What They Should Have Said

Mr. Obama's Libyan adventure has certainly thrown the normal ideological categories into disarray. The President is getting criticism from both left and right for committing us to an act of war and for the uncertain, even incoherent, manner in which he seems to have done it.

Our stance in earlier posts was that we had no business going to war with Libya unless it was to avert a slaughter of civilians. The Obama administration evidently believed that just such a slaughter was imminent, and chose to intervene. If a massacre was indeed in the offing, he was right to try to protect people, but the manner of his intervention has been, it seems to me, needlessly destructive and counterproductive. We've now taken hold of the tar baby without having any good plan for extricating ourselves.

In fact, I think both Col. Qaddafi and President Obama have both bungled their handling of this conflict.

Here's what each of them should have said in order to accomplish their respective goals. Qaddafi first:

Setting aside the morality of his aims, Col. Qaddafi would have been wise to explain from the very beginning that he was under attack by armed insurgents, not peaceful demonstrators, and had the right to repel and defeat them. He then should have emphasized that he would take every possible precaution to prevent the loss of civilian life. It's hard to believe that, had he done this, the coalition that has coalesced to oppose him would have had any heart for the task. He could have insured his security from a coalition attack even more firmly had he invited U.N. observers into Libya to monitor the actions of his forces. He could have beaten back the rebels and no outsiders would have tried to stop him.

A Qaddafi sympathizer would have to conclude that attacking civilians was a blunder. It would have been a fatal blunder had he been confronted by someone other than President Obama.

Mr. Obama's blunder might have been even worse than Col. Qaddafi's. If the President had reason to believe that Qaddafi would show no mercy toward Libyans in the cities of the east, but would hunt them down and slaughter them, he should have "made it clear", as he is wont to say, that if Mr. Qaddafi proceeds to carry out that threat the U.S. will not waste time and money on "no-fly" zones and air attacks on Libyan military installations and soldiers. We will not spend billions to move a fleet offshore and maintain it there. We will, if Qaddafi initiates such an atrocity against his people, simply seek him out and kill him.

The prospect of being personally targeted by an American "bunker buster" would have had a sobering effect on the Libyan leader's ambitions and brought to an abrupt halt any thought of civilian massacres.

If Mr. Qaddafi was intimidated by the threat of certain death there would have been no civilian massacre. If he ignored the threat there would be no more Col. Qaddafi and minimal civilian casualties. Either way, Mr. Obama would have achieved his goal without squandering our resources and getting us entangled in yet another military action in the Arab world.

If such talk smacks of illegality or sounds too bellicose for the tender ears of the sensitive folk at the U.N. Mr. Obama could have couched his declaration in terms of the need to decapitate the Libyan chain of command. There would have been no uncertainty in Mr. Qaddafi's mind about what exactly that meant.

Instead, Mr. Obama and his spokespersons have issued conflicting and confusing statements as to what our goals are, insisting on the one hand that Qaddafi "must" leave and on the other that we're not really targeting the Libyan leader. The limited and ambiguous nature of our stated intentions has only managed to embolden Qaddafi and to enmesh us in a conflict that's beginning to look as if it can only end in abject embarrassment and confusion. The coalition, with no clear endgame in sight, is losing its will and falling apart, leaving Qaddafi holding on to both his life and power and continuing his crimes against his people - as well as the rest of the world.

Candidate Obama promised us "smart power". What he's delivered hardly measures up to this lofty promise.

Meanwhile, a video has come to light in which then Senator Joe Biden calls for President Bush's impeachment for doing in Iraq almost exactly what President Obama has done in Libya:

I wonder how Mr. Biden explains why he would have impeached Mr. Bush for attacking Iraq, but recoils from calls by members of his own party for Mr. Obama's impeachment.

It's no wonder politicians are held in such low esteem by the public.

Mind: The Matrix of the Universe

One of the fascinating developments of modern physics has been the creeping suspicion among physicists that what we call "matter" is really a kind of illusion, or perhaps more accurately, it's an artifact of our perceiving the world on the scale of size that we do. Were we very much tinier than we are matter would disappear in a fog of energy or more startling still, matter would turn out to be nothing more than a manifestation of consciousness.

A recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research by G.P.Smetham collates the evidence for the conclusion that the fundamental, irreducible ground of reality is not matter but consciousness. The article is rather long and in places a little technical, but here are some of the highlights:

[A] significant number of respected physicists and philosophers are now converging on the possibility that consciousness is a central feature of reality operating through the quantum ground. The physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, in their important book Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, are clearly making such a claim regarding the far reaching implications of quantum theory:

"The physical reality of an object depends on how you choose to look at it. Physics had encountered consciousness but did not yet realize it."

And:

"Consciousness and the quantum enigma are not just two mysteries; they are the two mysteries; … Quantum mechanics seems to connect the two."

The majority of the founding fathers [of physics] also came to such a view, a notable exception being Einstein. According to Schrödinger, for instance, "Mind has erected the objective outside world...out of its own stuff."

And Max Planck came to a similar conclusion: "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force....We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter."

More recently, in an article in the New Scientist Michael Brooks, commenting on quantum entanglement experiments..., tells us that the conclusion reached by the physicists involved is that, "[W]e now have to face the possibility that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure. In other words, measuring those properties is what brings them into existence."

And Vlatko Vedral, quantum researcher at the University of Leeds commented that, "Rather than passively observing it, we in fact create reality."

The headline for the article proclaims that, "To track down a theory of everything, we might have to accept that the universe only exists when we are looking at it...."

The evidence is inexorably stacking up in favour of the view that the ultimate nature of the process of reality is mind-like, or idea-like, as Stapp puts it.

In other words, at the most fundamental level of our physical world "there is no substance, the quantum field is actually 'empty' of substance." Matter turns out to be something like a rainbow. There appears to be an arc of color in the sky, but it's an illusion. Smetham quotes physicist Jonathan Allday:

Now, from a philosophical point of view, this is rather big stuff. Our whole manner of speech ... rather naturally makes us think that there is some stuff or substance on which properties can, in a sense, be glued. It encourages us to imagine taking a particle and removing its properties one by one until we are left with a featureless "thing‟ devoid of properties, made from the essential material that had the properties in the first place. Philosophers have been debating the correctness of such arguments for a long time. Now, it seems, experimental science has come along and shown that, at least at the quantum level, the objects we study have no substance to them independent of their properties.

Because there is no substantiality (and here Allday is using the term substance to indicate "matter‟) within quantum field theory the term "particle‟ is dropped and the term "quanta‟ is used, and these are "objects which have properties but are not substances‟.

Smetham and the physicists he quotes are coming to believe that the universe arose out of a "sea of potentiality" that crystallizes into an actual universe upon being "selected" by a mind, but what sort of mind could perform such a feat? What sort of mind preexisted the universe? Smetham's answer is God, but, he is at pains to make clear, not the God of monotheistic religion. His reasons for his objection to the God of Christianity and other monotheisms strikes me as very weak, but I'll let him state it:

We are now in a position to resuscitate the notion of God after the Hawking and Mlodinow failed assassination attempt. However it must be made clear that the concept of God which can be revived is not that which is conceived of by most Christians....The problem with the notion of God as it is enshrined in Christian doctrine and practice is the large amount of religious and cultural baggage that comes along with it, baggage which in no way could ever logically follow from any resurrected quantum divine principle; significant examples would be the virgin birth and the resurrection for instance.

If I understand him, Smetham is saying that because quantum theory doesn't actually predict the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus the God believed in by those people who believe in the historicity of these events can't be the God pointed to by quantum theory.

This seems to me to be a non-sequitur. As long as the concept of God believed in by Christians is compatible with the theory and with the God the theory points to, then I don't see the problem. Smetham, though, seems to be partial to Buddhism and is eager to rule out other possibilities. At any rate he continues:

In his book Why There Almost Certainly Is a God Keith Ward gives an account of his "God hypothesis‟ which clearly maps quite snugly on to the Hawking/Mlodinow model [In their new book The Grand Design] in all but one detail [Smetham refers to the Hawking/Mlodinow model, for reasons not important to our purpose, as the HAM-TOE]:

The God hypothesis proposes that there is a consciousness that does not depend upon any material brain, or any material thing at all. In this consciousness all possible worlds exist, though only as possible states that may or may not exist. The cosmic consciousness can evaluate these possible worlds in terms of their desirability – their beauty or elegance or fecundity, for example. Then, being actual, it can bring about desirable states and enjoy them.

The first part of this metaphysical vision is isomorphic to the HAM-TOE in that it proposes that the universe comes into being as a vast web of potentiality, possible worlds or possible pathways of experience. As we have seen, a logical analysis of the structure of the HAM-TOE clearly shows that this vast maze of cosmic potentiality must be of the nature of consciousness or mind. However, when it comes to specifying the selection mechanism by which a privileged set of these potentialities becomes actual Ward falls back upon the traditional view of the omnipotence of God.

According to Ward's proposal it is God, apparently acting as an independent agent taking the position of external cosmic observer firing quantum beams of approval into the world of potential manifestation, who "selects‟ which of the possible worlds are "desirable.‟

Smetham goes on to argue that since human beings are conscious entities they, too, perceive the world and therefore "select" the world that will exist [and bizarrely, the world that existed in the past]. Human agents are, as it were, the senses of God:

In other words the universe uses the perceiving process within the dualistic world of experience in order to explore and experience its own nature. Human beings occupy a central place in this process because they are the universe's agents (leaving aside the issue of beings elsewhere in the universe) in the process of universal self-exploration, self-perfection and self-transcendence; a universal process of self-discovery which modern theologians may wish to call "God.‟

The idea that God creates the world through His observation of it, or, more precisely, perhaps, His thinking it, is not a completely new idea. George Berkeley (1685-1753) had a similar notion as did his close contemporary Isaac Newton (1643-1727):

Sir Isaac Newton, who suggested that space was the "sensorium of God.‟ In the Opticks Newton wrote:

"…does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense into our little sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks."

Smetham closes with a passage that sounds like it could have been written by a contemporary advocate of intelligent design:

[A]t the ground of the process of reality there might be an infinitely potent, innately intelligent awareness which explores its own potentialities through manifesting the "little sensoriums‟ of all sentient beings. As quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger describes John Wheeler's quantum conclusion:

"…since we are part of the universe, the universe, according to Wheeler, creates itself by observing itself through us."

We are all part of the Grand Designer!

It's ironic that physics, traditionally the most materialistic of all the sciences, should be today coming to the conclusion that matter doesn't exist after all and that the ground of all reality is, in fact, a transcendent Mind.

Mr. Obama's Abu Ghraib, and Worse

The job our military has been asked to do is difficult enough without having it be made even harder by the presence in the ranks of degenerate psychopaths.

The army is currently prosecuting five soldiers for committing horrible atrocities against innocent Afghan civilians, murdering them in cold blood, cutting off fingers as trophies, and video-taping the bloody corpses with the soldiers posed like big game hunters gloating over their kills.

Hot Air reports:

Investigators at Der Spiegel unearthed approximately 4,000 photos and videos taken by the soldiers. The accompanying article in the magazine provides shocking details about the depraved, sadistic behavior of the men. In one alleged incident from last May, a mullah captured by the team is forced to kneel down in a ditch, where he is summarily executed. According to the article, the team later claimed to their superiors that the mullah had threatened them with a grenade and that they were acting in self-defense. This account still fails to explain why Gibbs reportedly severed one of the dead man’s fingers and removed one of his teeth, presumably as gruesome “souvenirs.”

It all turns one's stomach, and for my part I'd have no trouble recommending the death penalty should these soldiers be proven guilty. Their despicable crimes deserve execution, and their iniquity is made even worse by the awful disgrace they've brought upon our military, our country, and those who have been grievously wounded and killed on our behalf.

So far, the White House, staffed by people quick to condemn the Bush administration for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, has released no statement regarding the photos or accounts. Neither has the New York Times, doubtless because Mr. Bush is no longer president.

The Obama Mysteries

President Obama may be doing the right thing in participating in the effort to stop Qaddafi from slaughtering the Libyan people, although why he didn't support intervention in Sudan where millions were slaughtered, or in Yemen where dozens have been gunned down, or in Syria or Iran where governments are killing their civilians is something of a mystery.

Also mysterious is how he squares his current willingness to kill Libyans with earlier criticisms of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. For example, in a 2002 speech Mr. Obama blasted his predecessor's apparent plans to invade Iraq with these words:

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.

What did he say here about Hussein and Iraq that does not apply equally as well to Qaddafi and Libya? Consistency is apparently not a very highly valued element in Mr. Obama's skill set. Later in the speech he says this:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Indeed. Then in a 2007 interview with the Boston Globe he was asked to identify the circumstances in which the president would have the constitutional authority to bomb Iran without first seeking authorization from Congress. He replied:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.....As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch.

Mr. Obama, however, failed to advise Congress before launching missiles on Libya and killing who knows how many Libyans.

Here's another mystery. The problem in Libya is obviously Moammar Qaddafi. Because of this man's actions Mr. Obama believes we are justified in killing Libyan soldiers and perhaps some innocent civilians, but Qaddafi himself is not to be targeted. We are not to touch the man who is murdering his people, but because he is murdering his people we are evidently justified in killing his people, too. What sense does any of this make? What are the principles which govern the President's thinking? Are there any?

I've read that Mr. Obama and some of his male advisors were reluctant to order the strike on Libya, but the President was persuaded by his U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and an advisor named Samantha Power to do it. Someone on the radio this morning asked if anybody remembers the days when the feminists told us at every opportunity that if we wanted peace in the world we needed to put more women into positions of power. So much for that silly idea.

Bashir's Dilemma (Pt. I)

Last week we posted an interview with pastor and writer Rob Bell in which the interviewer, MSNBC's Martin Bashir, pressed him with the ancient dilemma long favored by skeptics:

Since evil exists, it seems that it must be the case that either God is able to eliminate it but doesn't want to or that He wants to eliminate it but is not able to do so.

Bell never really answered the question which made it seem, perhaps, as if there is no answer to it, but there is. Philosophers have long pointed out that there's an obvious third possibility, i.e. God both wants to eliminate evil and is able to eliminate evil, but has good reason for not eliminating evil.

Of course, although the answer deflects the logical force of the dilemma, it raises the further question of what possible reason God could have for not doing something that any parent who sees his child suffer would do if he could. If human parents would alleviate their child's suffering, the question goes, why doesn't God?

Most philosophers prefer to break this question into two parts. They make a distinction between two kinds of evil, moral and natural. Moral evil is evil (or suffering) that results from human volition. Natural evil is evil that results from natural forces like, drought, disease, tsunami, earthquake, etc.

So the question bifurcates into why doesn't God prevent evil like the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan recently, and why doesn't God prevent the kind of evil in which one person treats another cruelly?

One possible answer to the latter question goes back to Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) and is called the Free Will defense. It says essentially that God desires to end evil and is able to end it, but the cost of doing so would be to override or strip us of our freedom to make our own choices.

Well, why doesn't God do that? What good is free will if so much misery results from it? The answer to that question goes, perhaps, to the reason He created us in the first place.

God created human beings to live in a love relationship with Him. Such a relationship, in order to be satisfying and meaningful, requires that both parties be free to choose to requite the love of the other. Thus God invested us with free will to enable us to choose to love Him or not. It is that freedom, the existentialists remind us, which makes us significant, which makes us different from everything else in the world. It's also that freedom that people abuse when they exercise it for the purpose of hurting others.

God could strip us of our freedom and compel us to love Him, but not only would that defeat the purpose of a loving relationship, it would essentially dehumanize us. It would make us less than human and it would drain God's relationship with us of any real significance. This is, in God's mind, apparently too high a price to pay.

Thus He tolerates evil in order to preserve His romance with His creatures.

There's much more to this question than what I've outlined in this short post, but this is at least a start of an anaswer. What, though, of natural evil? Why doesn't God prevent that? We'll take a stab at that question in a day or so.

In Casey's Shoes

We received a number of replies to our post titled Rough Justice, the account of how a boy named Casey who had been constantly picked on by the juvenile hyenas at his school, finally got tired of it. The following is typical of several of the stories we were sent:

This post hits far too close to home for me. I remember growing up in a public junior high school and always being taunted for the way that I looked and also for my weight. Ever since I can remember I have been a big boy. My mom would always tell me that I was just big boned, which I still hold to be true today. I found myself in junior high being like Casey, being harassed by the same group of kids over and over again. I can’t tell you how much that affected my self-image and even my self-worth.

Sadly I wasn’t like Casey, I never had the guts to stand up and punch that punk in the face, I was the kid however, that would walk different ways home and even take different hallways making myself late for classes so that I wasn’t harassed.

I am glad that Casey wouldn’t take it anymore and taught that kid a lesson that he would never have learned from school discipline.

The nonsense that surrounds bullying is all a joke anymore. School districts spend thousands of dollars to fund anti-bullying campaigns and yet never stop bullying or punish the correct kids. This is the same turnout in Casey’s case. Casey was punched in the face and punched in the stomach multiple times by his ignorant tormentor, and yet he is suspended for protecting himself? This is complete idiocy on the school official’s part. What are you trying to promote when you make these kinds of decisions?

I don’t understand it, and I didn’t understand it back when I was in Casey’s shoes. I think there are times when you need to stand up for yourself no matter the cost, and that’s what Casey did, and if he needs to do it again, so be it!

Better People

Deroy Murdock documents the awful behavior of the progressive left during the Wisconsin budget brouhaha. It's good that someone has documented it because it's awfully hard to find any mention of it in the major media which seems to have imposed a news blackout on anything that makes the Left look bad.

There have been literally dozens of threats against the lives of Republican legislators and their families during the weeks that this crisis unfolded. Many of those making the threats have been identified although no criminal action has as yet been taken against them despite the fact that their threats are violent, grisly, vile, and ugly, not to mention grammatically atrocious.

Here's Murdock's opening:

"We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning."

Is this a passage from Bram Stoker’s Dracula? A snippet from al-Qaeda’s latest missive? No, this e-mail reached Wisconsin state senator Dan Kapanke (R., La Crosse) on March 9, after he voted for GOP governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget and labor reforms.

Kapanke is not alone. While the mainstream media generally yawn, leftists threaten top Wisconsin Republicans with murder.

He goes on to provide lots of examples. The language is vulgar in many of them which you would expect considering the source, but I recommend that you read the rest of the article anyway so that you understand the nature of the people who comprise much of the base of the Democrat party.

It's also important to read this so that the next time someone complains about the "extremist rhetoric" of the tea party and their allies you can, after you've politely chuckled at their naivete (or blind prejudice), challenge them to produce even one example of anything that is a tenth as reprehensible as what you'll find in Murdock's piece.

Here's his close:

[W]here is the condemnation against the anti-Walker Left for its criminal behavior?

In the Battle of Madison, and perhaps beyond, death threats appear to be a virtually exclusive tool of the pro-union Left.

That suggests two possibilities:

Pro-taxpayer rightists would love to issue death threats, but resist temptation, knowing full well that the slumbering mainstream media would arise, showcase such a development, and discredit conservatives.

Or, maybe, free-marketeers have not issued death threats, because — compared to their left-wing counterparts — they simply are better people.

Actually, either way they're better people.

Mr. Obama Goes to War

The Obama administration has determined that Moammar Qaddafi poses a significant humanitarian threat to his people and has decided that we will participate in - though not lead, the President has made clear - an attack on Mr. Qaddafi's ability to murder his own people.

Very well, if the administration believes that Qaddafi is about to commit mass slaughter we should do what we can to prevent it, but the President's tentativeness and timidity in this venture are disconcerting. He promises that we will be involved only for a few days, as if wars can be waged in between golf outings, and that we will not be deploying ground troops. Well, what if ground troops are the only way to stop the slaughter? What then? And why is he telling Qaddafi what we will do and not do? And what's wrong with American leadership, anyway?

One might think that we would have long ago learned a couple of lessons about these affairs. One lesson in particular is that it's folly to employ half-measures. If you're going to strike against the king, as Machiavelli advised some 500 years ago, you must kill him. To leave Qaddafi in place is sheer madness. Whether he is stymied in his attacks on the rebels or not he will almost certainly return to his support for terrorism against the West and probably on a greater scale than ever. He'll be a threat to every citizen in every nation in the coalition that has arrayed against him.

The President has made it clear (one of his favorite phrases) that getting Qaddafi is not part of our objective, we only want him to stop attacking the rebels, but if so we should never have launched missiles at Libya. Dealing with tyrants is not a pastime for dilletantes. We have essentially declared war (without consulting Congress, by the way), but we're going to allow the man who is responsible for that war to remain in place so that he can support more terror assaults against the West like the Pan Am 103 bombing. This makes no sense.

Mr. Obama has been at pains in his public pronouncements to tacitly stress that he is emphatically not George W. Bush. Unlike Mr. Bush's conduct in Iraq, Mr. Obama has instructed us that we are to make no mistake (another of his favorites), he has a coalition of nations with him, he is not leading those nations, he will not be inserting ground troops, and, apparently, he will not be cutting off the head of the snake.

He's right to insist that he's not George Bush, and it's most unfortunate that he's not.

Statistically Suspicious

Suppose there were some field of endeavor putatively open to minorities but in fact populated only by whites. There would, in such a case, almost certainly be a presumption of either discrimination or at least a hostile climate which deters minorities from entering that field. This rumination leads us to a piece in First Things about a concern raised by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Social psychologists have “taboos and danger zones,” Haidt told a convention of his peers, drawing on his own observations and some statistical data. Harvard’s president Larry Summers asked why so many more men taught math and science at the nation’s top universities, and instead of reasonably considering his hypothesis that there may be “a sex difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores between men and women,” social psychologists stood by or joined the resulting attack on Summers as a sexist. “If you’re inside the force field, [Summers’ suggestion] is not a permissible hypothesis. It is sacrilege.”

And there is, Haidt continued, “a statistically impossible lack of diversity” in social psychology. He polled his audience of approximately 1000 social psychologists and found the ratio of liberals to conservatives was approximately 266 to 1. “When we find any job in the nation in which women or minorities are underrepresented by a factor of three or four, we make the strong presumption that this constitutes evidence of discrimination. And if we can’t find evidence of overt discrimination, we presume that there must be a hostile climate that discourages underrepresented groups from entering.”

Contrasting this to a Gallup data that showed that Americans are about two-to-one conservative, he concluded that “underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering.”

The same sort of underrepresentation exists in the major media. A survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1997 found that 61% of reporters shared the beliefs of the Democratic Party. Only 15% said their beliefs were best represented by the Republican Party. The rest were undecided or Independent.

There's nothing wrong with unequal ratios if they result from a disinclination on the part of conservatives to enter these fields and as long as ideological bias is straightforwardly acknowledged by those who hold it. It's when the bias of the scholar or the journalist distorts and misrepresents the truth the general public trusts them to deliver that there's a problem, and when the public believes it's getting a slanted, inaccurate picture of things from the "experts" and those who report the news, that mistrust grows. That's the situation much of the media, and the academy, finds itself in today.

Ten Books That Shaped Modern Conservatism

My friend Jason turns our attention to an ISI article that discusses ten of the most influential books in the shaping of modern conservative thought. The ten are:

• The Road to Serfdom ........................... F. A. Hayek
• Socialism ................................... Ludwig von Mises
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man ...... Albert Jay Nock
• Witness ................................. Whittaker Chambers
• The New Science of Politics ............... Eric Voegelin
• In Defense of Freedom ........................ Frank Meyer
• The Conservative Mind ....................... Russell Kirk
• Ideas Have Consequences ............... Richard Weaver
• The Quest for Community .................Robert Nisbet
• On the Democratic Idea in America .... Irving Kristol

The article gives a summary of each and discusses their impact. Anyone who wishes to understand the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism should be familiar with at least several of them, and the article at the link is a good starting point.
It might be noted that these books were all written between 1940 and 1960. There were a number of books written both before and after that period which have also been very influential in shaping conservative thought. Several that come to mind are:

• The Federalist Papers ...... James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, et al.
• Democracy in America ..... Alexis deToqueville
• On Liberty ..... John Stuart Mill
• Atlas Shrugged ..... Ayn Rand (actually written during the same period as the above works)
• Conscience of a Conservative ..... Barry Goldwater
• Almost anything written by William F. Buckley, including his magazine, National Review.

Perhaps one explanation of the current difficulties we face in America is that there are too many Americans who have never read any of these works.

Are Stings Immoral

Readers have perhaps heard of the surreptitious videotaping of Planned Parenthood staffers by pro-lifers who pass themselves off as underage pregnant girls or prostitutes. The "stings" have been carried out by Lila Rose’s group Live Action and involved deceiving Planned Parenthood staffers into revealing their actual practices and attitudes, which were shocking and sometimes illegal.

At First Things ethicist Robert George takes issue with the practice of lying, even in a good cause. Pro-lifers, he says, whatever their religious commitments, should:

reject lying even in the greatest of good causes. What we fight for is just and true, and truth — in its unparalleled splendor and luminosity — is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. It is the truth about the precious life of the child in the womb, and about the consequences of abortion for women and men, and the effects of abortion on families, on the medical profession, and on society more broadly, that will ultimately enable us to build a culture of life.

George holds that even though the other side lies about the nature of what happens in an abortion pro-lifers should not do as they do:

[I]n working to protect the victims of abortion, it is frustrating to hold ourselves to standards that so many on the other side freely disregard.”

He goes on to say that:

[T]here are no moral shortcuts to victory in this struggle. A culture of life can only be built on a foundation of truth. Lying may produce short-term victories, but it will, in the end, frustrate our long-term objective. Respect for life—like respect for every other great human good and every other high moral principle—depends on love of truth. Our efforts in the cause of life and every other worthy goal will, in the end, prove to be self-defeating if they undermine love of truth.

This is difficult for me to say because I sympathize with Professor George's insistence on the value of truth, but I don't think matters are as simple as he implies. I wonder, for instance, what he would say about the lies that must be told by undercover police or intelligence agents trying to pull off a sting of a gang of thieves or infiltrate a drug cartel or infiltrate a terror cell. I wonder, too, what he would say about the military putting out disinformation in order to deceive the enemy the better to defeat them in battle, or a government threatening the use of nuclear weapons to deter a nuclear attack even if they knew they would not, in fact, retaliate with nukes.

Truth is certainly among the greatest goods, one that is too much under-valued in modern society, but it is not the greatest good. It is not an idol. There are circumstances in which telling the truth would be a great wrong - for instance, if telling the truth would lead directly to the murders of innocents. Likewise, lying, though otherwise almost always wrong, would be a great good if it led to the saving of the lives of innocents.

Imagine, for example, that Col. Qaddafi is about to commit wholesale slaughter of the families of the rebels who rose up against him. Suppose further that our intelligence agents report that he will likely not do this if he thinks the American president would use force to stop him. Would it be wrong for the president to declare that the United States will invade Libya with the tacit purpose of killing Qaddafi if he begins his genocide, even if the president knows in his heart that he will do no such thing? Is political bluffing wrong?

Professor George would apparently say that it would be wrong for those hiding Jews from the nazis in the early 1940s or slaves from their owners in the underground railroad of the 1850s to lie to those who question them about their knowledge of such operations. If the nazis came to a home where Jews were being hidden and asked the homeowner if he knows where there are any Jews, does Professor George say that the homeowner should tell the truth and reveal their presence in his attic? Or should he lie to save their lives? What do you think?

Hell? No.

I've never watched Martin Bashir on MSNBC before nor have I ever read any of Rob Bell's books, but after watching this interview I'm convinced that I've been missing something by not watching Bashir and missing nothing by not reading Bell.

I don't think Bell lucidly answers a single question Bashir puts to him about his new book and each response he does make sounds like a contradiction of a position he holds in the book. Bashir prods him to answer whether it is irrelevant and immaterial how one responds to Christ in this life in terms of determining one’s eternal destiny, to which Bell replies that it is immensely important, but then he never really tells us why, and indeed, gives the impression that he doesn't really believe his own answer.

Bashir's summation is that Bell is trying to "amend the gospel" to make it "palatable" to modern people. It sounds to me like he might be hitting the nail pretty much on the head:

Bell's book is titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived and has apparently ignited a theological firestorm because allegedly (I haven't read it so I can't say with confidence) Bell argues for a position called universalism which is the belief that everyone will ultimately have eternal life with God. No one will be eternally separated from the love of God. God's love is so powerful that it will win even the most recalcitrant and obdurate to His bosom.

For the sake of his reputation I hope he does a better job in the book defending that view than he does in his interview with Bashir.

At any rate, without judging Bell's book, which, as I say, I haven't read, I recommend C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce as an alternative to universalism. Lewis illustrates nicely how human perversity creates its own hell and how many people willfully choose hell over heaven even if given a clear choice.

The video raises a couple of questions I'd like to explore over the next day or two. The first has to do with the dilemma that Bashir presents in the opening, and the second concerns God's justice.

Amateur Night

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has had it with the weak leadership of the current White House. According to The Daily.com a Clinton insider reveals Ms Clinton's frustration with Mr. Obama:

Fed up with a president “who can’t make his mind up” as Libyan rebels are on the brink of defeat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is looking to the exits.

At the tail end of her mission to bolster the Libyan opposition, which has suffered days of losses to Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, Clinton announced that she’s done with Obama after 2012 — even if he wins again.

“Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretaries of State — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

When French president Nicolas Sarkozy urged her to press the White House to take more aggressive action in Libya, Clinton repeatedly replied only, “There are difficulties,” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

“Frankly we are just completely puzzled,” one of the diplomats told Foreign Policy magazine. “We are wondering if this is a priority for the United States.”

Or as the insider described Obama’s foreign policy shop: “It’s amateur night.”

This is not surprising. We elected to the presidency a complete unknown, a man from nowhere, just because he spoke well and had an interesting racial identity. We swooned at his speeches and believed that we were witnessing the second coming. Now reality has set in, we've traveled to Oz and looked behind the curtain and found there a man who lacks any of the attributes required of someone who aspires to lead a nation. As others have noted, Mr. Obama clearly enjoys the perks of being president but seems to disdain the job itself. From the health care debate through every episode that has arisen in his tenure he has been disengaged, disinterested, and disinclined to lead. Throughout his short political career his predilection has been to vote present rather than to take a stand. It seems that inclination continues in the White House.

I suspect that Hillary knew this about him from the beginning, but thought she could help carry the man through his presidency. Evidently she underestimated the magnitude of the task.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 B.C., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Rough Justice

The big kid in this video is a boy named Casey. According to schoolmates he's picked on every day. In this case the aggressor apparently had a friend videotape his bullying so that he could show it to his buddies and gloat over what a tough guy he is. Unfortunately for him Casey finally got tired of it:

There's been much tut-tutting about "all violence being bad" and how Casey "should have told a teacher" that he was being picked on. Nonsense. Not all violence is bad and telling a teacher often doesn't do any good. Sometimes the best response is to humiliate the little punk who was trying to look big at Casey's expense. Maybe next time he'll be a little more hesitant to pick a fight with someone.

No doubt Casey is a hero to every kid who's ever been picked on in school, but incredibly, the school officials suspended Casey. Having been punched in the face he's now serving a suspension for protecting himself. Pretty pathetic.

What Caused God?

Science writer John Horgan acknowledges that scientists haven't a clue as to how living things could have developed out of non-living chemical precursors but, he cautions, those who think that perhaps there was some intelligent agent involved, a God, shouldn't gloat over the enormous implausibility of every naturalistic hypothesis thus far proposed:

Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse, but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.

Mr. Horgan surely knows better than to offer up such a jejunne objection. If the existence of life seems inexplicable apart from an Intelligent Causal Agent (ICA) then it is no argument against the existence of an ICA that we don't know what caused it.

After all, as Mr. Horgan reminds us, scientists don't know what caused life to exist either, but no one regards ignorance of the cause of life to be a reason not to believe that it does in fact exist.

An ICA is either contingent (i.e. dependent upon something else for its existence) or necessary (not dependent upon anything else; self-existent). Suppose it's contingent. If a contingent ICA exists then the fact that it's contingent matters little for the purposes of the naturalist such as Mr. Horgan. The naturalist wants to deny any non-physical causes operating upon the cosmos. They want to deny that any intelligence was involved in the origin of life. But if such an intelligence was involved it'd be small comfort to the naturalist that that intelligence is itself the product of an even greater cause. Whether there's just one ICA or a series of increasingly greater ICAs doesn't matter. As long as there is at least one ICA the naturalist has lost the argument to the Creationist.

Moreover, if there is a contingent ICA there must be something else which caused it, but as Aquinas points out in the Summa Theologica there cannot be an infinite series of contingent causes. The series must end somewhere, and it can only end with a cause that is itself necessary, self-existent, an uncaused cause of all else that exists.

Furthermore, it's a principle in philosophical and scientific explanation that causes should never be multiplied beyond what's needed to account for a particular effect. The simplest explanation is that there is not an indefinite series of ICAs but rather a single ICA that is the cause of life.

No matter how one looks at it, the question "What caused God?" is either philosophically naive or a rhetorical paper tiger. Mr. Horgan is just whistling past the graveyard by invoking it. He'd be better off just not calling the possibility to his readers' attention.

Don't Give Up on Nuclear Power

I have in the past urged that the U.S. be much more committed to developing nuclear power for domestic energy needs than we have been over the last several decades. Nothing that has happened in Japan in the last few days persuades me that I should change my mind.

So far as I know as I'm writing this no one has died from radiation exposure or has even been exposed to dosages that would be lethal or life-threatening. That may change, of course, but even if it does why should that inhibit us from developing nuclear power? More people die in coal-mining accidents in one year than have died as a result of nuclear contamination, but we don't stop mining coal. Coal causes more long-term health problems in the general population than did the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but we don't stop burning it. Even if the death toll in Japan turns out to be in the hundreds from radiation exposure that many people could die in an airplane crash, but we don't stop flying airplanes. Tens of thousands of people are killed and maimed in auto accidents every year, but we don't stop driving cars. Nor did we stop the space shuttle program after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Nor should we declare a moratorium on nuclear power.

There are currently three nuke plants under construction in the U.S. and two dozen more in the pipeline. The plants currently under construction are designed to be safer than the Japanese plants, which are forty years old, and much less likely to suffer the perfect storm of circumstances that led to the reactor failures at Fukushima.

We're going to need all the electricity we can generate in the 21st century and windmills aren't going to help much. Let's not make the same mistake we're making with our refusal to drill for offshore oil. Let's continue to develop a power source that, compared to any plausible alternative, is clean and safe.

Craig vs. Atkins

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent puts us on to this video clip of a 1998 discussion between philosopher William Lane Craig and Professor of Chemistry Peter Atkins on the late William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Atkins thinks that science can demonstrate everything that's worth knowing and challenges Craig to give an example of something important that can't be proven by the scientific method. Craig makes him wish he hadn't brought it up:

Atkins is a votarie of a metaphysical view called scientism, i.e. the belief that scientific investigation provides the only knowledge worth having. Craig shows that science is unable to answer many, perhaps most, of life's most important questions.

Craig is a remarkable thinker and a prolific writer. You can visit his website here.

Christian Persecution

At No Left Turns we read this tragic news:

Lela Gilbert notes that "a series of abuses against Christians has swept across the Muslim world," including "a murder in Pakistan, attacks on churches in Ethiopia, an attempted assassination of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Turkey, and repeated pogroms against the Copts in Egypt. Now, rights groups are reporting new developments in Iran's anti-Christian crackdown, which has swept up nearly 300 Christian believers since June 2010."

She also notes a detailed briefing document from January 2011 by Elam Ministries announcing a "severe intensification of arrests and imprisonment of Christians in Iran" and a report this week by Christian Solidarity Worldwide that five Iranian Christians had been sentenced to one year's imprisonment for "Crimes against the Islamic Order."

In Ethiopia attacks on Christians resulted from a Christian having torn up a Koran. Paul Marshall reports:

[L]ast Wednesday, after accusations that a Christian had torn up a Koran, mobs of several thousand Muslims began attacking local Christians and burning churches. The government sent the federal police force to protect Christians after the destruction of the first three churches, but the mobs overwhelmed the police force and burned down two more churches.

The violence reportedly spread to Chiltie, Gilgel Gibe, Gibe, Nada, Dimtu, Uragay, Busa, and Koticha, and as of yesterday had not stopped. Compass Direct reports that in the last five days as many as 59 churches have been destroyed, one Christian has been killed, and several thousand have been displaced.

The situation in Egypt (weren't we supposed to see freedom and democracy breaking out there now that Mubarak was gone?) is even worse. Nina Shea gives the details:

Violence against Christian Copts in Egypt escalated yesterday with reports that a mob of some 15,000 armed Muslims, using Molotov cocktails, guns, and clubs, violently attacked a vastly outnumbered crowd of Christians on the outskirts of Cairo. The Christians had been demonstrating in front of a television station and blocking a main road.

The Egyptian army, which was called to restore order, reportedly joined in the attack, shooting the Copts with live ammunition. Initial reports from Coptic sources indicate that nine Christians have been killed and over a hundred injured, scores seriously so. AP reports of the same incident state that six Christians and five Muslims were killed in what it describes as a “pitched battle” that lasted several hours.

The attacks started near St. Simon the Tanner Monastery in Mokatam Hills, near the Christian neighborhood near the capital known as “Garbage City.” Several garbage recycling plants and garbage trucks owned by the Copts were reportedly torched. The Christians were protesting last Friday’s burning of a Coptic church in Soul by a Muslim mob angered by a romantic relationship that violated sharia. (CBN reports that the Muslims had been incited to rid Soul of Christians by Mullah Ahmed Abu El-Dabah during mosque prayers on March 4.)

There was a time when Muslims were tolerant of other religions. There was a time when Muslims and Christians could be friends. In much of the world today that time is long past. The irony is that tolerance is a sign that one feels that his ideas are superior and can withstand the intellectual challenge presented by other points of view.

Intolerance and violence are signs, just as are rudeness and shouting, of a sense of intellectual and moral inferiority. When one lacks confidence that his most cherished beliefs really can withstand contact with competing ideas he often resorts to suppression of those ideas - by violence if necessary. This was the modus operandi of the communists in the 20th century and other leftists today against the seductions of freedom, and it's the path chosen by many Muslims in response to the challenge posed by the Christian Gospel.

The violence against Christians throughout the Islamic world is, perhaps, a symptom of a deep fear that Christianity, if allowed a hearing, will prove too difficult to purge from the hearts and minds of young Muslims.

It also highlights a stark difference between Islam and Christianity. In Islam it is seen as one's religious duty to compel others, even at the point of a sword, to become believers. In Christianity it is one's duty to proclaim the Gospel and let people decide, between them and God, how they'll respond to it.

The Itamar Horror

Here's video of the vaunted deed perpetrated by brave Palestinian warriors whose bold thrust against the Israeli oppressors will live on in the annals of Palestinian heroics, inspiring generations of Arab youths to imitate their great feat and delight their God. This is the sort of victory that Palestinians celebrate with boasting and candy and dancing in the streets.

The background music, appropriately enough, is from Schindler's List. If the sight of brutally murdered children is something you can't bear then don't watch this video, but if you want a glimpse of what the Palestinians have in store for every Israeli should they ever get the chance, the video makes it pretty plain:

Thanks to Big Peace for the video.

Japan's Crisis

Hot Air has a very helpful series of updates on the nuclear crisis in Japan, and the Washington Post has an excellent series of graphics explaining, among other things, the design of the Japanese reactors and how the failures have occurred. It makes sense out of the welter of information, some of it contradictory, coming out of Japan.

Right now the situation is much worse than the Three Mile Island accident (which had no perceptible effect on anything outside the plant itself) and heading for a calamity of the proportions of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Questions for Libya Interventionists

Demands for the President to back up his ill-advised assertion that "Qaddafi must go" continue to arise on both the left and the right. People on both sides are strenuously insisting that we intervene in the Libyan civil war to stop Qaddafi from defeating and slaughtering the rebels in Libya. Before we do that, however, I think we must insist on answers to some very important questions from the folks who are calling for war:

• If we decide to get overtly involved in Libya what justification do we have for not also attacking Iran and North Korea? What are the essential distinctions in the three cases? Surely both of these nations are a greater threat to us and to the world than is Libya.
• If Mubarak had resisted the Egyptian demonstrators with force should we have gone into Egypt? What about Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Bahrain all of which are or may soon be shooting demonstrators?
• Why should we stop Qaddafi from killing rebels but not stop Ahmadinejad from building nuclear weapons that he will surely use. Why not stop Kim Jong Il who murders his people in North Korea every day? Indeed, why not launch an attack on China which is led by Hu Jintao whom President Obama honored with a lavish state dinner despite the fact that he was partly responsible for the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square?
• If we use military aircraft to impose a no-fly zone we have to destroy anti-aircraft and radar systems. This means that we will be killing Libyans on the ground. Should we do that? Why? What happens when one of our bombs goes awry and kills a family of innocent civilians and the Arab world is incensed at us (again)? Is that a risk we should take? Why?
• When the rebellion began Libyans were displaying signs saying Foreigners Keep Out and threatening to turn their guns on our aircraft if we intervened on their behalf. Now they're pleading for help. Which of these messages should we heed?
• Even if we clear the skies, Qaddafi's forces on the ground will continue to drive the rebels back and possibly slaughter them. Should we attack his ground forces? Should we insert ground troops of our own if that's what's necessary to stop Qaddafi? Exactly how far should we go to stop him?
• How long should we stay in Libya once we manage to halt Qaddafi's advance? What is our exit strategy?

There is much for which to criticize Mr. Obama in the way he has handled the Middle East and North Africa, but unless one has answers to these questions why criticize him for not going to war with Qaddafi? So far I haven't heard many answers, and I've heard none that are persuasive.

Sickening

The story is horrific enough (see also here). Five members of an Israeli family, including three children, had their throats slit by an unknown assailant or assailants.

The level of degeneracy to which one must sink to do this to a child is hard to fathom, but to actually celebrate the brutal murders of little children puts one outside the community of civilized humanity altogether. These people are simply savages:

Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy "is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank."

What sort of people are these who take joy in the murder of helpless children? The words of John Calvin leap to mind: "Total depravity".

Japanese Tsunami

Dramatic video of the moment the tsunami struck a fishing village along the Japanese coast:

The death toll is expected to exceed 10,000. They need our prayers and our help.

Dumbing Down America

No one wants dumb cops working their neighborhoods, but that's what they're likely to get in Dayton, Ohio according to this story:

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits. It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

“It becomes a safety issue for the people of our community,” said Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President, Randy Beane. “It becomes a safety issue to have an incompetent officer next to you in a life and death situation."

Not even the NAACP supports the DOJ decision:

“The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed,” agreed Dayton NAACP President Derrick Forward. “If you lower the score for any group of people, you're not getting the best qualified people for the job,” Forward said.

This case is a window into how the liberal mind works and how they solve problems. If there are too few minorities passing the test, just lower the score needed to pass and the problem is solved. If crime is too high all we need do is decriminalize a few things like assault and battery and the crime statistics will plummet. If poverty is a problem just lower the income level below which someone is considered poor and, presto!, poverty is reduced, or even eliminated. If we followed this policy with enough resolve we could pretty soon be living in a crime and poverty-free utopia.

Wouldn't it seem more sensible, even to the folks at the DOJ, to make the police force applicant pool smarter, to insist that young men get a good education so they can qualify for good jobs, than to just water down the eligibility standards for service on the force?

Consider the message that the DOJ is sending young black males: They're telling them that they don't really need a good education to get a decent job. They're telling them that school isn't all that important, and if young black men aren't as well-educated as others applying for the same position, that's okay. We'll just lower the bar for them so that pretty much anyone can jump over it.

Come to think of it, maybe somebody lowered the bar for employment at the DOJ, too.

The King Hearings

Paul Berman is a scholar and writer. He's also a man of the left which makes his book Terror and Liberalism all the more remarkable. In it Berman traces the strange enchantment liberalism has had for terrorists over the last several decades. In Berman's telling the left has been inexplicably blind to the threat posed by Islamic extremists and much too willing to form alliances with those extremists in order to achieve mutual political goals.

I thought of Berman's book when I read about the reaction of the Democrats to the investigation being launched by Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, into the threat posed by Muslim extremism. King is conducting hearings on domestic terrorism arising out of the Muslim community, and, predictably, the left is having a hissy fit. The Democrats on the committee are registering every complaint they (and the Muslim Brotherhood) can think of to discredit the hearings.

Their objections are intellectually vacuous or incoherent, so much so that one would think they'd be embarrassed to make them, but some of our elected representatives, like Sheila Jackson Lee for instance, seem to have an exceptionally high threshold for intellectual embarrassment:

Rep. Al Green (D, TX) objected that King is investigating Muslims but not the KKK, but how many acts of mass murder has the Klan committed in the last fifty years? The Klan has been so compromised by law enforcement that it has long ago ceased to be a significant threat in this country. To waste resources investigating a minimal danger when Islamic extremists plot catastrophic acts of murder is simply asinine.

Perhaps Ms Lee, Mr. Green and their colleagues wish to maintain that attempts by young Muslim men to commit horrifying acts of mayhem are not a serious problem in this country. If they don't think this then what's their objection to holding hearings to learn more about the milieu in which people who want to kill our children are being spawned? If, however, they do think that Muslim terrorism is not a serious threat then they're certainly out of synch with their party's chief law enforcement officer.

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. once acknowledged that the threat of Islamic terrorism keeps him awake at night. As Rep. King notes, Holder "is not saying he's staying awake at night because of what's coming from anti-abortion demonstrators or environmental extremists or from Neo-Nazis. It's the radicalization right now in the Muslim community" that has him worried.

Certainly no one thinks all Muslims are domestic terrorists, as the lachrymose Rep. Keith Ellison implies (see below), but it is surely the case that almost all domestic terrorists, at least those who have attempted large scale terrorist acts in the last decade, have been Muslims. Let's try to learn why that is and what must be done to stop it, and let's take the problem more seriously than does Mr. Ellison:

The Absolute Madness of Biofuels

Robert Bryce at the Washington Times explains why the President needs to get over his infatuation with biofuels. All that this short-sighted policy is accomplishing is to make life harder for those who are already hungry, and to provoke food riots around the world. But aren't biofuels good for the environment? What's the connection between biofuels and food?

Mr. Bryce explains:

Last month, Peter Brabeck, the chairman of the Swiss food giant Nestle, declared that using food crops to make biofuels was “absolute madness.” The epicenter of that madness is the U.S. corn-ethanol sector. This year, it will consume 40 percent of all U.S. corn - that’s about 15 percent of global corn production or 5 percent of all global grain - in order to produce a volume of motor fuel with the energy equivalent of about 0.6 percent of global oil needs.

Congress lavishes about $7 billion in annual subsidies, mandates and tariff protections upon an industry that is helping push global food prices to all-time highs and shrink grain reserves at the very same time that global grain production is faltering and protests over food prices are becoming common.

The quantity of grain to be consumed this year for ethanol production - 4.9 billion bushels - boggles the mind. That’s more than twice as much as all the corn produced in Brazil and more than six times as much as is grown in India. Put another way, that’s more corn than the output of the European Union, Mexico, Argentina and India combined.

All that food is being used for fuel, and as the the demand for corn rises, it increases the demand for, and thus the price of, other grains as well. This makes grain-fed meat more expensive, and makes it very difficult for poor people to buy food:

Despite these facts, President Obama said last month in his State of the Union speech, “We can break our dependence on oil with biofuels.”

Soaring food prices led to violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia. Worries about adequate food stocks led several countries to ban food exports.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen food price increases and protests that are reminiscent of 2008. There have been food riots in Algeria and Mozambique. Last month, about 8,000 Jordanians protested in the streets of Amman and other cities over rising food prices. In Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, wheat prices are up by 30 percent over the past 12 months. Those higher wheat prices are being stoked by rising corn prices, which have doubled over the past six months and are at about $7 per bushel. “Higher corn prices always means higher wheat prices,” says Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, an Omaha-based commodity consulting firm.

In December, a study by two U.S. agriculture economists, Thomas Elam and Steve Meyer, found that corn prices are being directly stoked by demand from the ethanol sector. Mr. Elam and Mr. Meyer, who have done consulting work for the meat industry, found that without the ethanol mandates, the average price of corn would be lower by more than $2 per bushel. They also conclude that “biofuels policy has caused significant cost increases for all users of feedgrains.”

Bryce has more details about how the demand for corn for use in biofuel diminishes the amount of corn available for food and raises the price of most of the food we buy. For many of us it's just a matter of tightening our belt but for people who live everyday on the edge of starvation it's a calamity.

An unnecessary calamity at that. In the name of reducing pollution we're increasing starvation. Perhaps this makes sense to Mr. Obama, but I doubt that it makes sense to an Ethiopian mother who spends most of her waking hours trying to scrounge together enough grain to feed her hungry children a single pancake each day.

Ugly Americans

Frenzied mob scenes in the capitol building, death threats directed to GOP lawmakers, mobs trying to break the windows of lawmakers' cars, recall petitions being circulated to force GOP lawmakers out of office. This is the modern progressive left. Either the taxpayers and their representatives let them have their way or they'll throw a tantrum in the streets.

The Republican legislators have been called cowards for passing this bill, but that's simply, and typically, absurd. These men and women have been exceedingly brave to stand up to the mobs of people screaming at them, thugs trying to intimidate them, and the threats against themselves, their families, and their homes. On the other hand, if you want to see cowardice consider the Democratic senators who fled the state rather than stand and fight.

In light of the fact that I've not heard a single criticism of the Madison demonstrators' behavior on any mainstream news media outlet, I hope the people in the major media have a sufficient sense of shame to never again talk about incivility among the tea-partiers. If they do they deserve to be treated with utter scorn and derision.

One last thought: I wonder how many of the protestors in the Wisconsin capitol were university students and public employee union members. It seems from the pics that it could be a sizable majority. That means that most of the people demanding that the taxpayers continue to fork over their cash are people who either pay no taxes themselves or live off the taxes paid by others. Swell.

Hot Air has a good summary of events.

Baptists and Muslims

Most people who have commented on the Snyder v. Phelps case agree that the behavior and views of Mr. Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are contemptible and not deserving of the respect of decent people. Many commentators and cartoonists have reviled and mocked them in print, not just for their awful behavior at funerals, but for the beliefs they hold about homosexuality and American decadence.

But here's an interesting thing. The Westboro baptists are on the fringe of American Christianity, but they're roundly condemned for holding views that are actually in the mainstream of American Islam.

Whether it's their conviction that God hates homosexuals, or that God rejoices in the deaths of American soldiers, or that America is a fundamentally decadent society which deserves to be destroyed, there are a lot of devout Muslims in this country who would fervently assent to all of these.

So why do the media and others, if they find the views of the Westboro baptists so revolting, bend over backward to extend the palm of good will, understanding, and tolerance to other Americans who believe the same thing, but do so under the aegis of a different religion?

It might be replied that Muslims don't declare their beliefs at soldiers' funerals, but is this restraint due to the dictates of decorum or of prudence. Is it that Muslims simply have more sense than the Westboro folks and realize that there's no point in alienating the entire population of non-Muslim America, or is it that Muslims have a stronger sense of propriety and don't wish to offend the families of the soldiers who have died in combat against other Muslims?

Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I'll bet it's more often the former than the latter. At any rate, I wish those inclined to mock and despise Fred Phelps and his clan would ask themselves how they would respond if it wasn't the Westboro Baptist church they were ridiculing, but rather members of the local mosque. If their response would be different, if they'd probably not draw that cartoon if it were Muslims holding those placards, maybe they should ask themselves why.

Here's a video of one of Fred Phelps' daughters on Fox News Sunday last weekend. She's a lawyer and she seems very bright, but I can't imagine that she says very much here that, mutatis mutandis, many devout Muslims in this country wouldn't agree with.

As a postscript I wonder whether the Supreme Court majority in Snyder v. Phelps would have ruled the same way had people stood outside a Muslim funeral with signs that instead of saying Thank God for Dead Soldiers read Thank God for Dead Muslims. I suspect the Supreme Court would have found that intolerable, as they should, but then why is it not intolerable when the funeral is for a Marine?

The Über-Bush

For those who supported George W. Bush's treatment of foreign tyrants and terrorists it's hard to criticize President Obama's treatment of the same, except for his hypocrisy. After campaigning as the anti-Bush and blaming the "failed policies of the past", i.e. Bush's policies, for America's diminished standing in the world, Mr. Obama has pretty much transformed himself from the anti-Bush into the über-Bush.

He stayed with Bush's plan in Iraq, ramped up the predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan and surged troop strength in Afghanistan. He has retained both the Patriot act and, as far as I know, Bush's policy of prisoner rendition. He has refused to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and has recently resumed military tribunals for terrorists there. Next we'll be reading, perhaps, that he's given the go-ahead for "enhanced interrogations".

There's rich irony in all this. Having persuaded over 50% of American voters in 2008 that he was the avatar of hope and change, American families are less hopeful after two years of Mr. Obama than they've been in thirty five years, and the only change we've seen is in our national debt, the unemployment numbers, and the cost of fuel. Everything else, including our forays into the Middle East, seems to have remained the same.

One wonders where the anti-war left is now that Mr. Obama appears to be preparing to wage war against Libya. If George W. Bush had no justification for going to war with Iraq, as most on the left claimed, surely President Obama has far less justification for going to war with Libya. Who does Libya threaten other than the rebels who are seeking to depose Moammar Qaddafi?

Perhaps the justice of a war, in the eyes of the left, is a matter not of the actual circumstances leading up to a conflict but rather of who is in the White House giving the order to commence hostilities. I suppose we'll soon find out if that's true.

Premarital Sex and Monogamy

Russ Douthat has a fine column on "premarital" sexual behavior at the New York Times. I put premarital in quotes because Douthat makes an important distinction between different kinds of premarital sexual behavior. I'll let him explain:

[T]here are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill-considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

There's more to reflect upon in Douthat's column, particularly the trends that are showing up in studies of teenage sexuality as well as why so many social conservatives find the underlying philosophy of organizations like Planned Parenthood to be antithetical to women's long-term mental well-being. Check it out.

Interview with Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is one of the most prolific of our contemporary historians. He's written numerous books, big books on big themes. Modern Times, a history of most of the twentieth century, is perhaps his most well-known. Wall Street Journal editor Brian Carney caught up with the 82 year-old scholar in his London home recently where they sat down for an interview. Here's a sample of some of the interesting things Johnson says:

"Of course I worry about America," he says. "The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America—a marvelous country. But in a sense I don't worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths—particularly its freedom of thought and expression—that it's going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world."

Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America's decline "since the 18th century." But whenever things are looking bad, America "suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That's cheered me up no end. Because it's done more for women in politics than anything else—all the feminists? Nuts! It's brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it." Then he deepens his voice for effect and adds: "And I like that lady—Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib."

The former governor of Alaska, he says, "is in the good tradition of America, which this awful political correctness business goes against." Plus: "She's got courage. That's very important in politics. You can have all the right ideas and the ability to express them. But if you haven't got guts, if you haven't got courage the way Margaret Thatcher had courage—and [Ronald] Reagan, come to think of it. Your last president had courage too—if you haven't got courage, all the other virtues are no good at all. It's the central virtue."

Johnson expatiates on a number of other topics including the turmoil in the Middle East:

In 1848, he explains, "Practically every country in Europe, except England of course . . . had a revolution and overthrew the government, at any rate for a time. So that is something which historically is well-attested and the same thing has happened here in the Middle East."

Here he injects a note of caution: "But I notice it's much more likely that a so-called dictatorship will be overthrown if it's not a real dictatorship. The one in Tunisia wasn't very much. Mubarak didn't run a real dictatorship [in Egypt]. Real dictatorships in that part of the world," such as Libya, are a different story.

As for Moammar Gadhafi, "We'll see if he goes or not. I think he's a real baddie, so we hope he will." The Syrian regime, he adds, "not so long ago in Hama . . . killed 33,000 people because they rose up." Then, "above all," there is Iran. "If we can get rid of that horrible regime in Iran," he says, "that will be a major triumph for the world."

If you enjoyed Johnson's books you'll enjoy the rest of this interview. You can find it here.

Thoughts on Libya

There's growing criticism of the Obama administration, especially from conservatives, for not "doing something" in Libya, but I'm not sure exactly what he should do, and, in fact, I'm not convinced that he should do anything.

There've been calls for imposition of a "no-fly" zone to protect the rebels from Qaddafi's air force, but why should we get involved in that? When we established a no-fly zone in Iraq it was to protect the Kurdish people from being slaughtered from the air by Saddam after we had urged them to rise against him. Having failed to support them in their uprising we at least owed them the protection of air cover. We were also technically still in a state of war with Saddam after the first Persian Gulf war, and his use of his air force violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the cease-fire agreement. Moreover, Saddam was directly targeting women and children, killing them not only with rockets and machine gun fire but also with chemicals (that we had provided him during his decade long war with Iran).

Nothing like that is happening in Libya, at least as far as I've been able to glean from news reports. Qaddafi is using his planes against rebel forces, not to commit genocide, but to defeat the rebels. There are civilian casualties, to be sure, but many of those are coming from infantry and artillary fire. If Qaddafi starts to kill civilians with his ground troops should we then go in with ground troops of our own? If so, then what? What happens after we, at great cost, depose Qaddafi? Do we stay and build a democratic state like we've tried to do in Iraq? Can we afford that burden?

A "no-fly zone" is not antiseptic. If we impose one, hundreds of Libyans will die since we would have to attack their anti-aircraft and radar installations and probably their airfields.

I don't see where we have a justification for getting involved, or what national interest we have at stake in Libya. If Qaddafi turns his guns on his people as Saddam did on the Kurds then we have a humanitarian obligation to do what we can, perhaps, to protect them, but failing that we should just stay out of it and root, if we wish, for the rebels.

Some have suggested that the world's oil supply is at risk and that we should protect the oil fields from sabotage, but we get less than 3% of our oil from Libya. If oil is a concern then let China do something about it. They get a lot more of their petroleum from Libya than we do. Why should we expend blood and treasure to protect China's economy?

This is hard for me to say because I despise Qaddafi who was surely behind the Pan Am 103 bombing, but if we are going to punish Qaddafi for Lockerbie then we should say so and go after Qaddafi directly and not his military. Going after him for Lockerbie, however, would be extremely awkward since we largely absolved him of the crime after he renounced his nuclear weapons ambitions.

All things considered, unless Qaddafi unleashes his arms against the Libyan people, then I don't see what business we have getting into that fight other than, perhaps, in a non-combat support role for other Arab or African countries which may wish to come to the aid of the rebels.

Meanwhile, someone needs to ask the Sean Hannitys of the world, the next time they criticize the Obama administration for dithering on Libya, exactly what they propose he should do.