Fuzzy Science

It's a good rule of thumb, I think, always to be skeptical of scientific studies or discoveries which have political or metaphysical implications.

When, for example, fossilized single-celled organisms are claimed to have been found in meteorites, a discovery which would lend credence to the dogma that evolution of life is inevitable and will occur anywhere that conditions are right, it's wise to wait for further examination by experts to see if they concur that these really are fossilized organisms and not just inorganic artifacts. Likewise with any alleged discovery of remains of a putative link between homo sapiens and ape-like evolutionary ancestors.

Similarly, reports of alarming developments caused by climate change should be taken with a grain of salt until the reports have been subjected to the peer-review process. Often it'll be found that the assertions are either overblown or simply wrong. The case of the Himalayan melting glaciers last year is an example.

Another may be found in a story at NewScientist.com:

Erroneous data about how much ice is vanishing due to climate change are once more at the heart of an explosive controversy. This time, it's not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the venerable Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World that is in the line of fire.

Journalists across the UK received glossy press packs last week for the launch of a new edition. It included a press release declaring that: "For the first time, the new edition […] has had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland's once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the UK and Ireland 'green' and ice-free. This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever."

Today glaciologists have been crying foul, saying that the 15 per cent figure is wildly inaccurate.

When New Scientist contacted the Times Atlas team last week to find out where they had obtained the number, they cited the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, but were unable to be more precise.

Ted Scambos, the NSIDC's expert on the Greenland ice sheet, says neither he nor his colleagues were consulted in person. "Graduate students would not have made a mistake like this," he told New Scientist. "If what The Times has said were true, something like a meter of sea level rise would have occurred in the past decade."

That is nowhere near what measurements show. "Currently, Greenland is losing mass at about a rate of 150 billion tonnes per year, or about one-third of a millimetre of sea level rise per year," says Scambos. That means in the 12-year period from 1999 to 2011 that the Times Atlas analysed, meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet has contributed roughly 3 mm to global sea level rise – not 1 metre.

In total, the Greenland ice sheet holds enough ice to raise global sea level by about 7 metres, so the loss since 1999 has been less than 0.05 per cent.

Of course, a 3 mm rise in sea level in 12 years is not the same as zero rise, but it's hardly alarming. If the ice continues to melt at that rate then by the end of the century the oceans will be about an inch higher than they were at the beginning of the century. That doesn't seem all that alarming.

Carbon Vacuum Cleaner

If atmospheric carbon is indeed an environmental threat and a problem to be solved there are basically two approaches: One is to limit carbon dioxide emissions, a measure which would have severe economic consequences. The other is to suck the carbon from the air once it's there. A story at NPR discusses the work of a physics professor by the name of David Keith who is working on the latter approach.

Keith is on a patch of blacktop on the campus of the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, where until very recently he has been a professor. Now his academic hat is Harvard, where he is both a professor of public policy and a professor of applied physics. His hard hat is a little start-up company, called Carbon Engineering, housed on the Calgary campus. And that company is building a machine that can actually suck carbon dioxide from the air.

The technology at the core of the device is not new. "People have done this for a long time," he says. "There were commercial processes that took CO2 out of the air, in fact, in the 1950s, so there's no mystery that we can do it."

But those companies were just extracting small quantities of carbon dioxide for industrial purposes. Keith is after a much more important question, one that is universal for anyone trying to develop a technology: Can it be done affordably on a grand scale?

"So our interest is in building full-scale commercial systems that would take tens of thousands of tons — or more — of CO2 out of the air," he says.

You can read about Keith's work at the link. If his ideas work it would have enormous implications for public policy, at least those policies designed to curtail carbon emissions.

I wonder if Keith got any of the stimulus money of the sort that was showered on Solyndra. Probably not unless he was a big donor to the Obama campaign.

The Sap

David Brooks has been a loyal booster for the Obama administration since 2008, using his perch at the New York Times to regularly express his hopes and admiration for the president. Now he confesses that he's had an epiphany. He realizes that he's been setting himself up for chronic disappointment. He's been duped by the man he thought would be a new kind of politician. He is, in his words, a sap:

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

Brooks' contrition continues on for several more paragraphs, but reading it is a bit like watching those poor people in medieval Europe walking through a village flagellating themselves in hopes that their penance will somehow atone for their sins and earn them God's favor.

Brooks' disillusionment with Mr. Obama is touching in its pathos, but it raises a question: What reason did he have for thinking that Mr. Obama would turn out otherwise than he has? Where was the evidence in his past experience to think that he was anything but a far-left community organizer?

He sounds a bit like the naive teenage girl who gives her heart to the handsome lothario who promises her his undying love and a lifetime of happiness until he beds her and then moves on leaving her brokenhearted and mystified as to how she could have ever thought he was such a wonderful guy in the first place. It's sad.

Re: Poverty in America

Recently we ran a post titled Poverty in America to which a reader named Carol submitted a response in which she expresses the feelings of many Americans who want to help people who are less fortunate than they are but who are repelled by the abuse they see in the system. She also illustrates the absurdity of calling the less well-off in America poor, as if they were in anything like the same straits as people in much of the world who live daily in abject misery and squalor. I'd like to share some of what she wrote with you:

When considering poverty in America, I feel like I'm on a tightrope between compassion and outrage. Compassion for the truly poor people who lack food, clothing, and shelter, and outrage at all the evidence of welfare system "scammers." We all know people on food stamps who are severely overweight and feeding several large dogs, or families on welfare with big screen tv's, IPhones, and IPads.

I have a friend whose family receives some government aid. Her husband is a photographer and she works in a beauty salon, but they can barely make ends meet. Their children receive free school lunches and have had to drop out of sports and return musical instruments because they could not afford it.

We went to the beach together and had to cook every night because the family could not afford to eat out. I gladly supported this economic choice. I felt bad that evening when one of the children wanted a souvenir T-shirt and was severely reprimanded by her mother for wanting such a frivolous thing. Imagine my shock, when the very next day, this Mom bought herself a $200 pair of designer sunglasses on the boardwalk! So what is "poor?" I agree that "poor" is a relative term.

My daughter and I traveled to the Dominican Republic in May of this year with Compassion International, to visit the child I sponsor, Franklin Acosta (age 8). Our trip began in the city of Santo Domingo, visiting the homes of some of the sponsored families. The "home" we visited was a one-room concrete slab under the street level. We entered a small, narrow, alley which wound deeper and deeper into the earth. We passed by many concrete homes built on top of each other into the earth. It is a whole other world down there.

When we got to this woman's home, it was only big enough to hold a double bed which took up the entire back half of the home. The entire family of five sleeps together in that one bed. The front half of the home had room for a small gas cook top, tiny refrigerator, wooden end table, and a chair. Clothing was hung on a metal bar across the bed.

That night, our Compassion tour specialist checked us in to an all-inclusive ocean-front resort, in order to magnify the cultural shock. My daughter and I cried and were hugely impacted, as was the rest of our team.

Over the next two days we visited more poor families at the Bateys. Bateys are communities of poor Haitians who crossed the border due to promises of money to work the sugarcane plantations. Of course, that was a false promise. They were paid $1 a day. Now, the sugarcane plantations have closed down, but these poor people still live there. They crossed the border without paperwork and identification, so are not recognized by the Dominican Republic as citizens.

This means that they are not eligible for many Dominican programs, but they are too poor to go back to Haiti. They live in concrete one or two-room homes. They cook in big pots over an open fire. They have no running water or electricity in their homes. These people have no electronic devices, no phones, no bathrooms. That is poor.

Perhaps we should redefine the economic classes in this country. Instead of classifying people as belonging to the upper, middle, and lower classes, perhaps it would be more accurate to classify them as members of the upper, middle, and lower upper class.

Hostile to Women

Ron Suskind has a new book coming out about the Obama presidency and it has a few items in it that are sure to raise blood pressures at the White House. According to Politico some of the major players on the President's economic team felt there was simply no leadership coming from the Oval Office. Suskind quotes Larry Summers talking to Peter Orzag:

‘You know, Peter, we’re really home alone.’ Over the past few months, Summers had said this, in a stage whisper, to Orszag and others as they left the morning economic briefings in the Oval Office. … ‘I mean it,’ Summers stressed. ‘We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.’

The fact that people closest to the Oval Office felt no one was manning the helm is bad enough, but there's more in the book to dismay Obama enthusiasts (are there still such folks?). Mr. Obama's staff was apparently comprised of a bunch of Neanderthals as well:

‘The president has a real woman problem’ was the assessment of another high-ranking female official. ‘The idea of the boys’ club being just Larry [Summers] and Rahm [Emmanuel] isn’t fair. He [Obama] was just as responsible himself.’ … ‘[L]ooking back,’ recalled Anita Dunn [Obama's former communications director], when asked about it nearly two years later, ‘this place would be in court for a hostile workplace … Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.’

Yikes. The most progressive White House in history is run by a bunch of chauvinist pigs? Who'd have guessed? But, hey - they'll keep abortion legal so presumably feminists will bite their tongues and keep their complaints to themselves, just like they did during the Clinton presidency. Isn't it ironic that we never heard these kinds of revelations emanating from the Reagan administration or either Bush administration. It seems that it's only when liberals are in the White House that women get treated shabbily.

The Coming State of Eurabia

Clifford May writes a column at National Review about a new book by Bat Ye'or. Ye'or is a refugee from Egypt who has been writing for thirty years about the plight of Christian and Jewish dhimmis - religious minorities living in Muslim lands as second-class citizens. Her book, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate, looks at Muslims living in lands that once were Christian but which today call themselves multicultural. She predicts Europe will not remain multicultural for long. She's convinced that Europe is well along the way toward dhimmi status and will in the not too distant future be dominated by Islamic extremists and transformed into “Eurabia”:

Committed to a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilateral ideology that rejects patriotism and even national identity and cultural pride, afflicted by guilt over their imperial and colonial past — and ignorant about more than a thousand years of Islamic imperialism and colonialism — Europeans have become dhimmis in their own lands; inferiors who accept their status and submit.

Muslims in these lands are not so guilt-ridden or timorous about their cause or its justness. Under the banner of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) they're determined to establish Islam and Sharia throughout the West. Ye'or calls the IOC a kind of caliphate which in contrast with Europe:

...rejects multiculturalism, openly professing the superiority of the Islamic faith, civilization, and laws.

The caliphate,” Bat Ye’or concludes, is “alive and growing within Europe....It has advanced through the denial of dangers and the obfuscating of history. It has moved forward on gilded carpets in the corridors of dialogue, the network of the Alliances and partnerships, in the corruption of its leaders, intellectuals and NGOs, particularly at the United Nations.”

May closes his piece with a warning:

If you think that’s alarmist, if you think the OIC sincerely seeks cooperation with the West or that Europeans know where lines must be drawn and have the courage to draw them, read her book. Or just wait a few years.

Trifecta

Those who want to know what the Solyndra mess is all about should read former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy's piece at National Review.

Evidently, the Obama administration is hip deep in mud on this one. Not only were they complicit in fraudulently promoting a business that everyone told them was heading for bankruptcy; not only did they bestow a 535 million dollar gift, courtesy of the taxpayers, upon a company even though everyone told them it was an enormous risk, but they also circumvented the law that would allow the taxpayers to recoup some of that 535 million in the event of the bankruptcy that everyone told them was coming. Instead, they illegally restructured the arrangement so that Solyndra's major investors would get reimbursed first, and, just by coincidence, one of the major investors happened to be one of Mr. Obama's premier fundraisers in 2008.

McCarthy opens his column with this:

The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims — in this case, American taxpayers — a fortune.

Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.

He goes on to explain what happened and how the laws were broken. Maybe someday the name "Solyndra" will take its place alongside the word "Watergate" as a byword for White House scandal.

Since WW II there've been basically three reasons why voters have turned against presidents: Bad economy (Carter, Bush Sr.), unpopular war (Johnson, Bush Jr.), and scandal (Nixon, Clinton). President Obama appears on course for achieving the trifecta.

Proofiness and the Gender Gap

In a fine piece at City Journal Kay Hymowitz considers the reasons which have been advanced to explain why there's a gap between the incomes of males and females and concludes that, contrary to what we often hear from folks who see injustice lurking in every social disparity, there's nothing nefarious about the gender gap. She also concludes that it'll never go away. Here are some excerpts:

Early this past spring, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a much-anticipated report called Women in America. One of its conclusions struck a familiar note: today, as President Obama said in describing the document, “women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a huge discrepancy.”

It is a huge discrepancy. It’s also an exquisite example of what journalist Charles Seife has dubbed “proofiness.” Proofiness is the use of misleading statistics to confirm what you already believe. Indeed, the 75-cent meme depends on a panoply of apple-to-orange comparisons that support a variety of feminist policy initiatives, from the Paycheck Fairness Act to universal child care, while telling us next to nothing about the well-being of women.

Hymowitz goes on to show the fallacies inherent in some of the explanations of the alleged inequities:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more. But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 am and leaves promptly at 4 pm to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week—and lunch on weekends—at his desk.

I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that—and here is an average that proofers rarely mention—full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; meanwhile, just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since FTYR men work more than FTYR women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

She also has little patience with the claim that women make less money than men who perform the same job:

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded.

Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women. So the statement that female doctors make only 64.2 percent of what men make is really on the order of a tautology, much like saying that a surgeon working 50 hours a week makes significantly more than a pediatrician working 37.

Even so, she's willing to concede that there remains a gap between male and female income, but to impute it to discrimination, as is often done, is simply an argument from ignorance:

The point is that we don’t know the reason—or, more likely, reasons—for the 7 percent gap. What we do know is that making discrimination the default explanation for a wage gap, as proofers want us to do, leads us down some weird rabbit holes. Asian men and women earn more than white men and women do, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Does that mean that whites are discriminated against in favor of Asians? Female cafeteria attendants earn more than male ones do. Are men discriminated against in that field? Women who work in construction earn almost exactly what men in the field do, while women in education earn considerably less. The logic of default discrimination would lead us to conclude that construction workers are more open to having female colleagues than educators are. With all due respect to the construction workers, that seems unlikely.

So, what might account for the gap if not gender discrimination?

So why do women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The answer is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.

That’s likely to change as soon as the children arrive. Mothers, particularly those with young children, take more time off from work; even when they are working, they’re on the job less. Behind the Pay Gap found that “among women who graduated from college in 1992–93, more than one-fifth (23 percent) of mothers were out of the work force in 2003, and another 17 percent were working part time,” compared with under 2 percent of fathers in each case. Other studies show consistently that the first child significantly reduces a woman’s earnings and that the second child cuts them even further.

Of course, anyone with common sense knew that the mommy track was the primary explanation for the wage disparity, but common sense is not an abundant resource among ideologues determined to find injustice in every nook and cranny of our society. Sometimes one has to resort, as does Hymowitz, to a calm recitation of the facts.

Anyway, there's much, much more on this at the link, and those of a sociological inclination will want to read it all. It's something of an aesthetic pleasure seeing the shibboleths of conventional opinion deconstructed in front of one's very eyes.

Metaphysical Identity Disorder

A study out of Canada does nothing to allay suspicions that either atheists are a very confused bunch or that Canadian churches are so secularized as to be indistinguishable from the local Elks lodge.

It turns out that 28% of those who identified themselves as Protestants, 33% of those who identified themselves as Catholics, and 23% of those who said they attend weekly religious services do not believe in God.

And atheists like to call theists irrational?

Perhaps there's a metaphysical disorder equivalent to gender identity disorder that causes some atheists to be completely confused about what they are. Psychologists ought to study this.

HT: Joe Carter at First Things.

Black Loyalty

Columnist and erstwhile presidential candidate Pat Buchanan opines that the President is on a collision course with the most loyal elements of his political base. The reason is the precarious position blacks find themselves in as the economy constricts. Buchanan writes:

Black America’s situation, though tough today, seems certain to get tougher. Why?

First, black Americans held a significant share of the subprime mortgages that went sour when housing prices went south, and are thus over-represented among those who lost homes.

Second, black Americans, with a higher rate of poverty, depend more on the entitlement and social programs that Obama cannot avoid hoisting onto the chopping block in any “balanced” plan for dealing with the deficit-debt crisis.

Third, African-Americans are over-represented among the 22 million who work for local, state and federal governments. And while government workers came out best in terms of job security and salary hikes in the stimulus days of 2009 and 2010, in the austerity days of 2011, they are getting their fair share of pink slips. It is almost a truism: Whenever Middle America goes into recession, Black America flirts with depression.

Consider the U.S. Postal Service, with 600,000 employees, running a deficit of $8.5 billion and facing layoffs of 120,000. According to William Burrus, ex-president of the Postal Workers Union, 21 percent of all postal employees are black. When the cuts come, minorities will take a big hit.

This helps explain a sociological fact that mystifies many conservatives (and some liberals) but shouldn't - the fealty of black Americans to the Democrat party. Buchanan explains:

That African-Americans favor a powerful federal government is understandable. After all, it was the federal government that crushed the Confederacy, freed the slaves, sent troops to integrate the South, enacted the civil rights laws, imposed affirmative action on companies and colleges, and created the Great Society that provided trillions in wealth transfers and welfare benefits and employs a share of the black population that is nearly twice its representation in the labor force.

This all goes a long way to explain why so many blacks are so hostile to tea party conservatism and loyal to Democrats who are defenders and promoters of big government. Conservatives want to reduce the size of government which will only put more blacks out of work and diminish the benefits they receive from taxpayers.

At any rate, Mr. Obama is between a rock and a hard place. According to Buchanan:

If he proposes new taxes, Tea Party Republicans fix bayonets. If he proposes downsizing the government and cutting and capping social programs, his most loyal constituents rise up against him.

Maybe what President Obama should do is what's best for the long term health of the nation as a whole, not what's best for the short-term benefit of a part of it. Of course, that won't save him from the impending collision with his base.

Millionaires and Billionaires

Television personality Chuck Woolery explains how those rich folks like Warren Buffett and Matt Damon who think the rich aren't paying enough in taxes can show their sincerity:

The call by Warren Buffett to make the rich like him pay more is pretty funny considering that according to Money News he himself takes pains to shield his fortune from the IRS:

For many years now Buffett has pointed out that he pays less tax than his secretary. How could the country’s most well-known billionaire, worth $50 billion, get away with that?

Here’s the significant reason — one that Buffett omits from his Op-Ed: He has traditionally drawn a tiny salary from his company Berkshire Hathaway and gives no dividends to shareholders like himself.

So, even if ... income tax rates were raised on the wealthy, he might not pay significantly more in taxes. By keeping his wealth in his company, Buffett has discovered one of the best tax avoidance schemes ever invented. And Buffett never suggests that corporate loopholes that he has personally taken advantage of for decades should be closed.

For example, his Berkshire Hathaway company has acted as an effective holding company for his vast investment portfolio. Last I checked, Berkshire Hathaway was generating over $7 billion in dividend income each year from stocks the company owned.

Due to a special exemption (read: loophole) Buffett enjoys, his company benefits from the fact that nearly 90 percent of the dividend income is exempt from any corporate tax! (I do too, as I am a shareholder as well.)

Buffett is then able to take these wads of tax-free cash and re-invest them, buying more stocks or whole companies — a strategy he’s been employing for decades as part of his wealth-creating money machine.

So Buffett knows that even if tax rates were raised on the income of the so-called “wealthy,” it would have little or no effect on the “super-rich” like himself who put a corporate shell around their assets and never disburse much cash to themselves in the form of income or dividends.

Buffett gives a lot of his fortune to charity which is certainly to his credit but for him to call for higher taxes on the rich when he shields his own money from taxation is pretty disingenuous.

It's also disingenuous of President Obama to keep referring to his desire to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires. His tax proposals would raise taxes on every individual making more than $200,000 and every couple making more than $250,000. According to the Wall Street Journal the vast number of people who would be paying more taxes under Obama's Jobs Bill are not millionaires and billionaires. Many of them are small business owners who we're counting on to hire people to get us out of the recession:

Almost 4 million people reported income above $200,000 in 2009, and they paid $434 billion in taxes. To put it another way, roughly 90% of the tax filers who would pay more under Mr. Obama's plan aren't millionaires, and 99.99% aren't billionaires.

Four hundred and thirty four billion seems like a "fair share", especially when 47% of Americans pay nothing in federal income taxes.

Raising taxes on people you hope will employ those who're looking for work is a lousy way to get out of a recession. Why doesn't the White House understand this?

Poverty in America

Yesterday we noted a report which stated that poverty in America is increasing. It's tragic that people are losing jobs and income and that others are unemployable, but the report raised a question in my mind: What is the real extent of poverty in America?

Poverty is a relative term. Compared to what I've seen in Central America or conditions friends describe having witnessed in Haiti and Africa, or compared to the amenities even the very wealthy have enjoyed throughout history, the people in America whom we call poor are immensely well off.

A report from the Heritage Foundation gives us some perspective:

[U]nderstanding poverty in America requires looking behind these numbers at the actual living conditions of the individuals the government deems to be poor. For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests near destitution: an inability to provide nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter for one’s family.

However, only a small number of the 46 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.

• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• 92 percent of poor households have a microwave.
• Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.
• Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.
• Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and 70 percent have a VCR.
• Half have a personal computer, and one in seven have two or more computers.
• More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
• 43 percent have Internet access.
• One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
• One-fourth have a digital video recorder system, such as a TiVo.
• 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food.
• 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat.
• 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
• Over the course of a year, 4 percent of poor persons become temporarily homeless.
• Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers, 49.5 percent live in separate single-family houses or townhouses, and 40 percent live in apartments.
• 42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom.
• The vast majority of the homes or apartments of the poor are in good repair.

By their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed.

The poor in America have access to better schools, health care, libraries, transportation, indoor plumbing and lighting, clothing, communications, than was available to even the filthiest-rich aristocrats throughout history. Louis XVI, lounging at Versailles, would have envied the standard of living of America's poor.

To get a glimpse of what it's like to be genuinely impoverished read a book like Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt who describes his childhood in the Ireland of the 1950s. Very few people in America live at the level of indigence that was for millions of Irish a matter of course.

The Heritage report closes with this:

Finally, welfare policy needs to address the causes of poverty, not merely the symptoms. Among families with children, the collapse of marriage and erosion of the work ethic are the principal long-term causes of poverty. When the recession ends, welfare policy must require able-bodied recipients to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving aid. It should also strengthen marriage in low-income communities rather than ignore and penalize it.

What is government at any level doing to address the real causes of American poverty? Not much.

Deja Vu at the White House

President Obama is insisting that Congress pass his 447 billion dollar "jobs" bill. This bill will, he argues, help teachers and firemen keep their jobs, build infrastructure, lower unemployment, etc. (not to mention help him look relevant), but this is exactly what we were told the effects of the 800 billion dollar stimulus bill would be two years ago. That one failed to work, it only put us deeper in debt, and now the President wants to go still deeper yet by doing it all again.

He wants us to continue doing the same thing that didn't work before while hoping this time for a different result.

Meanwhile, the American standard of living continues to decline. From Yahoo News we learn that:

The ranks of America's poor swelled to almost 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in more than two decades.

The Census Bureau's annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged in the midst of a re-election fight that the unemployment rate could persist at high levels through next year.

The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million, up from 14.3 percent in 2009. The official poverty level is an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four.

Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment.

Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in 1993 and was the highest since 1983. The share of Americans without health coverage rose from 16.1 percent to 16.3 percent — or 49.9 million people — after the Census Bureau made revisions to numbers of the uninsured. That is due mostly to continued losses of employer-provided health insurance in the weakened economy.

The median — or midpoint — household income was $49,445, down 2.3 percent from 2009.

What could the president do to get America working again? He could encourage the development of domestic energy resources, drop the moratorium on offshore drilling, drop most of the regulations that are stifling business, lower the capital gains and corporate income tax, rescind Obamacare, and stop calling for higher taxes on people making $200,000 or more. All of these would remove the wet blanket of uncertainty that shrouds business and encourage them to hire workers, borrow money to expand, and prime the pump of economic growth.

Congressman Paul Ryan explains:

Mr. Obama won't do any of this, of course, because he's ideologically committed to high taxes and high spending. Thus the economy will stagnate until he's finally out of office and someone is elected who will provide the leadership to undo the damage that the last five years have wrought on our economy, our society, and our families.

Big Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution

Sometimes people ask why conservatives don't think much of big, overbearing, bureaucratic government (I guess putting the question this way pretty much answers it). Part of the reason, of course, is that we too often read things like these:

Congressman Anthony Weiner who resigned in disgrace will reap about one million dollars of your and my money in pension and benefits.

A kid's lemonade stand was shut down and the parents were fined $500 because they didn't have a permit. They were selling lemonade to raise money for pediatric cancer.

A man was ticketed by authorities for directing traffic when a traffic light malfunctioned and police didn't show up. The man got traffic moving but was fined by police when they finally arrived. After citing the man the cops left, and the snarled traffic piled up again.

You read this sort of thing everyday and you can't help but think that ladling on more rules and regulations and hiring more bureaucrats to staff more wasteful bureaucracies will only make these sorts of stories more common and more aggravating.

Government rules and regulations have the effect of sapping citizens of their initiative and enterprise. People grow reluctant to take it upon themselves to do anything that they see needs to be done for fear of being fined or sued. Under an overweening government we become a nation of emasculated sheep.

Speaking of big government Jonah Goldberg has an amusing piece at NationalReview.com in which he notes the unintended irony in the MSNBC "Lean Forward" ads that they've been running for the past couple of months.

One of the ads has Rachel Maddow standing at the Hoover Dam lamenting the fact that too many people think the days when we could build something like this are behind us, and that we're no longer a great nation because we no longer undertake great projects. Goldberg chuckles at this since the reason we would not and could not build a Hoover Dam today is precisely because progressives like Ms. Maddow would never allow it:

The reason the ad is so funny is that nobody thinks liberals such as Maddow would support anything like the Hoover Dam today. The Hoover Dam is a marvel. But by today’s green standards, it is a crime against nature. If you tried to build it, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace would be in court tomorrow blocking it, with Ms. Maddow cheering them on.

Indeed, look at all the activists attacking the proposed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. It would create thousands of construction jobs and yet liberals oppose it for the usual petrophobic reasons. Ironically, liberals love building highways and bridges, but loathe making it affordable to drive on them.

This is just a small example of the Catch-22 liberalism has found itself in. The Left yearns to “go big” but it wants to do so through the extremely narrow routes it has created for itself. They say government must rush into this economic crisis like firemen into a burning building. But they also don’t want to lighten the useless baggage the firemen must carry or remove the Byzantine obstacle course they’ve decreed the figurative firefighters must run through before getting to work.

Goldberg borrows Jonathan Rauch’s term Demosclerosis to describe the shackles that liberals like Maddow in the Democratic party have placed on those who would do great things. A nation that suffers from Demosclerosis is a nation:

whose first responders to Hurricane Katrina have to undergo sensitivity training before they can save people from drowning and 'shovel-ready' green jobs require months of 'prevailing wage' compliance paper-pushing and are too expensive anyway. Boston’s Big Dig took two decades to build; the far more ambitious Hoover Dam, which Maddow and company love, took four years.

These MSNBC ads really are amusing. Try to imagine, say, building the transcontinental railroad under the regulatory conditions that prevail today. The foul smoke belched out by coal-burning steam engines, the threat to wildlife posed by those steam engines barreling down the tracks, the scars inflicted on the scenic west by construction crews, the cheap non-union labor that was employed, the hazardous conditions the workers endured, and many more insufferable insults to liberal sensibilities would guarantee that such a project would never get off the ground. The sorts of bureaucracies that make the progressive heart pound would stop such a project before it ever got started, and Ms. Maddow wonders why we can't build stuff any more.

Big government makes its people small and, as John Stuart Mill said, with small people no big thing can be accomplished. According to a Heritage Foundation report the Obama administration has, since taking office, implemented or proposed 75 new major regulations, costing potential employers 38 billion dollars annually. If Ms. Maddow really wants to see innovation unleashed and great projects undertaken she should use her podium at MSNBC to tell Mr. Obama to get his government off our backs and out of the way.

Assassin Bugs

An article at the BBC discusses research that some biologists have done on a kind of insect called an Assassin bug. These creatures exhibit a fascinating behavior as explained in the article:

Assassin bugs hunt spiders on their webs by stalking or luring their victims before stabbing them with their long, sharp snouts. Researchers studying these aggressive arthropods have now found that they use noise to cover their tracks. The bugs wait for the wind to rustle the web, then take the opportunity to sneak up on their prey.

"Web-building spiders have only rudimentary eyesight, so avoiding being seen is not an issue for web-invading arthropods," the team explained in the paper. "The main sensory system of web-building spiders is based on interpreting vibrations in the web - web silk is exquisitely proficient at transmitting vibrations from potential prey and predators in the web."

The researchers placed the bugs onto the spider webs and used a desk fan to simulate a breeze on the web. When the fan was on, "the assassin bugs stepped more often and walked in a more continuous manner", the team explained. They described this tactic as "opportunistic smokescreen behaviour".

"The exciting thing in this study is that the assassin bugs can increase their chances of catching food by using wind noise as cover." The breeze did not seem to trigger the assassin bug to move when it was in an unoccupied spider web. This, the team wrote, suggested that "noise-related timing of behaviour reflects decisions made as part of a predatory strategy", rather than just a response to the physical movement of the web.

Assassin bugs also have a strange way of moving, and the scientists think this bouncing gait - "gently erratically rocking in the web" - may make it more difficult for the spiders to identify the characteristic vibrations of footsteps on silk. The bugs are perhaps "simulating debris moving in the wind", explained the researchers.

In a previous study the same team discovered that the bugs lured spiders by "pretending" to be prey tangled in the web. They tapped the silk to mimic the vibrations of a trapped insect. When the spider approaches - or when the assassin bug gets within striking distance - the predator strikes with its tube-like mouthparts, through which it injects the victim with a toxin that liquefies its insides so they can be sucked out.

Sometimes I'm just in awe of the miracles that natural selection coupled with accidental genetic mutations can accomplish purely by blind dumb luck. I know it takes a lot of faith to believe that such marvels can happen by chance, but it must be true else the scientific whizzes who host talk shows at MSNBC wouldn't make fun of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann for not believing it.

Where's Waldo

Libyan rebels and NATO intelligence services have been frustrated in their search for Muammar Qaddafi. Now Debkafile reports that his whereabouts is known but that he's in a desert oasis virtually inaccessible to the rebels with the resources they have available to them. I don't vouch for debkafile's accuracy, but their report makes sense:

In a world exclusive, debkafile's intelligence sources reveal that Muammar Qaddafi, two of his sons and several thousand fighters have gone to ground at Targan. This dot on the vast Saharan map lies several hundred kilometers southwest of the remote desert town of Jiffra which, too, is more than 1,500 kilometers from rebel-held Tripoli and Sirte, where his loyalists are holding out against Libyan rebels.

Western intelligence sources believe that if Qaddafi feels threatened there too, he will use a prepared escape route to Burkina Faso, whose president Blaise Compaoré and prime minister Luc Adolphe Tiao, despite their official denials, have promised him sanctuary. Burkina Faso is a member of the CEN-SAD (Community of Sahel-Saharan States) which still acknowledges Qaddafi as ruler of Libya and refuses to recognize the rebel regime.

Targan is a vast oasis covering hundreds of square kilometers with lakes and connecting streams wreathed in densely-growing palm trees and papyrus rushes. This hideout has so far eluded US spy and aerial satellite searches for the fugitive Libyan ruler. In case he is run to ground, he is believed to have prepared more than one escape route, some of them burrowed underground in places hidden by vegetation.

With him almost certainly are two of his sons, Saif al Islam and Moatassem-Billah and a part of the 32nd Khamis Brigade....

NATO and rebel forces have two major problems before they can catch Qaddafi:

Getting to the remote and vast Targan area is one. Another is controlling it. A very large military force would be required, inured to combat in the extreme climatic conditions of the Sahara which neither NATO nor the rebels have available. They would also need to find out which of the dozens of nomadic tribes in the region have given their allegiance to the Libyan ruler, because without the cooperation of some of those tribes no military operation has a chance of succeeding.

Read the rest at the link.

Our Media Watchdogs

Why is it, we wonder, that when Michele Bachmann gets her history confused, suggesting that the Founding Fathers worked to end slavery or that the "shot heard round the world" was fired in New Hampshire, the media erupts in spasms of derisive hilarity. They just can't get enough of the buffoonery of Michele Bachmann, but when Barack Obama commits a similar error there's utter silence. Not only is there nothing to be heard but the chirping of crickets, some media organs feel it necessary to actually cover up the mistake to keep the President from suffering the kind of mockery which should only be visited upon the likes of Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and George Bush.

As an example, consider that in his speech last Thursday night the President said this:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future -- a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad ....

In fact, so far from being a founder, Lincoln only joined the party in 1856, two years after it was founded, but you won't hear any hearty guffaws from the usual suspects on the Left who would be rolling on the floor had Bachmann said this.

Now, don't misunderstand. I don't think the President's misstatement is a big deal, nor did I think it was necessarily indicative of any mental shortcoming when he claimed to have campaigned in all 57 states, but neither is it a big deal when Republicans commit the same sort of blunders. If people are going to hold a laugh-fest when Bachmann or Palin says something untoward they should do the same thing when Obama does it, and if, as I think, they shouldn't deride the President for his historical solecisms neither should they deride Republicans for theirs.

What I do think is a big deal, though, besides the contrast in the reaction to Republican goofs and Democrat goofs, is that PBS went so far as to scrub the Obama flub from their transcript of his speech. Here's what the PBS transcript said:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future.

What would have been treated as an uproarious gaffe if a Republican had said it was actually expunged from the transcript by a media outlet that's subsidized by our tax dollars. PBS, behaving like Izvestia under the old Soviet regime, deliberately edited out anything which would make the president to whom they're emotionally wedded look ill-informed. Nor have I seen anything in any liberal media source chastising PBS for this shameful breach of professional ethics.

Little wonder that so few people trust the media to be fair and honest.

Update: PBS has inserted the missing words into the transcript at their website. Perhaps it was all an honest mistake, but that's rather hard to believe. PBS called their rendering of the speech a "transcript" which, unlike a "prepared text" from which the president might have deviated, is a word for word record of the actual speech, and it would just be astonishing if the one thing they missed in preparing that transcript was the very blooper that would embarrass the President.

Tom McGuire at Just One Minute offers another interesting sidenote. He quotes Time magazine as they set the record straight:

He gives a good speech, but he’s loose with the facts. He called Abraham Lincoln the “founder” of the Republican Party. Nope. Lincoln was not the founder of the party; he wasn’t even the first Republican nominee (John Fremont was, in 1856). Lincoln was, of course, the first Republican to be elected president.

McGuire then adds:

Ooops, my bad - that was Time ... writing about Mike Huckabee [who made the same error] back in 2008. The author of that immortal and transportable wisdom? Jay Carney, who now famously flacks for Obama. I still can't find Time's mention of the Obama gaffe.

Maybe Carney, President Obama's current press secretary, will be quizzed about all this at the next press briefing. Or not.

Why Muslims Are Angry With America (Pt. II)

This is Part II of Why Muslims Are Angry With America. Part I was posted yesterday. The posts are based on an essay for CNN by Steven Kull who is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of the recently released book, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America.

His article addresses what he believes to be the reasons for Muslim resentments of America.

I've excerpted the article and added comments. Kull writes:

A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces.

This is not simply imagined. Currently in Congress there are efforts to ensure that U.S. funding of democracy promotion in Egypt only benefits liberal, secular parties and does not in any way benefit Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

To most Muslims this American perspective on Muslim society is simply incorrect and American efforts to choose the winner is really about America seeking to impose its Western secular model of governance and to eradicate the role of Islam in the public sphere. Since to Muslims Islam is, by definition, meant to be in the public sphere, American efforts are seen as seeking to undermine Islam itself.

It needs to be asked why it's wrong to seek to encourage ("impose" is a bit too strong of a word) the adoption of the Western model of governance? If we want those parties more favorable to our way of seeing the world to prevail why should we not support them? Indeed, is it not the case that many conservative Muslims in the West work very hard to encourage the spread of Islam and Sharia in the West? As long as they do it lawfully they should be permitted to promote their beliefs.

Why, then, would Muslims take umbrage that the West seeks to promote it's values in their world? There's a double standard at work here. Muslims feel they should be free to spread their views and values throughout the West, but that the West, including Christians, must not be allowed to promote their views and values in Muslim lands.

Overwhelming majorities endorse liberal principles including that the will of the people should be the basis of governance, government leaders should be chosen through free elections and that there should be full freedom of religion. At the same time, equally large majorities say that Sharia should be the basis of government, that all laws should be vetted by Islamic scholars to ensure they are consistent with the Koran and that Muslims should not be allowed to convert to another religion.

Obviously there are some serious contradictions here. But these contradictions are not primarily between sectors of Muslim society but rather within Muslim individuals. This could be described as an “internal clash of civilizations.”

So it is particularly infuriating to Muslims when America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side .... America’s interventions produce a backlash, making Muslims feel that they need to do more to defend their Islamic foundations and making advocates of liberal ideas suspect.

Kull makes a good point here, but he also highlights a serious problem. It's very difficult for the West to formulate a coherent policy toward a part of the world in which the mass of people live with such a profound contradiction. No matter what the West does it is bound to offend one side or the other of the Muslim psyche.

There are reasons to believe that this effect was al Qaeda’s intended goal of the 9/11 attacks. By provoking America into military action against Muslim targets, al Qaeda hoped to revive the age-old narrative of the crusading West and to drive the Muslim people into the arms of al Qaeda’s vision of a purely traditional Islamic society devoid of liberal or Western elements.

Al Qaeda did not succeed in drawing in most Muslims. Al Qaeda’s terrorist methods are seen as wrong and its vision as too extreme. The hold of liberal ideas is not easy to shake. However, al Qaeda did succeed in pulling the United States into a position in the Muslim world that has alienated much of Muslim society.

The reason al Qaeda is seen as wrong, I suspect, is because they were, or are being, defeated. If al Qaeda had prevailed in Iraq and elsewhere they would be seen as great heroes in the Muslim world, carrying out the will of Allah in humiliating the crusaders. Bin Laden himself said that Muslims favor the strong horse, and if that had turned out to be him he would have been seen as the modern Saladin. Many Muslims doubtless reject al Qaeda, not because of their horrific bloodshed, but because al Qaeda has failed to fulfill its promise.

By intervening in ways that have enhanced the polarization of secular and Islamist forces the United States has also made it more difficult for Muslims to build a political space within which they can find a middle ground that integrates these elements into a more coherent whole.

How much political space would there have been in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or in Iraq under Saddam? The idea that American interventions make finding a middle ground between secularists and Islamists more difficult is hard to credit. America poured a lot of money into Mubarak's Egypt and although he was a tyrant there was more of a middle ground there than there is in Syria or Pakistan where our influence is minimal.

As America begins to gradually disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan there is the potential for negative feelings toward the United States to begin to abate. Muslims generally perceive U.S. military forces in the region as a threatening presence designed to keep the region the way America wants it to be .... But perhaps most fundamentally, America’s relationship is most likely to improve as it comes to understand, accept and embrace the whole of Muslim society and the course of development that it has chosen for itself.

Muslims believe that they are on a different path than the West. This path is central to their notion of their freedom to practice their religion. When they feel that America is threatening their religion and their aspirations, they grow resolutely hostile.

As Americans we may believe that it is not possible to blend such a form of religiosity and liberal values. Maybe Muslims will conclude this too. But only when Muslims perceive America as no longer being an obstacle to their endeavor will they be able to move forward in their discovery. And it is only then that America’s relationship with the Muslim world will become more amicable.

America will no longer be an obstacle to the Muslim endeavor when it becomes clear that that endeavor no longer includes the destruction of Israel and a worldwide caliphate. If Muslims abjured these two goals and resolved the contradiction Kull talks about between a desire for a more liberal polity and a deeper desire to live under Islamic law, the relationship between the West and the Muslim world would indeed become less antagonistic.

Is the West not in any way at fault for the strained relations? Certainly in one regard it is, at least in that part of the Muslim world which lies in the Middle East. The bulk of the problem is that we depend on their oil, and as long as we do Western culture will infiltrate their world. The best thing we could do would be to develop our own energy resources which would allow our national interest to be much less intertwined with what's going on in the Middle East and allow us to leave them alone. That would make us both happier.

Unfortunately, developing our own resources in any meaningful way is not something the current administration is willing to do.

Why Muslims Are Angry With America (Pt. I)

Steven Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of the recently released book, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America.

He's written a very thoughtful piece for CNN on the reasons for Muslim resentments of America. He's no doubt correct that many of the world's Muslims think the way he says they do, and perhaps some of those attitudes have justification. Even so, some of the views Kull believes Muslims hold are, in my opinion, at least, simply unwarranted.

The article is very insightful, and I urge readers to peruse the original, but I'd like to share some reflections of my own on it today and tomorrow as we draw close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Kull writes:

Muslims have much they do not like about how America treats them. But there is one thing that is the most fundamental: their perception that America seeks to undermine Islam - a perception held by overwhelming majorities. The fact that many Americans blithely brush off this accusation without really understanding it is one reason this anger persists. To understand it one must go deeper into the Muslim worldview.

Western cultural products are seen as seductively undermining Islamic culture. More importantly, Western powers have gained extraordinary military might that is seen as threatening and coercively dominating the Muslim world and propping up secular autocrats ready to accommodate the West. U.S. support for Israel, sometimes described as ‘America’s aircraft carrier in the region’, is seen as integral to U.S. plans for domination. All this is seen as also serving Western economic interests, such as in securing oil, which dovetails with the agenda of keeping Islam under foot.

Muslims overwhelmingly believe that the 9/11 attacks, and any attacks on civilians, are contrary to Islam. However, many Muslims do believe that America must back away from the Muslim world.

Many Muslims, with their penchant for conspiracy theories, even wonder if the United States somehow engineered the 9/11 attacks to justify this advance [into Iraq and Afghanistan]. When George W. Bush, in what has to go down as one of the greatest public diplomacy missteps of all time, announced a “crusade” against terrorism, the assimilation of American actions into the long-standing narrative of Western hostility to Islam was all but complete.

Many Americans agree we should "back away" from the Muslim world, but, given current realities, it's hard to see how it could happen. First, to demand that the West back away from the Muslim world while Muslims continue flooding into the West, influencing Western culture, laws, and politics as they do so, makes their demand seem awfully one-sided.

Second, much of the Muslim world is absolutely dependent upon Western markets for their oil. If they're going to depend on the West to develop and purchase this crucial resource, there's necessarily going to be a level of interaction between the two worlds that makes backing away highly impractical.

Third, as long as the Muslim world harbors an existential threat to the West, like al Qaeda and its various epigones, Western military forces will of necessity be serving in Muslim lands. There may be some truth to the claim that the reason terrorist groups exist is because we're there and they resent us for it, but the assumption that if we left terrorism would dissipate is naive. Terrorism will not fade if we leave the Middle East. It'll just move closer to home.

Kull continues:

[F]or many Muslims [American pluralism and tolerance] masks a ... narrative that is actually quite oppressive. This narrative is one that some Muslims think they see even more clearly than Americans themselves.

According to this American narrative - which Muslims perceive as arrogant and dismissive - human society naturally and inevitably evolves through the stages that the West has gone through. As in the Renaissance, religion is largely banished from the public sphere, thus allowing pluralism and diversity of beliefs in the private sphere while maintaining a secular public sphere. This leads naturally to the elevation of individual freedoms and the emergence of democratic principles that make the will of the people the basis of the authority of law rather than revealed religious principles.

From this assumed American perspective, Muslim society is seen as simply behind the West in this evolutionary process. Retrogressive forces in Muslim society are seen as clinging to Islamic traditions that make Sharia the basis of law, not the will of the people, and inevitably keep women in their traditional oppressed roles and minority religions discriminated against.

I don't think any thoughtful American (except maybe some Marxist determinists) sees the stages the West has gone through as inevitable for any culture. Indeed, many Christian scholars would argue that these stages could only have happened in a society that was immersed in a Christian worldview. It's not that Westerners think Muslims will go through this evolution or reformation, it's that they think they should.

If that sounds chauvinistic, so be it. If one believes one's values are genuinely superior to the values of others then one should want others to adopt them. Muslims themselves certainly feel this way. They desire that the whole world convert to Islam and live according to the principles found in the Koran. If Muslims feel this way about Islamic culture they can hardly complain that Westerners feel the same way, mutatis mutandis, about Western culture.

Moreover, a society that lives according to "revealed religious principles" is actually living, not according to the law of God so much as according to the interpretation of that law by a relatively few clergy. A theocracy is really a form of oligarchy. That sort of thing might work where the masses of people are uneducated, but it won't work well in a society with a vast educated class, and having a vast educated class is certainly more to be desired than vast ignorance. Muslims, to the degree they yearn for strict theocratic rule must also, if they're consistent, repudiate most non-theological learning.

Muslims see this narrative as being used to justify America actually violating democratic principles in relation to the Muslim world. Even if it is contrary to the will of the people, the United States props up autocratic governments on the basis that they are relatively more progressive - according to the assumed Western narrative - than what the people would do if they had their way.

When the Algerian military in 1991 overturned the results of a democratic election when it appeared that an Islamist party would prevail, America and other Western governments turned a blind eye. When democratic forces arose in Tunisia and Egypt, Muslims perceive that the United States only joined the parade when the outcome was irreversible. Still, America supports autocratic forces in Bahrain in the face of pro-democratic forces calling for change.

There's truth to this, but the truth is not as simple as it sounds. The view that America supports autocrats because they're more progressive is not quite right. America supported and supports people like Mubarak, the Shah, and even the early Saddam not because they have (or had) a more liberal view of the status of women than do traditional Muslim societies, or even because they tended to be more secular than the masses of their people.

Rather, they enjoyed American support, rightly or wrongly, primarily for three reasons: Policy-makers believe that the autocrat will bring stability to the country and to the region; most autocrats tend to be more helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism; and, frankly, there is widespread distrust of the democratic bona fides, not of those who seek to depose the autocrats, but of those who will ultimately accede to power once the autocrat has been deposed.

We're seeing signs in Egypt and Libya that the people who'll eventually hold power in these countries may well turn out to be theocratic tyrants like those who seized control in Tehran after the fall of the Shah. The U.S., and probably every other country, holds to the doctrine that it's better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't. That may not always prove to be the right course, but it's certainly understandable.

More on Kull's essay tomorrow.

The Candidates' Debate

For a fine concise overview of last night's GOP presidential candidates' debate check out Michael Barone's piece at The Washington Examiner. He evaluates not only the candidates' performance but also that of the moderators, particularly Brian Williams, who sounded as though his questions were written for him by the Obama campaign.

Some of the folks at MSNBC that I've heard today seem to have been scandalized by Rick Perry referring to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, but I have yet to hear anyone explain why he's wrong. The only criticism I've heard anyone make that addressed the appropriateness of his characterization was by someone on the radio who pointed out that it's actually worse than a Ponzi scheme for three reasons:

• In a Ponzi scheme participation is voluntary, in SS it's mandatory.
• In a Ponzi scheme when the money runs out the scheme collapses, in SS the government just raises your taxes.
• In a Ponzi scheme all investor contributions go to providing benefits for other investors, whereas in SS contributions go to support a massive bureaucracy and for other governmental expenses.

Anyway, despite the two moderators' attempts to trivialize the debate and to shield Mr. Obama from criticism, it was clear that everyone on that stage is more qualified to serve as president than was candidate Obama.

Banned Books Week

Students of karate hone their skills by performing a ritual series of moves, a kind of dance called a kata, against an imaginary opponent. It's like fighting someone who's not really there. Somewhat amusingly, political liberals also have katas during the performance of which they fight against opponents who don't really exist. One of these phantom fights will be conducted at the end of this month. It goes under the name of Banned Books Week, an annual ritual celebrated every September since 1982.

Jonah Goldberg describes the exercise at TownHall.com:

It's an exciting time. There are going to be special readings of "banned books" not merely in bookstores (where the banned books will, tellingly, be for sale) but online as well. This year, explains BannedBooksWeek.org, "readers will be able to proclaim the virtues of their favorite banned books by posting videos of themselves reading excerpts to a dedicated YouTube channel." It's all so very brave and subversive!

Already, news outlets are dusting off familiar stories about the scary climate of censorship in the land. Indeed, it's a staple of nearly every major newspaper to at least let the American Library Association air its dire warnings about the growing threat to the freedom to read. Last year, on the eve of Banned Books Week, the ALA's official magazine, American Libraries, ran a story headlined, "Book banning alive and well in the U.S."

It's a storyline the American left in particular seems to desperately want to be true. Recently, an American writer penned a lengthy online piece for the British newspaper The (London) Guardian headlined "The Tea Party moves to ban books." The left-wing activist group Think Progress announces, "Censorship On The Rise: U.S. Schools Have Banned More Than 20 Books This Year."

The problem: None of this is remotely true. Banned Books Week is an exercise in propaganda.

Indeed, stout-hearted liberals don their martial arts attire, cinch their symbolic black belts, and, like a Monty Python troupe, march forth to fight courageously against an imaginary opponent. Goldberg explains:

For starters, as a legal matter no book in America is banned, period, full stop (not counting, I suppose, some hard-core illegal child porn or some such out there). Any citizen can go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and buy any book legally in print -- or out of print for that matter.

When the American Library Association talks about censorship of books, it invariably refers to "banned or challenged" books. A "banned" book is a book that has been removed from a public library or school's shelves or reading lists due to pressure from someone who isn't a librarian or teacher. In practice, this means pretty much any book that's pulled off the shelves of a library can be counted as "banned." Even so, that's very rare, which is why the ALA lump "banned" and "challenged" together. Moreover, it's crazy. If the mere absence of a book counts as a "ban," then 99.99 percent of books have been banned somewhere.

Meanwhile, a challenge happens when someone -- usually a parent -- questions the suitability of a book. If you complain that your 8-year-old kid shouldn't be reading a book with lots of sex, violence or profanity until he or she is a little older, you're not a good parent; you're a would-be book-banner. The preferred tactic of the BBWers is to highlight a stupid decision by one school somewhere in America and hype the anecdote as a trend. So when a school in Missouri recently removed Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" from its shelves, it was immediately decried as the harbinger of a national trend. (The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library immediately offered all the school's students free copies of the "banned" book)

To get a sense of how overhyped these sorts of stories are, consider that reported challenges have dropped from 513 in 2008 to 348 last year. The historic norm is a mere 400 to 500 bans or challenges.

Well, there are almost 100,000 public schools in America (98,706 in 2009) educating roughly 50 million students. (There are 33,000 private schools. And some 10,000 public libraries). So if there were, say, 500 parent-driven "bans or challenges" in a given year in public schools, that would mean for every 200 public schools, or every 100,000 students, at least one parent even complained about an age-inappropriate book. What an epidemic!

But perhaps Goldberg is being too harsh. Why make such a big deal about the facts if progressives feel good pretending to smite the dreaded foe hip and thigh?

Like the karate student whose practice of the kata makes him more formidable in actual battle, perhaps some day we'll see these staunch defenders of free speech stand athwart the school board doorway when a mob of outraged Muslims shows up to demand that a book critical of Islam or the Prophet be removed from a school library. I'm sure the practice our mighty freedom warriors received against their make believe opponents will empower them to mount fierce resistance when confronted with the real thing.

The Higgs Boson

Those who do a little reading in modern physics will probably be aware that one of the grand hopes behind the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (below), a huge atom smasher near Geneva, Switzerland, was that it would be able to accelerate particles to such high energies that the Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle", would be revealed.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Higgs is predicted by string theory, and if the Higgs isn't found it would be devastating to those physicists who have invested the last four decades of their lives in trying to demonstrate that string theory is correct. Moreover, since string theory is the fundamental support for other theories like the multiverse, parallel universes, and extra dimensions, these ideas, too, might be rendered less tenable should the Higgs not appear in the LHC experiments.

Here's a good video on the role that the Higgs plays in contemporary subatomic physics:

Recently, the news coming out of Geneva has been disappointing to those who hoped to find the Higgs. Tests that should have confirmed its existence haven't. According to an article in Wired if it's not found by 2013 scientists will have to reassess their models of how the universe works.

Who Are You?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one, which one are you? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might partially resolve this problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it possesses. But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve it?

No Good Explanation

There are basically two schools of thought about President Obama's leadership of the American economy currently in circulation. One is that our economic doldrums are due to the fact that though the president really wants the U.S. to have a thriving economy, he just doesn't know how to bring that about. This school of thought entails that Mr. Obama is totally unqualified for the position he's in, incompetent, and/or not very smart.

The second school of thought is that President Obama is actually very bright and very competent and our economy is on precisely the trajectory he wants it to be on. His ambition is to "fundamentally transform" this country, eradicate the capitalist system that has created so much prosperity, and replace it with a big government socialist state similar to those which are failing so spectacularly in Europe. Economic stagnation prepares the ground for that change by making it appear that capitalism is a failed system, and Mr. Obama is masterfully leading us to that denouement.

Either the President wants to fix the economy but can't, or he can fix it but won't. Of the two possibilities I don't know which is the more likely. Certainly neither is attractive. To deny that he can't fix it is to imply that he's malevolent. To deny that he won't fix it implies that he's not up to the office to which he was elected.

There is a third possibility, of course, one toward which I incline. Perhaps Mr. Obama really does want to dismantle American capitalism and replace it with big government euro-socialism, not because he's malevolent but because he really believes socialism is the more just economic arrangement. He sincerely believes that it is unjust for some people to have more of the world's goods than others. If this is the correct explanation, then questions arise, at least in the minds of those not on the fringe left, about his wisdom and judgment.

In any case, none of the alternatives are pleasant to contemplate. Maybe there's a fourth possibility that I'm just not seeing.

750 Thousand on Brink of Starvation

Once again the long suffering African people are besieged by various of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. At present it is Famine and War which stalk the land, Somalia in particular, and that part of Somalia controlled by the Islamist al Shabab most specifically:

"In total, 4 million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the coming four months in the absence of adequate response," the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) says. Half of those who have already died are children, it says.

In Africa drought is only the proximate cause of famine. The ultimate cause is the inability to live in peace and to manage a country effectively. This is certainly the case in Somalia where the al Qaeda affiliated al-Shabab has created a hell on earth for its people.

Kenya-based Somali journalist Fatuma Noor, who traveled through al-Shabab territory last year,says the famine has damaged the group's credibility. "Al-Shabab are losing support. People are saying that the drought in the region was caused by a lack of rains, but the famine was man-made. They are asking - why has it been only in al-Shabab's areas?"

It's not as if there isn't Western aid available to the victims of al Shabab's stupidity, cruelty, and/or indifference.

Noor says many Somalis are blaming al-Shabab for the severity of the crisis because of the ban it imposed on the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and some other Western agencies in 2009. "There have been warnings of a famine since last year, but there was no proper planning to prevent it," says Ms Noor.

In other words, there is aid available to the victims of this famine, but the Islamist leaders won't let it in to the areas where it's most needed. Instead, according to the article, they tell the people that Allah has caused the drought and that they should pray for rain. Meanwhile, until Allah gets around to answering these prayers, hundreds of thousands of Somalis are beginning to look like the little boy in the photo above.

The New Civility

Teamster president James Hoffa demonstrates for our edification the new rhetorical tone Democrats have been demanding in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting. The rhetoric coming from the left, we can expect, will be full of this sort of brotherly love, kindness, and civility in the coming campaign season (50 sec. mark):

The new tone will unify us, heal our partisan divisions, and bring us together as a nation. Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters, for her part, can't wait for the healing to begin (20 sec. mark):

Democrat Rep. Andre Carson's sweet reasonableness is on display in the following video as he does what he can to promote unity by refusing to question the motives of his opponents (33 sec. mark):

In this clip President Obama himself exemplifies how as a post-partisan president he rises above crass political divisions as he cordially invites, sort of, those Republican SOBs to work together with him in harmony and unity to solve the country's problems:

Frankly, I'm not sure questioning the peoples' patriotism is the best way to put them in a cooperative mood, but I'm pretty sure that he better not use a line like that Thursday night when addressing the joint session of Congress. If he does I wouldn't be surprised to see the GOP caucus get up and walk out en masse, and they should, even if it puts a damper on our new civility.

Cohabitation and Child Welfare

An article in the Washington Times highlights what some researchers have been saying for a couple of decades now about the social consequences for kids living in homes where the adults are living together without benefit of marriage:

Cohabiting is an emerging threat to the health of children and society, two new research reports say.

In the latter half of the 20th century, “divorce posed the biggest threat to marriage in the United States,” sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox and 17 other scholars said in a report released this week by the Institute for American Values’ Center for Marriage and Families and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. That is no longer the case, they said.

“Today, the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives,” the scholars said in “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions From the Social Sciences.”

Cohabiting relationships are prone to instability, with “multiple transitions” and breakups. Children are less likely to thrive in such homes and may even be exposed to abuse from unrelated persons in their homes, the report says.

“The growing instability of American family life also means that contemporary adults and children are more likely to live in what scholars call ‘complex households,’ ” it added. There is scant research on homes in which children live with half-siblings, stepsiblings, stepparents and stepchildren, “but the initial findings are not encouraging.”

Mr. Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project, and his colleagues cautioned that while cohabitation is associated with increased risks of psychological and social problems for children, “this does not mean that every child who is exposed to cohabitation is damaged.”

Still, the risks are real, they said: In one study of children aged 6 to 11, about 16 percent of children in cohabiting homes had “serious emotional problems.” This was true of 4 percent of children living with married biological or adoptive parents.

One thing this article doesn't mention is the threat to a child's physical safety posed by mom's cohabiting boyfriends. David Blankenhorn notes, in his book Fatherless America, that most child abuse, including sexual abuse of teenage girls, is at the hands of live-in boyfriends, and that, statistically speaking, girls are nowhere more safe than when they are with their biological father.

Editorial Hari Kari

There's a puzzling article by Richard Black at the BBC on the resignation of the editor of the science journal Remote Sensing.

The back story is that Remote Sensing published a peer-reviewed paper by two climate scientists who are skeptical that computer models which project dire global temperature increases are correct. It's their view that a negative feedback is being interpreted as though it were a positive feedback resulting in temperature projections that are excessively inflated.

The paper, written by Roy Spencer and William Braswell, has been heavily criticized by the climatological community for not taking into account counter-arguments that had appeared in other journals allegedly addressing the very complaint they raise.

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing, says he agrees with those who have taken him to task for publishing the Spencer/Braswell paper and is stepping down, presumably as an act of professional contrition.

This resignation strikes me as odd because nowhere in the article is there reference to any specific error in Spencer and Braswell's work. It's never made clear what it is about publishing this paper that's so egregious as to warrant the editor's decision to fall on his sword.

In fact Spencer is so confident of the science in his paper that he's challenging anyone who thinks they've found an error or evidence of shoddy methodology to publish a peer-reviewed critique. In essence, he's telling them to put up or shut up.

A second thing that's odd about the BBC article is that the caption of a photo of Spencer accompanying the article states that he's "a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist." What does his religion have to do with this? What's the purpose of mentioning it? Is this intended to be some sort of smear? Is the implication supposed to be that Christians can't do responsible climate science? Would a photo of a proponent of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming be accompanied by a caption declaring him to be an atheist, if indeed he were one?

It's all very strange.