A Subtle Call for Violence

Radical lefty Claire Potter, who teaches feminism, cultural criticism and political history at Wesleyan University, reflects on the London riots and wonders why American youth are comparatively so blasé. Her post, which is carried by the Chronicle of Higher Education, gives us a glimpse into how the Left in America thinks. She writes:

This [the London riots] has all caused me to reflect on the extraordinary passivity of Americans, and of American students, who respond to reduced access to education by studying harder, getting better grades, and stepping on the people who can’t — or aren’t in a position to – compete any longer.

You might think that, except for the part about stepping on people, Potter is praising American students since studying harder to get better grades would seem to most people to be virtuous, but Potter doesn't intend to be taken that way. In her mind, those who work harder and succeed are somehow oppressing those who don't, or can't, compete. The better you do in life the more of an oppressor you are. Thus students shouldn't work hard, she implies, because there will be those who get left behind and that's unfair. Better for everyone to be mediocre than for some to excel.

This is egalitarianism on steroids. I wonder if she believes it's unjust to those of her students who are academic slouches to give them a lower grade than those who excel in their work.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch Waiting For Superman (Davis Guggenheim, 2010), a movie that promotes the idea that the problem with public education is that there just aren’t enough (privatized) charter schools.

The idea the movie actually promotes is that many public schools are failing our kids. Many of our schools have been rendered ineffective by liberal social and educational policy and self-aggrandizing unions. The kids in those districts need an alternative and public schools need competition. This offends the Left because once kids escape a failing public school not only will they have a better chance of success, which means others will be oppressed, but they'll have escaped the secular and left-wing indoctrination camps which many public schools have become.

The problem with public schools is not that there aren't enough private schools, although there aren't. The problem with public schools is that they're more concerned with students' rights and privileges and not enough with creating and maintaining the sort of atmosphere in which education can take place.

What have we done in the face of a government, a political class, and a monied class that is dismantling a country that prided itself (for what now seems like a shockingly short time, roughly 1933-1973) on its capacity to provide dignified lives for working and middle income citizens? Nothing. Nothing except elect a president whose capacity to give away the liberal store exceeds even that of the neoliberal Clintons.

How exactly is the country being dismantled by imposing fiscal sanity upon government? How are state governments (which I presume Potter is talking about here) depriving people of their "capacity to provide dignified lives" by taking measures to avoid bankruptcy? Does she really think that a bankrupt state, one with no money, no jobs, and no hope, would offer people a greater capacity to lead "dignified" lives?

I mean think about it. To take one example, over the course of the last twenty years, one of the finest educational systems in the world has been systematically dismantled and privatized with malice aforethought. The liberal and fine arts have been de-funded, degraded, mocked and reserved for a special few: shockingly, we are not even particularly interested in funding a proper science and math education in the vast majority of schools.

Practical educations for the new economy — accounting, telemarketing, hotel management, home health aid — that will consign people to a life of service at a flat, non-negotiable wage, have taken the place of an education that allows all citizens to dream about transforming their own lives.

Training people to succeed in the sorts of jobs that are available is bad, according to the professor, because now students are not taking courses in women's studies, queer theory and other "life-transforming" fields but are instead preparing themselves for work which will actually generate an income and enable them to support a family.

The sheer arrogance of people like Ms. Potter is astonishing. Who is she, after all, to demean careers like accounting and hotel management? Are these fields somehow less noble than being a university professor who spends her time talking about feminist theory and writing papers that nobody but a handful of colleagues reads and which will be forgotten five years from now? I thought leftists disdained this sort of insufferable elitism, but apparently they only disdain it when it's manifested in people other than themselves.

How do Americans respond to this? By having an orderly march on Washington, in August, so that nobody has to even strike a day of school to attend it and everyone is on vacation.

Imagine. Orderly, peaceful protest demonstrations. How quaint, but Ms. Potter doesn't want violence. Oh, no:

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to see cities burn. I lived through that once, and never want to watch it again.

She wants protest but not the sort that's orderly nor the sort that's violent. That doesn't seem to leave many options, but actually she's being disingenuous. She really does seem to want violence. Why else offer us a subtle justification for it in the next paragraph:

I also understand that Americans pride themselves on their capacity to find peaceful resolution of political issues. This belief about our essentially peaceful political culture flies in the face of the actual history of a country that has seen repeated epidemics of violence, and that continues to enforce its imperialist policies abroad with violence.

But never mind: at some point Americans decided that the strategies of nonviolence espoused by radical activists like Barbara Deming, Bayard Rustin and (most famously) Martin Luther King, Jr., represented what the United States really was. To underline: these visionaries have been the exception, not the rule. Violence has almost always accompanied political change in this country, from the Revolution forward.

Her syllogism seems straightforward: Violence accompanies political change. We need political change. Ergo, the implied conclusion is, we need violence. There really are some constants in the universe and one of them is the penchant for violence that has infected the Left ever since its founding in the French Revolution of 1789.

Incidentally, Ms Potter is mistaken in saying that Americans think we are a peaceful people. She'd be more correct to say that Americans aspire to be a peaceful people and to eschew violence, especially domestic political violence. She should eschew it, too.

It's hard to read her next sentence without feeling incredulous:

Furthermore, while many conservative politicians continue to incite violence (in the form of strong rhetorical appeals to anti-statism, massive resistance to integration and abortion rights, and a citizenry armed to the teeth);

In the Orwellian catechism of the Left it's apparently an incitement to violence to yearn for smaller, more responsible, and less onerous government, to stop the violence against the unborn, and to afford people the ability to protect themselves from violent criminals. She probably also thinks it's an incitement to violence to recite the Bill of Rights and to sing the Star Spangled Banner.

And where she came up with the positively bizarre idea that conservatives are mounting massive resistance to integration is mystifying, but then it's also mystifying how anyone could find reasoning such as Professor Potter's compelling.

Britain's Decline

Mark Steyn hits a home run in his genuinely funny commentary on the sad estate to which once great Britain has fallen. It's dark humor, though, since there's much tragedy in the destruction wrought by the welfare state and also because the policies that produced the mindset of the rioters in Britain are precisely the same as are being promoted in the U.S.

You'll enjoy the whole piece, but here are a couple of appetizers to whet your palate:

There is literally nothing you can’t get Her Majesty’s Government to pay for. From page 205 of my book:

“A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute.” Hey, why not? “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained his social worker. “Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”

Why do they need a Dutch hooker? Just another hardworking foreigner doing the jobs Britons won’t do? Given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one gig that wouldn’t have to be outsourced overseas.

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims.

Steyn's good. Check him out.

Falling from Mt. Olympus

President Obama's approval numbers have now fallen below 40% which means that his support even among Democrats is starting to erode.

Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, finds the growing disenchantment on the left with Mr. Obama to be an interesting development. It is indeed quite a contrast with the starry-eyed adulation of so many of his devotees two years ago. Podhoretz opens his column in the Wall Street Journal with these thoughts:

It's open season on President Obama. Which is to say that the usual suspects on the right (among whom I include myself) are increasingly being joined in attacking him by erstwhile worshipers on the left. Even before the S&P downgrade, there were reports of Democrats lamenting that Hillary Clinton had lost to him in 2008. Some were comparing him not, as most of them originally had, to Lincoln and Roosevelt but to the hapless Jimmy Carter. There was even talk of finding a candidate to stage a primary run against him. But since the downgrade, more and more liberal pundits have been deserting what they clearly fear is a sinking ship.

Here, for example, from the Washington Post, is Richard Cohen: "He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is." More amazingly yet, Mr. Cohen goes on to say of Mr. Obama, who not long ago was almost universally hailed as the greatest orator since Pericles, that he lacks even "the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians." And to compound the amazement, Mr. Cohen tells us that he cannot even "recall a soaring passage from a speech."

Overseas it is the same refrain. Everywhere in the world, we read in Germany's Der Spiegel, not only are the hopes ignited by Mr. Obama being dashed, but his "weakness is a problem for the entire global economy."

In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause "the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal," all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the "god" Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.

Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— "What Happened to Obama?"

Of course what happened to Obama is that he got elected and has attempted to put his big government ideology into practice. He has enjoyed some success in this, much to the detriment of the country. People on the left, sympathetic to his aims, are dismayed that profligate spending and onerous regulations don't work, but they don't, and now Mr. Obama has nothing left to try to turn the economy around, if, indeed, he actually wants to.

As a candidate he could thrill audiences with soaring rhetoric and platitudes about "hope and change," but now people are demanding specifics. That's why his speeches sound flat. Abstractions and generalities suitable, perhaps, for campaigning no longer impress people looking for concrete solutions, and Mr. Obama has no solutions to offer. He urges us simply to do more of what hasn't worked before, and that just moves any viewers who aren't wedded to the left's vision of an egalitarian utopia to sigh and turn off the television.

Kinesin Motor

Anyone who has ever seen the computer animation of the processes occurring inside a living cell titled Inner Life of a Cell (produced by Harvard University) has marveled at the kinesin motor which transports organelles through the cell by "walking" along microtubules. This video explains some of the amazing complexity involved in this process and how the kinesin performs its "walk":

If you've never seen the animation of the kinesin in the Harvard video it's at the two minute mark here:

Please keep in mind that everything you see here is solely the end product of many fortuitous convergences of chance mutations and natural selection. Anyone silly enough to think that such precision, complexity, and design requires an intelligent agent to engineer them is simply not thinking scientifically and should consult with Judge John Jones of the 2005 Dover School Board trial who is an expert on these matters and who will be able to school you in the proper way to understand them.

HT: Evolution News and Views

Real Life Heroes

I recently watched a film that was released in 2009, and as I sat down I wondered why I had never heard of it until a couple of weeks ago. After all the film was highly rated and advertised to have all the elements that generally send the media into promotional hyperdrive. It's a true story with racism galore and an oppressed minority fighting the government in ways that can only be described as heroic despite beatings and death threats from the racist majority. I'm not exactly immersed in contemporary culture so I thought perhaps I had missed all the publicity about it and didn't give matter much more thought.

As the film unfolded, however, a dark suspicion overtook me. I tried hard to fend it off, I really did, but I couldn't help it.

The suspicion was that the film didn't receive much notice because though it had all the elements that are catnip to the media, those elements just didn't fit the left's preferred narrative. The heroes of the story are white, and worse, the racists are black. The tyrannical government is actually putting socialist principles into practice, and, ensuring complete media silence about the film, the heroes happen to be Christians with a strong, unabashed faith in God.

The movie is a documentary, much of it filmed surreptitiously, of the horrific treatment suffered by white farmers in Zimbabwe at the hands of a clearly racist black government that's confiscating white-owned farms that have belonged to those families for generations and giving them to political cronies. The government, under the execrable Robert Mugabe, offers no compensation for the confiscated land and beats and/or murders those who refuse to leave.

One family, the Campbells, was resolved to withstand the intimidation, and the film documents what the elderly Campbells, their daughter, and their son-in-law had to endure as they fought their government in international court in 2008. Their courage, tenacity, and faith are absolutely remarkable, as is the almost preternatural absence of bitterness and desire for retribution against their persecutors.

It's a film that should be watched by those, like Nancy Pelosi, who think that it's racist to oppose Mr. Obama's policies. They may learn what real racism looks like. It would also be salutary viewing for some of our liberal academics who think that racism is an exclusively white malaise.

The film is titled Mugabe and the White African. Watch it with a liberal friend, especially if he or she is a secularist. It'd be a fun evening were the story not so terribly tragic.

Why Are They So Angry?

It's an interesting question, laden with psychological overtones, as to why academic Darwinists get so angry with those who disagree with them about evolution, especially those who dissent from the view that natural processes and forces are sufficient to account for the vast panoply of life we see in our world.

David Klinghoffer offers an interesting and plausible explanation, but I think it's only part of the answer. Here's a portion of what he writes:

You may have wondered why Darwinists in academia get so worked up about intelligent design. Reading what they write about our scientists and their work, you picture these guys turning red and sweating a lot. Alternatively, they try to mask their rage by getting all sarcastic and pseudo-witty -- a man of mature age like Larry Moran, for example, calling other adults "IDiots."

Clearly, it's irrational because anger is almost always irrational. (I should know.) But even irrational fury typically has a trigger, and you might reasonably doubt whether the publications of scientists associated with the Discovery Institute are really, in a direct sense, that trigger.

[These people]aren't driven to their fury directly by the scholarly work of Michael Behe, Doug Axe or Stephen Meyer, but rather indirectly every time a student brings it up in class. Every year a new cohort of young people comes through the lecture hall and some number of them -- probably a growing number -- have been exposed somewhere to ID's critique and alternative to neo-Darwinism. Every time a student puts her hand up and politely asks something along the lines of, "But what about irreducible complexity?" it throws the class discussion down a totally different corridor of the mind than the professor meant it to go.

The professor can either dismiss the student with a hand wave and a casual invocation of "creationism," which makes everyone else wonder what this is all about, or he can explain the issue and try to refute Behe or Meyer, but that just raises more questions in the minds of some students who are inclined to doubt his authority.

Either way, how annoying for him! That's not on the syllabus! It's not supposed to be the program at all. It really puts our professor into an uncomfortable position. This explains P.Z. Myers's undisguised outrage when questioned in a non-academic setting -- a pub in Glasgow -- by a young person fresh out of college and on his way to grad school. The young man, our Jonathan M., was a stand-in for other students that professors encounter in their own classrooms and whom they, in that setting, are generally disallowed from abusing the way Myers abused Jonathan.

The thing is, these challenges from students are something that keeps happening year after year and class after class. It's a persistent irritant to our [professional academics], with personal and professional consequences for them. It's like having an ache in your neck or back that keeps coming back and you can never seem to rid yourself of it no matter what you do. Physical discomfort like that drives people to irritability that can seem both irrational and inexplicable, until you understand what actually drives it.

The intelligent-design movement is reaching these students and thereby their teachers, throwing the latter into chronic peevishness that we, in turn, see manifested in their public comments.

The other part of the explanation, I think, is that these challenges and questions have only somewhat to do with science and mostly to do with religion. Most of the acidulous, angry Darwinians are metaphysical naturalists, they believe that nature is all there is. Naturalism is, for all intents and purposes, their religion and Darwinism is a critical support pillar in that religion. Students with the temerity to doubt Darwinism call into question the naturalist's deepest beliefs, but not only that.

They also call into question the intelligence, competence, credibility, and authority of professors who have invested their lives in preaching the Darwinian gospel. These people have egos, and to be questioned by a mere novice in front of a class full of postulants preparing for initiation into the sacred rites of Darwinian orthodoxy is humiliating and insufferable. The querulousness they display is directly proportional to the affront to their egos and professional reputations.

Unable to make a convincing case, at least a case that's convincing to someone who's not already a believer, they lash out in anger against anyone who puts them in that embarrassing position. It's not the man who's confident in his convictions and able to defend them compellingly who resorts to rudeness and insults. It's the man whose noetic structure is fraught with insecurity and a sense of his own inadequacy in making a case for ossified dogmas that never before had to be defended who gets "peevish" when confronted with the need to do so.

Fatal Attraction

Denis Prager, a devout Jew, uses the attempt in San Francisco to ban circumcision as a springboard for wondering what it will take for American Jews to realize that the progressive left is not their friend:

So, then, given my profound support for circumcision, what good could possibly come from San Francisco passing a ban on it?

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the left. Obviously, San Francisco's already existing bans on toys in Happy Meals, on soda in city-owned places and on plastic bags, and the city's proposed ban on the sale of pets, even goldfish, have not moved many Jews (or non-Jews) to begin wondering whether left-wing governance is dangerous. But perhaps a ban on circumcision will.

Of course, not everyone who is on the left -- and certainly not the traditional liberal -- is an enemy of the Jews. But, aside from Islamists, virtually all the enemies of the Jews are on the left.

The worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel (i.e., to pave the way for moral acceptance of Israel's destruction) is virtually all on the left. Universities in America and elsewhere in the Western world, as well as the mainstream news media outlets around the globe, are all dominated by the left. They drum into their students', readers', listeners' and viewers' minds that Israel is one of the worst societies on earth.

The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "Many of the youths who survived the (Norway) massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories."

Yet, most American Jews still walk around thinking that Christians and conservatives are their enemies when, in fact, they are the best friends Jews have in the world today. From the present conservative Canadian government, which is probably the most vocal pro-Israel country in the world today, to every major conservative talk-show host in America (including the fiercely pro-Jewish and pro-Israel Glenn Beck, who has been libeled as an anti-Semite), to the leader of Holland's Party for Freedom and member of the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders (one of the most eloquent pro-Israel voices in Europe today), to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- the right is where the Jews' friends are.

What will it take for this generation of Jews on the left to realize what Arthur Koestler, perhaps the most prominent Jewish leftist of a previous generation, came to realize: namely, that leftism is "the god that failed"?

Prager makes an important point. Too many Jews, like too many blacks, live in thrall to the myth that progressives are looking out for their best interests. They believe the myth that to be conservative is to be an anti-semite (or racist). They believe that to be a Christian is to see Jews as "Christ-killers," and they believe that to be a Christian conservative is to be an anti-intellectual yahoo.

None of this, of course, is true. As Prager writes, the exact opposite is the case, but myths die hard. Blacks still think after seventy years of fealty to the Democratic party that Democrats will someday solve their problems. Jews who support the progressive left are just as blind to the fact that almost all the non-Muslim anti-semitism in our society today is found there.

Deteriorating Race Relations

Something is going seriously wrong with race relations in this country. Over the last half century we've made immense progress in demonstrating to the world how people of different ethnicities and races could amicably coexist even if they didn't quite trust, or even like, each other. All of that progress now seems to be unraveling as roving gangs of young blacks in dozens of localities across the U.S. have terrorized, beaten, and murdered whites simply because they're white.

The horrors that occurred at the Wisconsin State Fair were but one instance of what seems to be an accelerating trend of racial hatred and violence perpetrated by blacks against whites.

Robin, a psychologist and former liberal who writes at American Thinker, gives voice to what a lot of white Americans are thinking, and it doesn't augur well for the future. Robin blames Obama for the increasing violence, and although I think that's a bit of a stretch (though not entirely so, given the insouciant attitude of the Department of Justice toward black on white crime), it's not a stretch to point out that something is going very much awry.

Notwithstanding media reluctance to mention it, interracial violence has always been disproportionately, indeed, overwhelmingly, black on white, but whites have been conditioned to think that this was "understandable" given our nation's racial history and the terrible poverty and lack of opportunity blacks have endured. White guilt has abetted a reluctance to entertain the thought that there was something deeply, virulently wrong in the black community.

Many bought into the black liberal propaganda that racism was a taint that afflicts only whites. Criticism of black shortcomings was inhibited by a fear of being labeled a racist. Blacks and whites could both criticize whites, but only blacks were allowed to comment on black dysfunction, and even then they were often criticized for providing ammunition to white racists if they did so.

All this is changing. Whites are becoming deeply resentful of the frequent reports of terrible beatings and other crimes perpetrated by blacks against whites, often simply because they're white. Many hard-working whites are embittered by the injustice of being required to pull the wagon in which a large portion of the black population rides only to have the free-riders now and then jump out of the wagon to kick them in the head and then jump back in and demand that the whites pull harder.

Growing numbers of whites are arriving at the point where they no longer preface their comments about race by declaring "I'm not a racist, but..." More people are likely to be heard saying "I don't care if you call me a racist." The charge of racism has largely lost its former sting.

People can only read so many stories like the one that came out of the Wisconsin State Fair last week before they stop looking for euphemisms and excuses for black violence and start thinking that there's something amiss in the psyche of people who feel the need to form roaming packs of predators who just want to hurt others for no reason other than that they're white and easy targets.

If President Obama wants to use his bully pulpit to do something truly beneficial for the country he should give not one but a dozen speeches like the one given last week by Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia. Too many blacks hear messages like this all too infrequently. Our national life together will only deteriorate into mutual animus and overt hostility unless more people, especially black men, start pounding home the message that barbaric behavior is unacceptable among civilized people.

Carter on Journalistic Integrity

Joe Carter at First Things administers a much-deserved spanking to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker for a hit piece he did in that magazine on Michele Bachmann. As Carter points out, Lizza's attempts to demean Bachmann were ludicrous and reflect more poorly on the writer's professionalism and character than they do on the intended target, but defending Bachmann wasn't Carter's real purpose in writing.

In his attempt to smear Bachmann Lizza also slandered a man, the late Francis Schaeffer, who has had enormous influence among Christian evangelicals, including Carter (and including me), and this was more than Carter could abide.

Carter offers Mr. Lizza four pieces of good advice, in the course of which he pretty much holds Lizza's sloppy journalism up as an example of the sort of thing that young journalists, who wish not to embarrass themselves, should avoid.

Here's his second "Lesson":

Lesson #2: Ensure that you use reliable sources — As I mentioned, Schaeffer has been the subject of numerous studies. There are dozens of qualified and reputable scholars who would be willing to explain his thought and influence. Unfortunately, while Lizza did find a PhD to provide a quote, he chose one that is known for being an unreliable source. Lizza writes,

[Schaeffer] was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26, where man is urged to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Sara Diamond, who has written several books about evangelical movements in America, has succinctly defined the philosophy that resulted from Schaeffer’s interpretation: “Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.”

First, there is no “school of thought” known as “dominionism.” The term was coined in the 1980s by Diamond and is never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation.

If Lizza had done his homework he would have found that Diamond’s mid-1980s “scholarship” is neither timely nor credible. For example, Diamond bases her contention that Schaeffer is a “dominionist” on his book A Christian Manifesto. The problem is that rather than claiming that “Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns”—Schaeffer says exactly the opposite:

[W]e must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of theocracy. Let me say that with great emphasis. Witherspoon, Jefferson, the American Founders had no idea of a theocracy. That is made plain by the First Amendment, and we must continually emphasize the fact that we are not talking about some kind, or any kind, of a theocracy....

By the way, the first paragraph of this quote can be found on the Wikipedia page for Schaeffer. Had Lizza merely been as diligent as a college freshman plagiarizing a term paper he would have discovered his error.

Read the whole thing. It's a good dissection of the sort half-truths, innuendo, and misrepresentation that we're likely to see a lot more of as the campaign season unfolds. Thanks to Byron for the tip.

Update: Another individual strongly influenced by Schaeffer and also a victim of Mr. Lizza's journalistic shoddiness is Nancy Pearcey, the author of the book Total Truth. Pearcey responds to Lizza's New Yorker piece here.

Laffer's Advice

Economist Arthur Laffer, an architect of the economic recovery under Ronald Reagan, was consulted last spring by President Obama's economic advisor Austin Goolsbee. Here's what Laffer told him:

"Reaganomics would fix any economy that’s in the doldrums,” Laffer said. “It’s not a magic sauce, it’s common sense.

“You’ve got to get rid of all federal taxes in the extreme and replace them with a low-rate flat tax on business net sales, and on personal unadjusted gross income. That’s number one.

“Number two, you have to have spending restraint. Government spending causes unemployment, it does not cure unemployment.

“Number three, you need sound money. Ben Bernanke is running the least sound monetary policy I’ve ever heard of," Laffer said.

“Number four you need regulations, but you don’t need those regulations to go beyond the purpose at hand and create collateral damage. The regulatory policies are really way off here.

“And lastly you need free trade," Laffer said. "Foreigners produce some things better than we do and we produce some things better than foreigners. It would be foolish in the extreme if we didn’t sell them those things we produce better than they do in exchange for those things they produce better than we do.”

Laffer also said that the S&P downgrade was deserved. We spend and borrow too much and if the other rating agencies don't follow suit they won't be doing their jobs.

People don't work in order to pay taxes, Laffer added, they work for what they get after taxes. When we pay people not to work and tax them when they do work we shouldn't be surprised when we find that a lot of people choose not to work.

Goolsbee is no longer in the administration, but I doubt that this is advice Mr. Obama would heed in any event. He seems determined to take the country toward a socialist economy with less market freedom, more onerous government control, higher taxes, and more entitlements. That path has never been shown to lead to prosperity, Laffer's has.

So, When Do We Start Bombing Sudan?

A third Muslim leader (or is it the tenth?) is perpetrating atrocities against his people. This time, Nina Shea reports in National Review, it's Sudan's president, Gen. Omar al-Bashir, already an indicted war criminal, who is now carrying out attacks against the 1 million Nuba and various other peoples of oil-rich Southern Kordofan.

Shea writes:

Ever since Bashir seized power in a 1989 military coup, with support from the National Islamic Front, he has waged perpetual, total war against his own people — first the Nuba, then South Sudan, then Darfur in the west, then the Beja people in the east, and now again the Nuba.

Since fighting broke out in Southern Kordofan on June 5, Khartoum has made it impossible for foreign aid groups to go there, and the region has never been on foreign journalists’ beaten path. Nevertheless, we have glimpses of the atrocities now taking place thanks to leaked U.N. reports and intermittent accounts by church representatives.

Those atrocities include aerial bombardments resulting in destruction of property, forced displacement, significant loss of civilian lives, including of women, children, and the elderly; abductions; house-to-house searches; arbitrary arrests and detentions; targeted killings; summary executions; . . . mass graves; systematic destruction of dwellings; and attacks on churches.

Col. Qaddafi has to be asking himself, "Why me? Why not al-Bashir, or Bashar Assad (Syria) or Ali Abdullah Saleh (Yemen) or just about any of the multitude of tyrants in the Middle East or North Africa?" Indeed, there's scarcely a Muslim country that doesn't live under a barbarous tyranny, so we might ask along with Qaddafi, why are we killing Libyans to save the Libyan people from their leaders, but essentially doing nothing while other despots in that part of the world exterminate their people?

Perhaps I should make clear that I'm not saying we should bomb Khartoum (although I would not object to a decapitation of their horrid leadership). What I'm trying to get a handle on is why we're bombing Libya. What is the Obama Doctrine on the use of force? Does he have one?

Possible Leukemia Cure

A report at The Blaze gives renewed hope for cancer sufferers. The article tells of a cure for leukemia that seems to work, although it has yet to receive large-scale testing. Even so, if it proves successful it may have applications in fighting other kinds of cancer, including pancreatic, prostate, ovarian and brain cancer. Here's an excerpt:

Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia – turning the patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.

They’ve only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer. Scientists are already preparing to try the same gene therapy technique for other kinds of cancer.

“It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last.”

For the experiment, blood was taken from each patient and T-cells removed. After they were altered in a lab, millions of the cells were returned to the patient in three infusions.

The researchers described the experience of one 64-year-old patient in detail. There was no change for two weeks, but then he became ill with chills, nausea and fever. He and the other two patients were hit with a condition that occurs when a large number of cancer cells die at the same time – a sign that the gene therapy is working.

For the sake of all those who suffer from these afflictions and who will suffer from them in the future, let's hope and pray that this procedure continues to give successful results in the rigorous testing that lies ahead.

Buyer's Remorse

The Left is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Mr. Obama. Even his cheerleaders at MSNBC are beginning to complain about the lack of leadership coming from the Oval Office. Drew Weston, a progressive psychologist at Emory University, and ardent Obama supporter has a lengthy essay in the New York Times in which he argues that Mr. Obama has disappointed by being neither tough enough nor liberal enough.

The latter charge will seem incomprehensible to many readers since Mr. Obama is the most leftward president in American history, but be that as it may, toward the end of the piece Weston says what many observers who've been less smitten by his oratory and racial significance have been saying for three years:

A second possibility [for Mr. Obama's failures] is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Of course, these explanations are not mutually exclusive. The part about an "extremist Republican Party" is nonsense, of course, but the part about Mr. Obama being unable or unwilling to articulate what he believes in, is not. The country, led by a swooning media, rolled the dice on a man they knew nothing about and got a president who appears with every passing day to be unsuited for the job.

London's Liberal Legacy

By now everyone has heard of the terrible, senseless rioting that has occurred in England over the last several nights. Max Hastings of the Daily Mail explains why it is happening, in his opinion, and everything he says, down to the last detail, sounds like he's talking about the U.S.

This is a very important essay, exposing as it does the culturally corrosive acid that is modern liberalism. Everything Hastings deplores in his piece is the outworking of the liberal assumption that individuals should be unfettered by any discipline, rules, and consequences for their behavior. It's the result, too, of three generations of the liberal emphasis on the inherent goodness of people, personal autonomy, and a state generated sense of entitlement.

Here's Hastings' conclusion:

A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so. They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential. Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people. They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

Do read the whole column. It's an eye-opener.

I have one criticism, though. It has to do with the above sentence which says, "Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people."

Those things are all necessary, of course, but what's really at the root of Britain's problems, and ours, is an accelerating secularism. Unless young people can be given a transcendent purpose, grounded in belief in individual responsibility to a personal God, none of the rest will make much of a dent in the problem. Unless society affirms that there is indeed a transcendent purpose and a God who establishes it then it has no compelling answer to the nihilist argument that everything is meaningless and we may as well just burn it all down.

Does Morality Require God? (Pt. III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of posts on biologist Jerry Coyne's USA Today article in which he claims that morality does not require God. Scroll down for the first two installments. Coyne writes:

And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality. Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.

Once again, if our behavior is determined by our genes then it's not moral behavior in any meaningful sense. Morality requires that an agent be free to choose one behavior over another. There are those who view cheating or murder as good. If morality is encoded in our genes then the genetically determined behavior of an Anders Breivik is no more right or wrong than that of the person whose genes tell him that Breivik is evil. We don't like that our cat tortures a bird but we don't consider the pet to be doing anything immoral. It's just doing what cats are genetically programmed to do. Likewise, if Coyne is correct, with people.

Should we be afraid that a morality based on our genes and our brains is somehow inferior to one handed down from above? Not at all. In fact, it's far better, because secular morality has a flexibility and responsiveness to social change that no God-given morality could ever have. Secular morality is what pushes religion to improve its own dogma on issues such as slavery and the treatment of women.

This is total nonsense. There's nothing in secular evolutionary morality that makes slavery wrong or that says we should treat women with dignity. Secular morality ultimately leads to a might-makes-right egoism. Slavery and women's rights came about because people realized that oppression is inconsistent with a God who created all of us in his image and who loves us equally. As Tocqueville put it, slavery came to an end when people realized that people who were equal in the eyes of God could hardly be treated unequally in the eyes of men.

The serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is completely correct when he said in the filming of an A&E Biography segment, "If it all happens naturalisticaly, what's the need for God? Can't I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself."

New Atheist Richard Dawkins is often prone to silliness when he steps outside the field of biology, but he asks a telling question that atheists usually shrink from when he wonders, "What's to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean that's a genuinely difficult question."

It's not that people can't hold to a set of values that most would call moral. It's rather that, if there is no transcendent, objective moral authority, whatever values people hold are arbitrary and subjective. If they held values contrary to the ones they do in fact hold, if they embraced the same values as Dahmer or Hitler, they would be unpopular but not wrong.

And really, isn't it better to be moral because you've worked out for yourself — in conjunction with your group — the right thing to do, rather than because you want to propitiate a god or avoid punishment in the hereafter?

Coyne shows in this passage that he has no understanding of basic Christianity. The Christian motive for striving to live a good life is not fear of punishment or the need to propitiate God. That was all settled at Calvary. The Christian is motivated to live the way God desires out of love and gratitude for the One who suffered so that we could be reconciled with God and have eternal life.

Nor should we worry that a society based on secular morality will degenerate into lawlessness. That experiment has already been done — in countries such as Sweden and Denmark that are largely filled with non-believers and atheists. I can vouch from experience that secular European nations are full of well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths running amok. In fact, you can make a good case that those countries, with their liberal social views and extensive aid for the sick, old and disadvantaged, are even more moral than America.

The experiment has also been tried extensively elsewhere and resulted in the murders of six million Jews by the Nazis, the forced starvation of 15 million Ukrainians by the Soviets, the murders of millions in the Chinese cultural revolution, the murders of millions more in the Cambodian killing fields, the horrors in much of Africa, and in the prison states of North Korea and Cuba.

These crimes are arguably the most gruesome, violent, sanguinary, and cruel in the history of the world and they were perpetrated by regimes which explicitly rejected the Christian worldview in favor of a secular morality based on "reason." Indeed, nothing in any evolutionary or secular ethic prohibits such ghastliness. In a world without God none of this is in any sense morally wrong. How could it be?

It's true that several European states which have not yet explicitly repudiated their Christian heritage have nevertheless embraced secularism without spiraling into totalitarian cruelty and madness, but it's only because these countries are still living off their Christian inheritance. They're piggybacking on Christian values while declaring that the values upon which they're parasitic are really the fruit of secular reason.

It's a form of self-delusion, and Professor Coyne's argument, such as it is, offers us a good case study.

Tea Party = Al Qaeda

A new Rasmussen poll shows that 29% of Americans agree with the comparison that many on the Left are making of tea party members to terrorists.

That more than one in four people in this country would agree that tea partiers are the political equivalent of al Qaeda is dispiriting, not for what it says about the tea party but for what it says about 29% of our countrymen.

The tea party is the only reason anything at all is being done to try to save this country from complete ruination. Like an alcoholic who just can't stop drinking we have spent ourselves into a stupor, and the Democratic party has no desire to stop. Indeed, anyone who tries to wrest the bottle from their hands gets labelled by the masters of Orwellian Newspeak a "terrorist" or "extremist" who's trying to destroy the country.

Let me switch to a related thought. One frequently hears the irritatingly misleading claim by commentators (I even heard Glenn Beck say it) that the problem is Congress or the problem is that our politicians are too busy squabbling to agree on a solution to our economic troubles.

This is, in my opinion, absurd. The problem is not Congress as a whole, the problem is the political Left, including many in Congress, who refuse to do what's necessary to rescue us from calamity.

We're in this mess because we spent too much, starting under Bush, but skyrocketing (by a factor of 4) under Obama. The tea party was largely responsible for electing a Republican House last November which resolved to stop and reverse this insanity, and almost 30% of Americans, including some prominent Democrats, think it's the tea party who are the terrorists?

The stock market has dropped 2000 points in the last few days, wiping out many people's savings, because the market no longer has confidence that the Democrats will allow this problem to be fixed, and it's the tea party who are the terrorists?

For the first time in history the United States' credit rating has been downgraded from AAA because the Democrats refused to pass the GOP's "Cut, Cap, and Balance" legislation, and it's the tea party who are the terrorists?

Meanwhile, for two and a half years the Democrats have refused to offer a budget, the president has refused to offer a plan to cut the debt, but it's the tea party who are the terrorists.

When John Kerry calls the tea party terrorists one is minimally surprised. When Joe Biden says the same thing one shakes one's head in recognition of the source, but when almost 30% of Americans, presumably a group consisting of many people of at least average intelligence, affirm the characterization, one despairs for the country.

Does Morality Require God? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we undertook a consideration of a column by atheistic Darwinian Jerry Coyne who argues in USA Today that God is not necessary as a ground for morality. I'd like to continue that critique in this post.

Coyne's next move in the case he's trying to build is to place into evidence all the alleged misdeeds of the God of the Old Testament in order to show that the God of the Bible would be an inadequate ground for morality:

This isn't just philosophical rumination, because God — at least the God of Christians and Jews — repeatedly sanctioned or ordered immoral acts in the Old Testament. These include slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46), genocide (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-18), the slaying of adulterers and homosexuals, and the stoning of non-virgin brides (Leviticus 20:10, 20:13, Deuteronomy 22:20-21).

Was God being moral when, after some children made fun of the prophet Elisha's bald head, he made bears rip 42 of them to pieces (2 Kings 2:23-24)? Even in the New Testament, Jesus preaches principles of questionable morality, barring heaven to the wealthy (Matthew 19:24), approving the beating of slaves (Luke 12:47-48), and damning sinners to the torments of hell (Mark 9:47-48). Similar sentiments appear in the Quran.

Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.

Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.

None of this, as distressing as it may be, is relevant to his initial claim that morality exists independently of God. Let's grant for the sake of discussion that the Bible portrays God as a moral monster (although many scholars would disagree). What follows? Nothing of any help to Coyne's case. What follows is that God as portrayed in the Old Testament seems, at least on a literal reading, to be a questionable source of moral instruction, but this gets Coyne nowhere. It could be that the Bible is mistaken about God's role in these events. It could be that we don't fully understand the events it describes.

The point is that without a transcendent, omniscient, objective ground for morality there really is, as Nietzsche taught us, no good or evil, no right or wrong. Whether or not the deity portrayed in the Bible actually is that transcendent ground is a completely separate question.

Moreover, Coyne's argument begs the question. He assumes that objective moral values exist without God and then employs these values to show that God doesn't exhibit them. But the independent, non-arbitrary existence of these values is precisely what's in contention. He can't assume they exist when their existence is what he has promised to demonstrate.

He goes on to ask:

So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

Yes, but scientists also see unimaginable cruelty and greed. Indeed, these are far the more common behaviors on display in the animal kingdom. Coyne selects traits of which he approves to call moral and traits of which he disapproves to call immoral, but what criterion is he using for this judgment and from whence does he derive that criterion? Surely, he doesn't expect us to think that what he, or even a majority, approves is what should be deemed right. By that standard he would have to grant that human sacrifice would have been moral during much of our history.

Furthermore, he again begs the question by assuming that altruism, sympathy, etc. are morally good behaviors in order to show that rudimentary morality exists in chimps, but whether these things really are moral or amoral apart from divine will is what he needs to demonstrate. So far, he hasn't done it.

We'll finish up this discussion tomorrow.

Cyber War Heating Up

China is believed to have already launched, or tried to launch, cyber attacks against the U.S. According to Strategy Page it looks as though the U.S. is getting ready to respond in kind:

The U.S. Department of Defense has long advocated going on the offensive against criminal gangs and foreign governments that seek (and often succeed) to penetrate U.S. government and military Internet security, and steal information or sabotage operations. Without much fanfare the Department of Defense has made preparations to do just that.

Since the military cannot afford to pay enough to recruit qualified software and Internet engineers for this sort of work, it has turned to commercial firms. There are already some out there, firms that are technically network security companies, but will also carry out offensive missions (often of questionable legality, but that has always been an aspect of the corporate security business.)

Some of these firms have quietly withdrawn from the Internet security business, gone dark, and apparently turned their efforts to the more lucrative task of creating Cyber War weapons for the Pentagon. It may have been one of these firms that created, or helped create, the Stuxnet worm.

Most of the Internet combat so far has been done under peacetime conditions. In wartime it's possible (especially for the United States) to cut off enemy countries from the Internet. Thus potential American foes want to maintain an official peacetime status so the United States cannot use its ability to cut nations off (or nearly off) from the Internet and remove easy access to American (and Western) targets. Thus the need to make attacks discreetly so as to make it more difficult for an enemy to target stronger attacks against you, or threaten nuclear or conventional war.

The first Chinese target (and those in North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere) that ought to come under attack are the computers that keep track of their political and religious dissidents.

Syrian Genocide

A Jerusalem Post article gives us a hint of the horrors taking place in Syria:

Ahmed Khalaf, a lieutenant in the Syrian army said that he was ordered to command his soldiers to shoot indiscriminately at everyone in Deraa, including women and children, London based Asharq Alawsat reported on Saturday.

"I, along with other officers, was ordered by our commanders to commit genocide in Deraa and was told not to spare women and children."

In an interview with Asharq Alawsat, Khalaf claimed that he told his commander that he followed orders while secretly telling his soldiers not to fire on anyone. However, when he was found out and put under house arrest he understood that he had to flee the country.

Khalaf explained that hundreds of Sunni officers are sitting in jails around Syria for refusing to obey orders to fire on civilians, and claims that "4,500 soldiers have defected in the Damascus area."

Lieutenant Khalaf managed to escape from Syria is currently hiding in an undisclosed location.

Wasn't the threat of genocide precisely the reason that President Obama deployed U.S. forces against Libya? Didn't he go on national television to tell us that we could not permit Qaddafi to just slaughter his own people?

It sure would be helpful and reassuring if he would explain what principles, if indeed there are any, govern his decision to order military intervention, or, failing that, at least get off the golf course long enough to condemn Assad every day for what he's doing to these people.

As it is, Mr. Obama is giving the impression of really not caring much about the plight of the Syrian people and of just making his foreign policy up as he goes along.

Does Morality Require God? (Pt.I)

Darwinian biologist (and atheist) Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago wanders out of his field to write a column for USA Today in which he argues that it's a mistake to think that morality depends upon God. Since I believe it does depend upon God, and have argued as much on Viewpoint on numerous occasions in the past, the article caught my attention. I wanted to see if Prof. Coyne made a compelling case for his assertion and was completely unsurprised to find that he didn't.

His argument begins to wobble with his opening paragraph and staggers and stumbles, like a drunk navigating a frozen pond, the rest of the way. He opens with this:

One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.

This was kind of him, to be sure, but it's pretty much irrelevant to his point that God isn't necessary for morality. Here's why: If there is no God it wouldn't have been wrong for him to ignore the delivery man's plight. Kindness is something we appreciate, but that doesn't make it moral. It's only morally right if we have a duty to do it. If naturalism (i.e. atheism) is true, however, there are no duties to do anything. One has no more of an obligation to be kind as one does to be selfish. The one is, in the overall scheme of things, no better or worse than the other. The universe is indifferent to whichever choice we make. Prof. Coyne continues:

We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.

The fact that people may instinctively disapprove of a particular behavior doesn't make it wrong. Many people disapprove of Prof. Coyne's atheism, but he would certainly not think it morally wrong. Many others instinctively disapprove of the notion of loving their enemies or treating women as equals, but Coyne wouldn't say that these behaviors are wrong. Disapproval and admiration have nothing to do with whether an act is right or wrong.

Moreover, if morality is indeed instinctive, i.e. if our genes program us to behave in certain ways, then how can those ways be right or wrong? The homosexual community makes the case that homosexuality is genetic and no one chooses to be gay. They're born that way and thus it is inappropriate to consider homosexuality to be immoral. But if being born gay removes homosexuality from the realm of the moral then every disposition we're born with, including the disposition to help the fed-ex delivery man or to refuse to share with others, is also removed from the realm of the moral. We do what we're predisposed by our genes to do and that's the end of the matter.

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.

Coyne frames this a bit awkwardly. What he should have said is that many who are skeptical of Darwinism argue that naturalistic evolution could never make feelings of kindness and altruism morally right. After all, many people harbor feelings of meanness and selfishness. If evolution produced the former it must also have produced the latter. On what grounds does Coyne judge the former to be right and the latter to be wrong?

Evidently, what's right are behaviors he appreciates and what's wrong are behaviors of which he disapproves, but not only is it backward to declare behaviors of which we disapprove to be wrong, we might also wonder why anyone else should accept Prof. Coyne's likes and dislikes as normative. Even if the vast majority shared Coyne's approbation and disapprobation it still wouldn't make the behaviors right or wrong. Throughout history the vast majority of people approved of slavery and disapproved of miscegnation, but is Coyne prepared to acknowledge that slavery was therefore morally right and miscegnation morally wrong?

Next the professor trots out Plato's Euthyphro dilemma to show that God cannot be the ground for morality:

[M]orality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one. Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.

Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

What Coyne neglects to mention, though, is that most philosophers of religion believe that Plato's argument simply doesn't do the work Coyne thinks it does. See here for my humble opinion on why it doesn't work.

So far, Prof. Coyne has failed to provide any persuasive reasons to accept his claim that God is unnecessary for morality. I'll examine the balance of his argument tomorrow.

Who Designed the Designer?

Perhaps you've heard materialists retort, when confronted with the argument that the universe and life show overwhelming evidence of having been designed for life, that if that is so then who designed the designer? Implicit in the objection is that if you can't describe the designer or say how, exactly, it designed things then your argument is refuted. It's a philosophically naive reply, but a common one for all that.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a simple three step rejoinder to it:

Step 1: Assume that Craig Venter (a biologist working on developing artificial life) succeeds in developing an artificial life form and releases it into the wild.
Step 2: Assume that a researcher - let’s call him John - later finds one of Venter’s life forms, examines it, and concludes that it was designed by an intelligent designer.
Step 3: John’s design inference is obviously correct. Note that John’s design inference is not any less correct if he (a) does not know who Craig Venter is; and (b) is unable to say who designed Craig Venter.

Arrington goes on to ask, "Does it say anything about the paucity and/or weakness of our opponents’ arguments that they think the 'Who designed the designer' argument is one of their best?"

It's the fundamental claim of intelligent design proponents that certain aspects of the world, specifically cosmic fine-tuning and complex specified information in living things, are evidence of a cosmic intelligence. Despite what some of their philosophically unsophisticated critics may think, their argument is not the least discredited because they can't say how the engineer came to be or who the engineer was (or is).

Progressive Civility

The following is a quote from Froma Harrop a syndicated columnist who heads the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a group that runs a project called Restoring Civility which is dedicated to the improvement of the tone of our public discourse. Given Ms Harrop's involvement in Restoring Civility this passage will cause you to shake your head:

Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States–threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate. . . . Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that’s what Obama has been doing. . . . That the Republican leadership couldn’t control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party. But oddly, Obama’s passivity made it hard for responsible Republicans to control their destructive children. The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he’d say, ‘OK.’ So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, ‘Let’s talk.’

Well, a lot of people have noted the disconnect between Ms Harrop's role in Restoring Civility and her incendiary language in this passage and have called her on it. Her attempts to explain herself are pretty funny. For instance, she said this:

I see incivility as not letting other people speak their piece. It’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse. Of course, there are matters of delicacy, and I dispensed with all sweet talk in this particular column. And I did stoop to some ad hominem remarks, I’ll admit.

This elicited so much derision on her website that she flouted even her own self-serving definition of civility by shutting down the comments and denying others the ability to "speak their piece." You can read about Ms Harrop and her peculiar notions of civility at Hot Air.

The lesson here, apparently, is that when secular liberal/progressives talk of civility what they have in mind is a conversation between two or more progressives in full agreement on the topic under discussion. As for courteous, respectful discourse between them and, say, a tea partier, well, in that case name-calling and other forms of abuse are amply justified. After all, it's not as if these are reasonable people with whom Ms Harrop and her progressive friends have to deal. They're tea-partiers, for heaven's sake.

Syria

Syrian president Bashar Assad has already murdered several thousand Syrian protestors and the slaughter continues apace:

Horrifying images of bodies and limbs floating in the Orontes River in Hama were aired by Syrian state television early Thursday, Aug. 4. Contrary to official claims that they belonged to Syrian soldiers torn to pieces by protesters, debkafile reports they are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up in the streets. Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river.

They are reliving the terrors of the massacre President Bashar Assad's father inflicted on this city of half-a-million in 1982 which left 30,000 dead. The Syrian ruler decided to take advantage of three events for unleashing an all-out assault against rebellious Hama:

1. World attention was riveted on the deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's trial which opened in Cairo Wednesday.
2. The crisis between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and the army after the entire top command resigned in a body has immobilized Turkey.
3. The UN Security Council convening Wednesday night routinely condemned the killing of civilians in Syria and human rights abuses but stopped at approving sanctions or any concrete penalties for the delinquent Assad regime.

The Syrian ruler has therefore concluded he can safely ignore international opinion. In the face of US and Western indifference, he can continue to mercilessly slaughter his people without fear of the sort of intervention they undertook in Libya or UN sanctions.

Well, he can safely ignore Barack Obama's opinion, that seems certain. Mr. Obama appears to be too busy defending the Libyan people from Qaddafi's genocidal urges to worry about a few thousand Syrians being slaughtered by Mr. Assad.

No one thinks we should intervene militarily in Syria (although the reasons given by Mr. Obama for doing so in Libya certainly apply a hundred-fold to Syria), but why is there no interest in pressing for sanctions against this regime? Why is our administration not every day condemning the atrocities Assad is committing against defenseless civilians in the same city in which his father once slaughtered 30,000 people? Why are we daily spending millions of dollars bombing Libyan soldiers, but all we can muster against Syria are meaningless pronouncements in the U.N.? Is it because Libya has oil and Syria doesn't? Where is President Obama?

A Parable

An obese young man, weighing over 700 lbs., decided to see his doctor. The doctor inquired about his eating habits. The young man told him that he consumed 5000 calories every day and that he's actually increasing that figure by 500 calories a month so that in ten months he expects to be consuming 10,000 calories a day.

The doctor advised him that he was on a path to a stroke, heart attack, and/or diabetes and that the only way to improve his quality of life was to cut back on his calorie consumption. If he didn't he would surely die young.

The man was addicted to food, however, and very reluctant to give it up so he proposed a compromise. "How about if I just increase my intake at a rate of 450 calories a month instead of 500," he suggested, "so that ten months from now I'll only be eating 9500 calories every day."

The doctor replied that that was foolishly inadequate, that he had to do more than cut the rate of increase, he had to cut his base consumption back to about 1500 calories a day.

At this the young man grew angry. He called the doctor's proposal "extremist" and a fringe view in the medical community. He complained that the doctor was needlessly trying to deprive him of everything that made his life pleasurable. He insisted that the doctor's advice would kill him. He stomped out of the office declaring as he left that the doctor was "a lunatic."

And so the young man continued gorging himself until one day a year or so later he dropped over dead.

Drone Warfare

Christianity Today features a piece in which Paul Zahl, Daniel Bell, and Brian Stiltner consider the question whether it's moral to use Predator drone strikes to kill terrorists.

Zahl's contribution is puzzling, to put it charitably. He makes two points, both of which are hard to take seriously.

First, it's wrong, he claims, to conduct war when one side in the fight doesn't see the effects of their actions. The United States Air Force and the CIA operate predator drones thousands of miles away from the intended targets. There's no possibility of making eye contact with the enemy and fully realizing the human cost of the attack. If we could see the carnage we caused we'd be much more judicious in our use of force.

Be all that as it may, where does it say in just war theory, or anywhere else, that a conflict is waged morally only if the consequences are visible? Zahl acknowledges that his criterion would rule out aerial bombing and artillery strikes, and believes these are also wrong. Apparently, for him the only acceptable warfare is hand to hand combat.

His second reason for thinking that the use of drone aircraft is wrong is that unmanned predator drones prevent war from being "a fair fight". Here's why:

They emasculate the enemy. I use emasculate intentionally, because our victims live in societies where male humiliation is a fate almost worse than death. This method of fighting reduces people on the ground to a condition of absolute helplessness, because they cannot fight back against unmanned drones.

This reduction of the enemy to absolute helplessness is good for us, you may say. It means we can't lose! But it also creates resentment in the people we are fighting.

Well, yes, but war does that. People resent it when they're being shot at, even if accidentally. It's a little odd of Zahl to take the position that we'd be better off sending troops into Pakistan to fight and die than to use missiles. Wouldn't the presence of U.S. troops cause at least as much resentment as do drone strikes? What guarantee is there that combat troops would cause fewer inadvertent casualties than missiles do?

It's also strange that Zahl thinks war has to be a "fair fight" in order to be moral. How could there ever be a completely fair fight? One side will always have an advantage over the other and if they didn't the conflict would result only in a standoff. Is it unfair that our troops are better trained and equipped than the enemy? Is it unfair that our military uses satellites and aircraft for reconnaissance?

The other contributions in the column seem more reasonable than Dr. Zahl's. Indeed, Bell makes the point that it's not the technology of war that is at issue in determining the morality of its execution, but the virtue of the combatants.

I'm with him.

New Tone

I was going to do a post on the utter hypocrisy of the liberal left in the wake of the debt-ceiling debate - you know, all the name-calling directed at the Tea Party "terrorists", "hostage-takers", and "traitors" and how they wanted to "end life on earth as we know it". I had planned to write about how, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the left-leaning media exploded at alleged incivility on the right and how conservatives were poisoning our national discourse and how Sarah Palin was to blame for the lunatic in Arizona who shot Ms Giffords, and how liberals all demanded a new, more respectful tone in our politics, but how they're in fact blind to their own sordid, incendiary, and fatuous rhetoric.

I was going to write about all this, but then I read Jonah Goldberg's column at National Review, and I knew I couldn't say it as well as he does.

Here's his opening:

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map was an evil totem that forced some guy to go on a shooting spree. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks — particularly NBC whose senior foreign-affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, devotes, by my rough reckoning, ten times as much air time to whining about Sarah Palin as she does about anything having to do with foreign affairs — flooded the zone with “Have you no shame” finger wagging. A memo went forth demanding that everyone at MSNBC get their dresses over their heads about the evil “tone” from the right. Media Matters went into overdrive working the interns 24/7 to “prove” that Republicans deliberately foment violence with their evil targets on their evil congressional maps.

Everyone “knew” the shooter was a tea partier. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a conservative. He was a sick, demented, nutball. And it still didn’t matter! More bleating and caterwauling about the “tone” followed. More chin stroking and tut-tutting from Meet the Press roundtables and “very special segments” on the Today Show. More pizzas were ordered for the Media Matters galley slaves.

The rest of Goldberg's column is very much worth reading and I urge you to give it the two minutes it'll take to finish it.

It's sad that people whose economic policies are making day to day life in America purgatorial for millions, whose refusal to drill for domestic energy has delayed, directly or indirectly, the employment of tens of thousands, whose adamantine support for an industry that slaughters over a million babies a year is non-negotiable, and whose policies enable unions to hold taxpayers hostage all across the country, would have the chutzpah to stigmatize as "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" the very people who oppose all of this.

Maybe it's not chutzpah, maybe they just lack elementary thinking skills.

The Beauty of Mathematics

Australian Geneticist Michael Denton talks about the strange beauty of mathematics and how that beauty militates against the hypothesis that mathematics is something that we invent. Denton argues instead that mathematical truth exists independently of us and that we discover rather than create it. This raises, of course, the intriguing question of how it came to be in the first place:

Michael Denton - Mathematical Truths Are Transcendent And Beautiful -

An explanation of Pascal's Triangle can be found here. While you're at it you might also want to check out the Fibonacci sequence and its myriad occurrences in nature. It's fascinating.

The Corrosive Effects of Liberalism

People sometimes think that the only differences between conservatives and liberals are political. They may differ on how to address our economic problems but which one chooses is pretty much a matter of taste. This is, however, not true. The differences extend far beyond how we should manage the nation's finances. Dennis Prager argues that liberalism is corrosive of a nation's moral character.

He gives ten ways in which liberalism corrodes our character both nationally and individually. This is not to say that individual liberals are not fine people, but rather that the policies they support have a pernicious effect that they doubtless don't intend.

Here's a summary of his argument:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults....The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.

9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

Prager opines that progressives don't try to refute these charges, rather they simply invoke emotionally charged terms like "social justice" and "compassion," and smear their opponents as "selfish" or "racist".

He closes his piece by saying that if you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

Flying Squirrel

If you're a collegiate wrestling fan you'll appreciate this takedown by Ellis Coleman of Northern Michigan at the Junior World Championships. Coleman was competing against an Iranian wrestler named Mehdi Chooli Zeidvand who can probably look forward to being shot for embarrassing his country when he returns home.

The move is called "the Flying Squirrel."

Coleman went on to win the match, and eventually earned third place in his weight class.

Thanks to HuffPo for the tip.

That's Our Joe

Politico reports that Vice President Joe Biden compared the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists in the recent debt ceiling negotiations:

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

This is pretty funny coming from an administration that's reluctant to call actual terrorists terrorists.

In the Orwellian world of Mr. Biden and his associates, apparently, people who maim and kill for political reasons are not terrorists, but people who insist we stop spending money we don't have are.

Speaking of Mr. Biden, we were very disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that he's charging the Secret Service rent for living in a house he owns so that they can better protect him. What this means is that we the taxpayers are actually paying Mr. Biden for the privilege of protecting his life. Perhaps this is what the administration has in mind when they say that everyone should pay their fair share.

I wonder if people demanded an end to this scam if Mr. Biden would consider us terrorists.

Getting bin Laden

The New Yorker has an account by Nicholas Schmidle of what happened in Abottabad the night Osama bin Laden's luck finally ran out. Schmidle's piece has some fascinating details about the raid on bin Laden's compound and is a fascinating read. Here's how he begins:

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU.

A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

One of the details Schmidle discusses is why the president opted for a raid rather than a missile attack. He also points out that this mission was just a night's work for most of the men involved. Most of them had been on dozens if not hundreds of such missions not only in Pakistan but also Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Give it a read.

The Incredible Design of Chemistry

Scientist Michael Denton discusses the amazing fitness of the laws and properties of chemistry, particularly the properties of water and carbon dioxide, for the production of life on earth. Denton is an agnostic but he finds this fitness astonishing and inexplicable apart from a superintelligent designer:

Michael Denton - We Are Stardust - Fine Tuning Of The Elements - Fred Hoyle Atheist to Theist -

Denton's book Nature's Destiny goes into these matters in much more detail. It's an excellent read for anyone interested in learning more about the fine-tuning argument. A brief discussion of Hoyle's prediction can be found here.

Al Qaeda on the Brink

There seems to be a growing consensus in the intelligence community that al Qaeda is on life support. According to a report in the Washington Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al­ Qaeda to the brink of collapse.

The assessment reflects a widespread view at the CIA and other agencies that a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — an outcome that was seen as a distant prospect for much of the past decade.

Unfortunately, Islamic terrorism is hydra-headed. When al Qaeda is no longer viable other nihilistic savages will step up to fill their role. We are in a generational war with people who want to destroy everything about the Western way of life and everyone in the Islamic world who disagrees with them on any point of doctrine. This war won't end until one side or the other is exhausted either economically, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Honest Politicians

A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that the debt ceiling impasse has shown that our system of governance is broken. We're too divided and unable to get anything done any longer, the argument goes, and it's all the fault of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party. The Tea Party congressmen and women are nutty obstructionists, a scourge on our politics, and we need to vote them out in order to save our democracy.

I think this is all exactly wrong. I think our system is working fine. Americans are learning the difference between contrasting visions of what government should be and learning, too, that their votes matter, that they have the power to elect people who will truly represent them. So far from being the end of democracy, as some are saying, I believe we're seeing it's reinvigoration.

We're also seeing politicians model what we've always said we wanted political leaders to be.

For years we've heard that the problem with Washington is that the people we send there can't be trusted to do what they said they would do, they're too easily bought off, all they care about is their next election, they have no principles, they lie, etc.

Now for the first time in my memory a significant fraction of the House and Senate is comprised of people who are doing exactly what they said they'd do, who can't be bought with earmarks or promises of campaign funding, who don't care about being re-elected, whose only ambition is to see their principles upheld, who are genuinely putting the country's future ahead of their own political careers, and a lot of people, mostly on the left but also in the GOP (Senator John McCain, for example), are beside themselves with frustration and even anger.

To watch the fulminations of some of the commentators at MSNBC you'd think that people who refuse to be complicit in burdening our children with crushing debt are going to be the end of the Republic. Some are calling them "terrorists" and "anarchists". A casual viewer would gain the impression that these evil people were deliberately trying to destroy the country rather than save it.

What we're now hearing is that all that talk about the need for principled leadership is no longer "operative". What we really need are people who can compromise, who'll shrug off their principles, who'll renege on the campaign promises they made their constituents. In other words, what we need, we're now being told, are precisely the kind of politicians that everyone has for decades held in contempt.

It seems that what some folks mean when they say they want politicians with integrity is that they want honest politicians as long as those politicians are reliably liberal. Otherwise, they want them to be as weak and unprincipled as they can be.