who to fund next. Unlike much of the global sector, the impact of a contributor's donation is visible and apparent through Wokai.

Wokai has also built a community of contributors through the website, in which users can access user-rated and user-generated content on microfinance in China. We also encourage other social entrepreneurs to establish Wokai Chapters in their city to mobilise support and encourage others to get involved. Through information and capital exchange, Wokai aims to grow the microfinance sector in China and correspondingly increase opportunities for the poor to generate a sustainable livelihood and access education and healthcare services.

We are currently reaching out to bloggers such as yourself to help us build this community of contributors. We would be very appreciative your support in our effort to raise awareness build community support.

Microfinance in China is an extremely underdeveloped and overlooked issue that deserves more attention. Poverty in China is often overlooked and overshadowed. According to World Bank and UN statistics, around 200 million Chinese live on less than US$1.25 a day. China's financial and banking system makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and small business owners to access loan credit, especially in rural areas.

Since the website launch in November 2008, Wokai has raised over US$374.000 in loan capital, attracted 6,700 contributors, and empowered 491 borrowers. Wokai works closely with two Chinese microfinance institutions (MFI) in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, achieving a 99.5% on-time repayment rate. By the end of 2011, Wokai is aiming to raise US$1 million in loan captial to expand its partnerships with Chinese MFIs. This is an achieveable goal, but not without more support from individuals passionate about empowering families to lift themselves from poverty.

Thank you for your time, love reading the blog and I look forward to speaking further about microfinance in China and Wokai.

I encourage readers to check out Wokai's webpage here.

Calling for a Violent Revolution

What is going on here? A mainstream cable talk show on MSNBC is apparently providing a platform for a guy who's advocating violent revolution in the U.S. Dylan Ratigan is one of the fairer voices on the lefty cable network MSNBC, but why he would have a guest like this on, and why his producers allowed him to have this guest on, is beyond me. Indeed, in a more sensible era the man's ideas would be considered seditious. I believe in free speech, but it's patently irresponsible to give someone an opportunity on national television to call for killing the leaders of our country, which is certainly implicit in any call to violent revolution.

Imagine that instead of a politically progressive cartoonist of minimal talent this had been a member of the Tea Party voicing similar opinions on, say, Glenn Beck's show. There'd be a national clamor for the sponsors of the show to yank their sponsorship and for FOX to fire Beck. Yet Ted Rall, a man who once implied in a cartoon that Pat Tillman was an "idiot" and a "sap" for passing up a pro football career to join the military after 9/11, can call for the violent overthrow of the government - which would certainly entail a huge loss of life and be cataclysmic for this country and the world - and the outrage seems to be exclusively on the right:

Am I overreacting or is this as sick as it sounds?

Helping the Poor Through Microfinance

Yesterday we did a piece on how conservatives and liberals differ in their views of the best way to help the poor. Here's an example of the sort of assistance that conservatives applaud.

In the past it was felt that what we needed to do was just send money to those languishing in grinding poverty in places like Chad and Haiti. It was eventually realized, however, that sending aid to foreign governments was, for a host of reasons, counterproductive. Moreover, unless people are working, unless they're struggling to make it on their own without having to rely on an indefinite stream of handouts, we might as well just burn the cash we give them for all the good it does those who receive it.

The lessons learned from our bad experience with aid led to the emergence of a number of private organizations that employed the principles of microfinance to help the poor in the third world. Microfinance groups cut out the bureaucratic government middle-man and encourage and reward entrepreneuership and self-reliance. One such organization is named Kiva.

For those who may not be familiar with Kiva and other similar groups, they work like this:

Entrepreneurs in need of funds to expand or start a business in the third world apply for a loan with a field representative who works with Kiva. Usually the loans are for a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars. The representative assesses the credibility of the applicant, and if they are approved, their name, photo, and a brief bio are posted on the Kiva website.

People all over the world then view the request and make an online contribution (minimum of $25). Once the loan amount has been raised the loan is granted and the entrepreneuer then has about a year or so to repay it. When the lenders have been repaid they are notified and can then apply the funds to other loans if they wish.

It's an excellent way to help people without having to work through an inefficient, wasteful government bureaucracy and without just throwing money at people without demanding anything of them in return, as many welfare programs do.

Kiva affords donors an opportunity to help people who are working hard to help themselves, and one of the best aspects of the microfinance plan is that the donations can accumulate and be recycled among a series of recipients. It's a great idea all around.

Check it out.

How Can We Best Help the Poor?

People have asked how one might square conservative political philosophy with a Christian duty to help the poor. The question puzzles me a little because I don't know why anyone should think the two are in tension in the first place.

Of course, there might be some still in thrall to archaic stereotypes who believe that liberals care about the poor whereas conservatives care only about making money and protecting their wealth. That's simply not true, however. Conservatives and liberals, at least many of them, both agree that we have a moral obligation to help the poor. The debate between them is not about whether we should help but how we should help. It's about finding the best way to accomplish the goal of lifting people out of poverty.

Conservatives reject policies which are wasteful, inefficient and ineffective, which is how they view most government programs. Waste and inefficiency are unjust and immoral, but they are inevitable in government. The government initiates some anti-poverty program, and a bureaucracy is then erected to manage it. Your tax dollar wends its way through the bureaucratic sausage machine and everyone who touches it along the way takes a cut. By the time the money gets to the recipient for whom it is intended she may see only a fraction of the original dollar. That's wasteful and inefficient.

For six decades we've tried to solve the problem of the poor by essentially taking money from those who have, and giving it, often with no strings attached, to those who don't. For example, perhaps you work hard, maybe two jobs, to save for your children's education and to pay your mortgage. Your neighbor buys a house next door which he can't afford and is subsequently foreclosed upon. The government solution is to take money from you and give it to him to stave off foreclosure. That's unjust.

After six decades of these sorts of policies we are burdened with as much, if not more, poverty as ever. We have spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s on combating poverty and have very little to show for it. That's ineffective.

The best way to lift people out of penury is not by giving them a handout. It's by making sure there are jobs available for those who are willing to work. If people don't have to work for what they receive they'll never develop the virtues and disciplines necessary to rise above their circumstances.

So the question becomes, what's the best way to create jobs? Here again the liberal solution is to raise taxes, run up debt, and provide money in the form of stimulus to get the economy going. That may help a little, like a band aid might help a little, but the long term cost is very high. Not only do the jobs disappear when the stimulus runs out but the debt that the government incurs when they borrow the money to pay for it is an albatross around the necks of future generations.

A better approach is to create a private-sector business environment in which employers have the fiscal resources to expand their business and market their product. When consumers have more money in their pocket they'll buy more. When employers are making a significant profit and consumers are buying their product people will be hired. What's the best way to get more money into the pockets of businesses and customers? Conservatives argue that it's by removing onerous and costly regulations on businesses, keeping their taxes low and also reducing the taxes that consumers pay.

Right now businesses aren't hiring because they don't know how much Obamacare is going to cost them, they don't know how much their fuel costs will go up with the onset of inflation and the possibility that cap and trade gets passed next year, and they don't know what their tax rates will be after January 1st. The administration wants to allow the current lower tax rates to lapse, at least on those making over $250,000, which includes a lot of businesses. This will automatically kick in massive tax increases on these businesses unless legislation is passed to keep the current rates in place. All this uncertainty is like a tourniquet squeezing an arm. It just shuts off the flow of commerce.

Conservatives also believe that spending must be reduced because the more government spends the more money they have to borrow. The more they borrow the more money they have to print to pay on the debt. The more money there is in circulation the less value it has, and the less it will buy. That's inflation, and it always hurts the poor more than anyone because they're living on the tightest economic margins. When $3 buys only one gallon of gas instead of two, most of us just pay the extra cost and cut back somewhere else, but the poor can't pay it. They walk instead.

Moreover, when gas costs more everything costs more, including food, because it takes gas to raise, harvest, process and transport the food. The poor often cannot afford to pay the higher cost so they just do without.

Conservatives believe that the best way to help the poor, which all Christians, liberal and conservative, believe we must do, is to lower taxes, reduce spending, ease regulations on business, and reduce health care and fuel costs on both businesses and consumers. This will enable consumers to buy more, businesses to hire more, and that means jobs for those who need them.

The liberal solution is to do the opposite: Raise taxes, borrow money to spend on infrastructure, etc., increase the regulatory burden to protect the environment and the consumer, increase health care costs to pay for care for those who can't afford it, and increase fuel costs so that we are forced to conserve more. These may all sound like good ideas, but each of them stifles job creation and are no help at all in the long run to the poor who need jobs more than they need a marginally better environment.

The question for the Christian, then, is do we want a solution that ultimately does not make the situation of the poor better and may make it worse, or do we want a solution that helps not only the wealth creators in society, but also more effectively ameliorates the plight of the poor?

The Olby Affair

Keith Olbermann is a difficult man to like. In my opinion he and Sean Hannity are the two most insufferable talk show hosts on the air today (well, not counting Michael Savage). Olbermann is often vulgar, vicious, vile and unfair. Even so, I don't understand why MSNBC suspended him indefinitely without pay, and I suspect there must be more to the story than meets the eye:

Keith Olbermann, the unabashedly liberal-leaning counterpart to cable television's conservative hosts, was suspended indefinitely without pay from MSNBC Friday afternoon for contributing a total of $7,200 to three Democratic candidates in late October, a violation of network ethics policies.

I understand that NBC has rules about their personnel not contributing to political campaigns, but I don't know why. They say it's because news people should not be invested in a political candidate because it reflects poorly on their ability to fairly comment on the issues of the day, but this explanation is difficult to credit. Anyone who has watched MSNBC's lineup knows that there's no impartiality there. The people at MSNBC are as deep into the tank for progressive Democrats as Sean Hannity over at FOX is in the tank for conservative Republicans (FOX, by the way, has a similar policy for its news staff but not for its commentators).

I think the NBC policy makes little sense and to punish Olbermann because he gave money to a couple of progressive candidates when for 24 hours a day MSNBC is pretty much campaigning for progressives and progressive policies anyway seems a little peculiar. Olbermann is, like everyone else at MSNBC and many of the people at FOX, an opinion-monger. He tries to promote his point of view and to persuade people to accept it. No one confuses these guys with objective news reporters. No one thinks they're ideologically unbiased or that they even should be.

To forbid them from financially supporting the candidates they promote on their shows seems very odd, but if the NBC execs feel they have to enforce their policy why not just dock him a day's pay or something? The reaction seems, on the face of it, disproportionate to the offense, and that's why I think there's more to the story than what we learn from the WaPo account. Maybe this is not the first problem the suits over at MSNBC have had with Keith, which is certainly not hard to imagine, and perhaps he has crossed the line one time too many.

At any rate, I wouldn't be sorry to see him be let go, which is what some are speculating is going to happen (if he does leave I wish he could take Hannity with him), but this is not how I'd like to see it happen. I'd prefer he be cashiered because his ratings are poor or because his level of civility falls short of MSNBC's standards, but these aren't the reasons that were given for his suspension. The guy's very hard to take, but he still should be treated fairly and reasonably, even if he doesn't treat others that way.

Widening the War

I haven't heard anything about this on the normal media channels, but if it's true it marks a widening of the war against terrorists. Never before, at least according to the article, have American forces targeted an al Qaeda operative in Gaza.

From the article:

A missile fired from an American warship in the Mediterranean hit the car in which Muhammad Jamal A-Namnam, 27, was driving in the heart of Gaza City Wednesday, Nov. 3 and killed him, debkafile's exclusive counter-terror sources report. Namnam was an operational commander of the Army of Islam, Al-Qaeda's Palestinian cell in the Gaza Strip. He was on a mission on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP to plan, organize and execute the next wave of terrorist attacks on US targets after last week's air package bomb plot.

According to our sources, the Palestinian cell members were planning to infiltrate northern Sinai from the Gaza strip over the coming weekend and strike American personnel serving with the Multinational Force and Observers Organization – MFO, which is under American command and is stationed at North Camp, El Gorah, 37 kilometers southeast of El-Arish. In a coordinated operation, Al Qaeda fighters hiding up in the mountains of central Sinai were to have attacked US Marines and Air Force troops stationed at the South Camp in Naama Bay, Sharm el Sheikh.

Meanwhile, American and allied forces are quietly continuing to mass in the seas near Iran. Whether this is merely an attempt to intimidate Iran or a prelude to taking out their nuclear weapons facilities is hard to tell, but I imagine we'll find out soon enough.

The Package Bombers

The package bombs found on planes bound for the United States originated in Yemen and U.S. intelligence agencies know where the bad guys are. They want to launch a special forces operation against them, but the Yemeni president Abdullah Ali Saleh, despite U.S. and Saudi pressure, has been very uncooperative. Ultimately, the decision to go after these terrorists may be taken out of his hands.

Here's the story.

Tuesday's Significance

A friend writes to ask how significant I thought Tuesday's election was for Republicans, especially since Democrats still control the Presidency and the Senate. From what I've read the election results are very significant. Here are several reasons why:

1. Since they no longer enjoy the perquisites of power some House Democrats can be expected to retire (Nancy Pelosi's name has been prominently mentioned in this regard). This would give the GOP an even greater plurality than did Tuesday's election.
2. The Republicans are now poised to take the Senate in 2012. Twenty one Democrat senators are up for reelection in 2012 plus two independents. Only ten Republicans will stand for reelection. Unless the economy improves dramatically, and the President's approval ratings go up, more Democrat seats will be vulnerable than Republican. If the President's popularity and the economy are both in the doldrums the Republicans could wind up with over 60 senate seats which would make veto overrides a serious possibility.
3. The number of big states whose governments are now controlled by the GOP has shot up from 15 to 26. This is very significant for legislation like Obamacare and immigration policy which states can pressure the federal government to change or improve.
4. GOP control of the statehouses will also be very important this year because congressional districts will be redrawn as a result of the 2010 census. The party in power in the state gets to redraw these boundaries and they always do so to protect their own political interests.
5. The fact that the Republicans now have 46 senate seats (two races are still undecided) means it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to break a Republican filibuster. This means that Obama's legislative agenda is probably finished. All they can do is fight to keep what he already has from being repealed or try to circumvent the legislature by imposing policy through his executive agencies and czars.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of Tuesday's election was the number of governorships and state legislatures that swung toward the Republicans and the number of young, rising Democrat pols who got wiped out in the process. These two calamities for the Democrat party are going to be very difficult to overcome anytime soon.

Shrinking from the Challenge

Michael Egnor poses a series of penetrating questions to a militantly atheistic materialist named P.Z. Myers. Myers' replies to the questions suggest that he hasn't even thought about several of them. His answers and Egnor's response to those answers can be found here. Here are the questions Egnor asks Myers to answer:

• Why is there anything?
• What caused the Universe?

• Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
• Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real?
• Do final causes exist?

• Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
• Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
• Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
• Why is there evil?

When you read Myers' flippant and superficial answers and compare them to Egnor's replies it becomes very tempting to believe that atheism is little more than an expression of an anti-intellectual hope that there really is no God. Atheists seem unable, or at least Myers and others to whom Egnor has posed these same questions seem unable, to muster any persuasive counter to a serious intellectual challenge.

Read their exchange at the link and see what you think.

Letter to a Young Girl

I was reading an email from a young student recently, and what she said reminded me of a letter I had written about three years ago to my youngest daughter when she was a junior in high school. I had posted the letter on Viewpoint at the time, and after reading my student's email I thought I'd repost it in hope that someone finds it helpful.

Here it is:

Hi Honey,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

Can't We All Just Get Along?

A group of supporters of GOP candidate Robert Hurt, running for congress in Virginia's 5th district, are sitting outside minding their own business when a supporter of Hurt's Democrat opponent, Tom Perriello, happens by to engage the Republicans in some polite political dialogue over the issues. Much of the man's political wisdom was directed at a black woman who was among the Hurt supporters.

Warning - some of the technical jargon the Democrat employs may not be appropriate for mixed company:

Apparently, this gentleman did not receive the memo from Jim Wallis calling upon citizens to engage in civil dialogue this election season. Or maybe he thought this was pretty civil for a Democrat. Anyway, if a tea partier had launched this sort of racist, vile, and bigoted screed it would be all over the evening news, but since it was a Democrat, well, maybe the media just figures that that's really not news.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com

Yes, They're Angry

Throughout this campaign season the liberal media and the Democrats have been portraying Tea Partiers and other conservatives as "angry". Well, yes, they're angry writes Moe Lane at RedState.com. Who wouldn't be angry given what has been said about them and the people they respect and support during the last year.

Lane writes:

• These people (liberals) told their clients (i.e. their readers and listeners) to say that:
• you hate African-Americans.
• you hate Latinos.
• you hate gays.
• you hate women.
• you hate Jews.
• you hate Muslims.
• you hate the poor.
• you hate America.
• you were fascists.
• you were theocrats.
• you were stupid.
• you were uneducated.
• you were hatemongers.
• you were insane.
• you were violent extremists.
• These people told their clients to call you unpatriotic.
• to call you cowards.
• These people told their clients to mock you at every opportunity.
• to deliberately use a sexual slur when referring to you.
• to trivialize and dismiss your concerns at every opportunity.

It's true that every one of the epithets and slanders Lane lists has been employed by liberals, either in the Democratic party, the main-stream media, or cable talk - or all three - against the Tea Party as a whole or against individual Tea Party-supported candidates at one point or another over the last year. If Tea Partiers are angry maybe they have a right to be.

If the "Tea-nami" that has been forecast actually materializes at the polls today the Left will have nothing and no one to blame for stirring up these hornets but their own policies and their own execrable, disgusting, rhetoric.

Profiling

I know Juan Williams got fired from NPR for admitting this sort of thing, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm profiling or anything, but I have to say that from now on it's going to make me very nervous if I see Yemenis carrying toner cartridges onto an airplane.

Please don't think less of me.

Restoring Sanity, Or Not

Reason TV attended the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert Restore Sanity rally last Saturday and tried to get a sense of what was on the minds of the attendees. The results were pretty funny:

Even funnier are the interviews of attendees who were asked whether President Obama is a Keynesian. John Maynard Keynes, of course, was an economist who endorsed lots of government spending during times of recession in order to stimulate the economy. This is the President's view as well. Apparently, though, some of the attendees at the Restore Sanity rally couldn't tell the difference between being a Keynesian and being a Kenyan.

It's not often that something I see on the computer makes me laugh out loud, but this did. Watch:

And liberals are out there calling Tea Partiers simple-minded? These are the people that comprise the Democrats' electoral base? Lord help us.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com.

Truth Coming Back to Bite Him

Jerry Brown is running for the office of governor of California against Meg Whitman who has dug up an old interview Brown did on CNN fifteen years ago, some years after his first stint as governor. In a fit of candor uncharacteristic of politicians Mr. Brown admits that his whole campaign for the office was a tissue of lies. Whitman is now clobbering him with it:

If this video costs Brown the election it will certainly be a lesson for politicians: Under no circumstances should you ever tell the truth. On the other hand, that's a lesson they seem not to need to be taught.

Five Reasons to Vote Democratic Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day, the day that political junkies have been looking forward to for a long time - the midterm elections. In the spirit of bipartisanship I herewith offer five reasons to cast your vote for the Democrats when you go to the polls:

1. You think the government lets you keep too much of your paycheck.
2. You'd rather not have to work for a paycheck.
3. You think the best way to create jobs is to create more government bureaucracies.
4. You believe the best way to solve our immigration problem is to enact the same economic policies here that the immigrants are fleeing from.
5. You think the best way to gain independence from foreign oil suppliers is to build windmills.

Remember to vote.

Slime and Violence

ABC's Jonathan Karl laments the incivility and mendacity of the political ads with which we've been barraged this election cycle and puts the blame squarely where it belongs:

In one typical example, Democratic ads have transformed Kentucky Republican House candidate Andy Barr into "a convicted criminal" -- complete with images yellow police tape and fuzzy video of crime scenes. Not mentioned is his crime: As a college student 19 years ago, he was caught using a fake ID during spring break.

As you watch this year's ads -- and I've been watching all too many lately -- you'll notice a striking difference between Democratic and Republican attack ads: Democrats are attacking over personal issues, Republicans are attacking over policy.

A recent study by the Wesleyan Media Project actually quantifies this. They looked at 900,000 airing of political ads this year and concluded: "Democrats are using personal attacks at much higher rates than Republicans and a much higher rate than Democrats in 2008."

Karl's report gives lots of examples of how the Democrats have resorted repeatedly to personal insult and slander in a desperate attempt to discredit their opponents in the eyes of the voters.

With so many to choose from, of course, Karl couldn't list them all. Daily Beast columnist Howard Kurtz has videos of several more. Neither ABC nor The Daily Beast, it should be noted, can be said to be Republican media organs.

Sliming one's opponent is the sort of thing that sixth graders do in a student council election. It's done because they have no issues to discuss, or, as in the case of the Democrats, they have no desire to discuss the issues nor their record on them.

Somewhat related to the Democrats' use of personal attack is the absolutely appalling performance of MSNBC's Chris Matthews on his Hardball show the other night. Matthews is either one of the most uninformed cable talk show hosts or he's one of the most dishonest, and his guests seem no better informed, or truthful, than he is. Here's the segment from his program a couple of nights ago. The relevant discussion starts at about the 9:30 mark:

Since neither Matthews nor his interlocutors can recall anything on the liberal side remotely similar to a man pressing his boot onto a disruptive protestor's shoulder - since Matthews believes we'd have to go back 60 years to find a commensurate example of such violent behavior on the Left - let us at Viewpoint remind him of just a few episodes that have occurred in the last year or so, each of which is at least as bad, and some much worse, than the incident that has him worrying that the Tea Party is on the brink of Kristallknacht.

First there was the sad case of Kevin Gladney, a black man who was beaten and kicked by SEIU thugs outside a Town Hall meeting held by a Democrat congressman. Gladney was attacked because he was selling Tea Party paraphenalia.

Then there was the incident last summer of North Carolina congressman Bob Ethridge who physically assaulted a student who was questioning him on a Washington D.C. street. The video of this encounter is at the link.

And we can't forget the poor guy who had his finger bitten off at a health care rally about a year ago. The victim was a 65 year old man who was peacefully protesting health care reform when he was attacked by a MoveOn.org supporter.

And just the other day another MoveOn.org thug grabbed a man around the throat and choked him. The video can be seen here. Finally, if it's uniforms that has Matthews in a swivet as he frets for our future perhaps someone should remind him of these fine citizens who were charged and found guilty of intimidating white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, until the Obama Justice department decided that since they were black the charges would be dropped:

Maybe Matthews and his two guests, both of whom are putative journalists, don't keep up on the news and are merely professionally incompetent. That's always a possibility. On the other hand, maybe they're just dishonest.

Great Books

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included? Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article:

1. A great book speaks from an important original setting.
2. A great book is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. A great book is well-crafted.
4. A great book is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. A great book is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. A great book is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. A great book is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. A great book is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet these criteria? Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series doesn't count.

Bad Faith

Shelby Steele is no bitter, white redneck resentful that we have an African American president. He is himself an African American, a former college English professor, an accomplished author (Affirmative Action Baby and White Guilt), and is currently a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column Mr Steele plumbs the mind of Mr. Obama, seeking to understand the assumptions that guide his presidency. It's a very good essay of which the following is a part:

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.

Barack Obama .... is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America.

So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.

Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil — I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

Read the rest of Steele's essay at the link. It contains several excellent insights into the mind of Mr. Obama and, by extension, that of many another modern liberal progressive.

Liberal Genes

A recent study reveals that some people have a gene that predisposes them to be liberals. I don't know what to make of this. Does that mean that if liberalism is genetically determined liberals can't be held responsible for the damage they do? Does it mean that liberals are a kind of mutant? I don't know. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Is political ideology derived from a person's social environment or is it a result of genetic predisposition? It's an interaction of both, according to a recent study on our political leanings that boosts both sides of the nature versus nurture debate.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego and Harvard University determined that people who carry a variant of the DRD4 gene are more likely to be liberals as adults, depending on the number of friendships they had during high school. They published their study in a recent issue of The Journal of Politics.

The 7R variant of DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene, had previously been associated with novelty seeking. The researchers theorized novelty seeking would be related to openness, a psychological trait that has been associated with political liberalism.

However, social environment was critical. The more friends gene carriers have in high school, the more likely they are to be liberals as adults. The authors write, "Ten friends can move a person with two copies of 7R allele almost halfway from being a conservative to moderate or from being moderate to liberal."

I wonder if Obamacare will cover gene therapy.

Good Without God

Frans de Waal has a piece at The New York Times' Opinionator blog in which he argues that God is not necessary for human morality. Professor de Waal holds that morality is hard-wired into us by evolution and therefore appeals to a Divine sanction for morality are superfluous. There's so much wrong with his reasoning that one scarcely knows where to start, but perhaps this paragraph would be a good place to focus our attention:

Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. Not that religion is irrelevant — I will get to this — but it is an add-on rather than the wellspring of morality.

The question to ask Mr. de Waal is how it helps his case if morality is somehow built into us? If we've evolved to act in certain ways how does that make those ways "morally right"? If what we call morality is indeed part of our genetic inheritance then it has been encoded into our genes either by Divine agency or by impersonal natural forces. If it's the latter, which is Mr. de Waal's position, how could this innate moral sense possibly obligate us to conform to it? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal forces impose upon us a moral duty to do anything?

If, on the other hand, the moral sense is instilled in us by Divine agency then the rest of Mr. de Waal's paragraph is pointless. If God gives us the moral law, writes it on our hearts as Paul puts it in his letter to the Roman church, then of course people could have followed it before they had formal religion, but that doesn't mean that God is any the less necessary for its existence.

Furthermore, that humans worry about their communities and contrive laws to facilitate their survival has nothing to do with whether it would be right or wrong to break those laws or to do anything that would harm the community. In a godless universe there's no reason why I should care about the community, especially if it's in my own interest to act in ways that harm others but benefit me. Why would it be wrong to treat others unkindly if I prosper from it? What imposes the duty upon me not to behave this way?

Mr. de Waal says that whatever it is it's not God, but, in fact, it's either God or it's nothing at all.

Taliban Woes

The problems and difficulties faced by the Taliban in Afghanistan continue to mount. An article at Strategy Page explains why. Here's the lede:

The massive movement of intelligence gathering and analyzing forces from Iraq to Afghanistan in the last two years is paying off by cutting Taliban supplies of weapons, and money. More and more captured (often from dead Taliban) weapons and ammunition is of poor quality. Explosives, even the stuff made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer, is harder to get, and often used in smaller quantities in order to make more roadside bombs.

That, in turn, is just getting more Taliban killed, including many more leaders. That's because the largely illiterate Taliban have fewer skilled people for tasks like planting bombs (and rigging them to go off on cue). Guys who get promoted often find themselves one of the few people who knows how to rig a bomb, so they have to go out on the bomb planting missions.

These are increasingly more dangerous because the Americans have more UAVs, along with camera towers and aerostats (tethered blimps) that can see for long distances, day or night and in any weather. It's not just that the cameras can pick up some guys planting a bomb (and call in an air strike), but can detect suspicious movement of any kind.

There's much more at the link about how difficult things are getting for the Talibs in Afghanistan and why. Check it out.

Inexcusable

I don't know what's more outrageous, what this boneheaded Rand Paul supporter did to this woman, or the attempt by MSNBC talking heads to blame Glenn Beck and other talk radio hosts for his actions. In any case, the man has been condignly fired. The woman was a provocateur, to be sure, but that's not an excuse for this sort of treatment. She apparently needed to be restrained, but once she was on the ground, stepping on her was gratuitous and excessive.

The edited video makes it look like the man repeatedly stomped on the woman (he didn't), but just placing his foot on her shoulder was bad enough. Indeed, it's about as bad as Joy Behar on The View calling Sharron Angle a moron, evil, and a bitch (three times) and insisting that she's going to hell:

Anyway, the stomper has since apologized, but his behavior has no place in a civil polity and should not be tolerated in our political debates. The Paul campaign was right to sever their ties to the guy. Now, if only the Democrats would sever their ties to Joy Behar, or, for that matter, the SEIU thugs who beat and kicked Kenneth Gladney at a town hall meeting in August of 2009.

I know, I know, but one can still dream.

Irreducible Complexity

In the debate between intelligent design advocates and their Darwinian opponents, the claim is made by the IDers that there are systems in living things that are irreducible complex, i.e. they could not have evolved step by gradual step because they cannot function until all the parts are in place and operating. The bacterial flagellum is considered the paradigmatic example of IC but there are numerous others.

This site, for example lists a couple dozen systems or structures that are alleged to be irreducibly complex. Whether they are or not may be debated, but I'll leave that debate to others more qualified than I. Here are some examples for which the article offers brief explanations:

1. Bacterial Flagellum
2. Eukaryotic Cilium
3. Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases (aaRS)
4. Blood clotting cascade
5. Ribosome
6. Antibodies and the Adaptive Immune System

Students of biology will find the complete list interesting reading.

Psychological Egoism

Here's a question: Does genuine altruism exist in human beings? By this I mean, do human beings, or better, can human beings, act for the benefit of others if there's no benefit in the act for the doer? Do we do what we do for others only because we believe, if even subconsciously, that there's some benefit in the act for us?

Before you answer you should read a brief essay by Georgetown philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg on just this question.

Lichtenberg notes that psychological egoism (PE), the view that all our actions, including those ostensibly done for others, are really done for self-benefit, is impossible to falsify. This means that one cannot imagine a circumstance which, if it obtained, would prove PE wrong. The inability to think of such a circumstance means that the theory can't be tested and this is, in fact, a detriment. Immunity to testing is a weakness in a theory, not a strength.

Lichtenberg might have also mentioned that PE is ultimately based upon circular reasoning. To see this consider the case of Wesley Autrey which she discusses in the beginning of her piece. Autrey risked his life in 2007 to rescue a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City as a train bore down upon him.

To the question, what was in it for Autrey the PE might reply that Autrey hoped for a reward, either monetary, psychological or perhaps even eternal, for doing what he did. Suppose, though, that upon being interviewed Autrey denies that any of those considerations ever entered his mind. He didn't have time to think, he attests. He saw the man fall, he saw the train approach, and he reacted.

The PE might then resort to this fallback position: "There must have been some self-benefit in saving the man that Autrey felt." If asked why there must be such a motive, the PE can only answer, "because saving the man is what he did and everything people do they do in their own self-interest."

In other words,

1. We always act for our own benefit
2. Cases where people seem to act genuinely for others only seem to be altruistic. There's always a self-beneficial purpose buried somewhere in the person's motivations.
3. We know there must be a self-beneficial motive driving the person's act because we always act for our own self-benefit.

This is a circular argument and circular arguments are logically invalid. Thus, although PE seems formidable, it's ultimately based on fallacious reasoning.

Anyway, read Lichtenberg's column and see what you think.