Eugenics and the Left

Novelist Jonathan Freedland pens an essay in The Guardian about what he calls "one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite, a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left." The skeleton to which he alludes is the infatuation many prominent leftist intellectuals have historically had with eugenics and the lengths to which they were willing to go to purge undesirables from the human race.

Writes Freedland of the British intellectuals of the early 20th century:

[Eugenics is] the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".

Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood".

Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes – honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 – was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the "hordes of defectives" be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on "the fit". Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild.

Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming ... when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, J.B.S. Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German.

I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Freedland is writing of the climate of opinion among leftist/progressive elites in Britain, but the same ideas were rampant on this side of the pond as well. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood largely as an organization to control the propagation of undesirables which especially included, in her mind, blacks.

Other like-minded American eugenicists included Alexander Graham Bell and most of the early Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Davenport, H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, and a boatload of lesser lights. At the Nuremberg War Crimes trials the Nazis testified that they took their inspiration for the genocide of the Jews from American eugenicists.

Freedland goes on to say that,

The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk, were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their left-wing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, left-wing reasons.

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak.

What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it.

Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as means rather than ends. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.

This is a frightening thought given the power and influence progressives have in the American corridors of power today. The Nazis put the eugenic impulse in bad odor and drove it underground after WWII, but the desire to cull and regulate the human herd has not died out. It just doesn't get talked about much. How long that reticence will last in a progressive era like ours remains to be seen.

Anyone interested in reading the history of the flow of ideas from Darwin in the latter half of the 19th century through the progressive eugenicists of the first four decades of the 20th century, to the Nazis in the 30s and 40s might pick up a copy of Richard Weikert's book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany or Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg.

Randomness and Fitness

Darwinian evolution depends on the concept of biological fitness, but, to the degree that the notion avoids being a tautology, it's pretty much meaningless. There's no way to determine whether an organism is fit other than by seeing if it survives. But if survival is the measure by which we assess fitness then survival of the fittest equates to the vacuous claim that those organisms are fittest which survive and those which survive are fittest.

Stephen Talbot at The New Atlantis has a fine essay on the conceptual problems involved with the notion of Darwinian fitness. He starts out talking about the claim that evolutionary history is driven by random purposeless processes, a claim he finds untenable. He cites biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher Daniel Dennett to make his point:

Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.”

Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes: "Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe."

And we read this in Dawkins:

Wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.” And: “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.

In other words, both Dawkins and Dennett hold that at bottom life is mindless, meaningless, and purposeless. Any indications to the contrary are illusions. Talbot, however, has serious problems with this view. If all the purposes and meanings in living things are just illusions, as Dawkins insists, then:

[W]hat is the difference between merely illusory purpose and the real thing? If Dawkins means that there is only illusion, then, if there is nothing for the illusion to be a convincing illusion of, it hardly makes sense to say it is an illusion at all, as opposed to being just what it seems to be.

On the other hand, if Dawkins admits that meaning and purpose actually exist as realities and are therefore available to be mimicked in an illusory way, what grounds does he have for claiming meaninglessness and purposelessness as fundamental to the world’s character?

Indeed. Talbot then goes on to reflect on the emptiness of the concept of survival of the fittest:

[F]irst, evolution can be explained by the fact that, on the whole, only the fitter organisms survive and achieve reproductive success; and second, what makes an organism fit is the fact that it survives and successfully reproduces. This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce.

Stephen Jay Gould pointed out back in 1976, however, that Darwin and his successors hypothesized independent conditions — “engineering criteria,” as biologists like to say — for the assessment of fitness. These conditions may facilitate and explain reproductive success, but do not merely equate to it. In other words, the concept of fitness need not rely only on the concept of survival (or reproductive success).

The problem, though, is that there's no way to test these "engineering criteria." Talbot again:

To make the problem worse, evolutionary biologists are driven to arrive at scalar values for fitness — values enabling reasonable comparison of traits and organisms, so that we can determine which is the fittest. But how do you take all the infinitely wide-ranging and interwoven considerations that might bear on fitness and reduce them to a scalar value? It is a practical impossibility.

As a pair of philosophers put it in a 2002 article, “Suppose a certain species undertakes parental care, is resistant to malaria, and is somewhat weak but very quick. How do these fitness factors add up? We have no idea at all.”

His conclusion is that the claim that meaning and purpose are illusions, a claim which I would argue is certainly entailed by naturalism, is simply wrong and that the concept of survival of the fittest is hopelessly muddled. Of course, if a claim entailed by naturalism is wrong then naturalism must be wrong, but Talbot chooses not to explore this aspect of the argument.

At any rate, those with an interest in the biological sciences and/or the philosophy of biology will find his essay a rewarding and challenging read.

The Real Numbers

The recent unemployment numbers have been promoted to the public as good news for America and good news for the president's reelection prospects, but this Investors' Business Daily editorial indicates that the good news is superficial and misleading. The jobless rate remains stuck above 8% where it's been ever since the month following the president's inauguration.

It's the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it's expected to stay pretty much where it is through 2014:

Even worse for an administration straining to make the case that it deserves to be around for another four years is the real unemployment rate. It's not 8.3%, but closer to 15%, a figure that reflects those who "would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part time but would prefer full-time work," says the CBO.

Another White House problem comes from the CBO report: "The share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months — referred to as the long-term unemployed — topped 40% in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since."

The CBO data aren't isolated. Gallup reports that its unemployment rate based on weekly surveys stands at 9%, while underemployment is at a hefty 19%.

Also threatening Obama's re-election offensive is the nation's shrinking labor force. Many laid-off workers, frustrated by grim prospects, have stopped looking for jobs and are no longer in the labor pool.

That makes the jobless rate look better, as that number is a percentage of the labor force, not the overall national population. But those jobless Americans are real people who will cast real votes in November.

The trouble is fixing these facts in voters' minds. They need to know the full truth, not the half-truth the media and the White House feed them.

The pool of unemployed people who are seeking work is getting smaller as many of them simply give up. That makes it appear as if the number of unemployed is shrinking because the unemployment rate is a measure of those still looking for work.

I don't suppose we're likely to hear very often over the next eight months that real unemployment is much worse than the government reports it to be, but we should. To ignore these numbers when presenting the unemployment situation to the public is at best disingenuous and at worst dishonest.

Tone Deaf

Let's try to understand this. According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, it's wrong for a religious employer to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives and abortifacients to their employees because that's imposing the employers' values on their employees. On the other hand, Ms Wasserman Schultz sees nothing wrong with the president imposing his values on the religious employers by requiring them to provide the coverage:

How people can be so tone deaf to the irony inherent in their words is sometimes astonishing.

At any rate, here's a question I wish someone would have asked Ms Schultz: Why is it wrong, exactly, for anyone who has the power to do so, to "impose" his or her beliefs on someone else?

Someone might say that the question is silly. It's just obvious, it might be asserted, that imposing one's beliefs is unfair, but that reply doesn't help much. It simply leads to the question why it's wrong to be unfair. Fairness is a moral virtue only if it's grounded in a transcendent moral authority, but transcendent grounds of right and wrong have no purchase in a secular society.

So what is it that makes it wrong for one group to use its power in a lawful way (the question might be expanded to include unlawful ways, but we need not go there now) to impose its version of moral right on everyone else? The answer is that, in a secular society, nothing makes it wrong other than that some people, in this case Ms Schultz, don't like the particular moral beliefs that they fear are being imposed.

The Shale Boom

It may be hard to believe with gas prices set to rise above $4.25 a gallon by late April, but this article suggests we're poised on the cusp of the millenial kingdom of energy. Of course the article is an oil industry publication, but still.

It appears that domestic energy production will soon solve our employment problems, our energy dependence problems, and possibly our balance of payments and debt problems. It sounds too good to be true so take it with a grain of salt, but the claims in the article would seem to be easy to refute were they false and easy to confirm if they're true:

A funny thing is happening on the way to the clean energy future–reality is setting in. There is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ about the economic growth and job creating effects of America’s unconventional oil and gas production boom – more than 600,000 jobs directly attributable to shale gas development. Even President Obama is praising the job creating benefits of ‘America’s resource boom’. America is getting its energy mojo back and that is good news but not the entire story.

Total US recoverable natural gas resources (includes conventional, unconventional in lower 48, Alaska and offshore) totals 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet according to the Institute for Energy Research:

• Enough natural gas to meet US electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand for generation levels.
• Enough natural gas to fuel homes heated by natural gas in the United States for 857 years.
• More natural gas than Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan combined.

Global oil shale resources exceed 10 trillion barrels. More than 1.8 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in shale in Federal lands in the western United States in the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, of which 800 billion is considered recoverable–three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.

A report from Price/Waterhouse/Coopers for the National Association of Manufacturers says low cost domestic natural gas will save $11 billion per year in US manufacturing costs over the next ten years and create more than a million new jobs. This new low cost energy reality is expected to increase disposable income by $2,000 per year per household in the United States.

Moreover, natural gas is the likely replacement for coal which is great for air quality as well as the economy:

After pursuing a virtual war on fossil fuels imposing one new regulation after another to undermine the economics and weaken the support for low cost energy production in order to reduce demand and thus emissions, opponents of fossil fuels are also faced with a stark new reality.

New regulations may force the premature closure of coal generation plants, but that capacity is likely to be replaced with high efficiency natural gas fired generation not renewable energy. Low gas prices are a much more virulent threat to coal than anything the US EPA can dream up in regulations and more ruthlessly efficient. So older coal plants will be replaced with newer, cleaner, cheaper natural gas plants not a bad market outcome. Not a bad environmental outcome either.

There's much more good news of this sort at the link. I suggest you digest it slowly since too much optimism taken too quickly can be hard on the heart after a decade of consistently gloomy prognostications about American decline and rising fuel costs.

What Am I Missing?

I need some help understanding something. All my adult life I've heard from Democrats and their media allies that Republicans want to end social security, or curtail its benefits, and that they, the Democrats, will let this happen only over their dead bodies. They are, I've always been told, the only bulwark against a niggardly, cold-hearted GOP which wants to throw old people out into the street.

So now we come to the debate over the Payroll Tax cut. The Payroll Tax is the only funding mechanism for social security, but it's not the Republicans who want to cut it, it's the Democrats, and when the Republicans balk the Democrats and the media wax livid.

In a confusing reversal of roles the Republicans argue, correctly it seems to me, that you cannot reduce revenues to social security by over a hundred billion dollars a year without having to borrow the money to pay for the shortfall from somewhere, and more borrowing just hastens fiscal armageddon.

Cutting the tax would reduce funding to Social Security by $119 billion over the next year, on top of the $105 billion reduced from funding in 2011, so who is it who's jeopardizing old folks' retirement? Is what I've heard all my adult life a fable? Is it really Republicans who want to protect seniors from being thrown into the streets and Democrats who are willing to pitch them under the bus for the short term political benefit of putting a few more dollars in younger workers' monthly paychecks?

Why isn't the media talking about this aspect of the debate? Does anyone think that if it were Republicans who were cutting social security funding that the network talking heads and newspaper opinionaters would not be venting their outrage 24/7? What am I missing? The world seems to have been turned upside down and all the media seems to be able to do is yawn and play endless clips of Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You."

Pact with the Devil

Paul Rahe a professor of political history at Hillsdale College has a blistering critique of the Catholic Church at Ricochet.com. It's a long piece, but it will be of great interest to anyone who cares about American Catholicism.

The gist of it is that the current troubles the Catholic Church faces regarding the Obama administration's mandate requiring them to provide insurance for contraceptives and abortifacients are really their own doing and are the outcome of their longstanding complicity in the expansion of the welfare state.

This passage perhaps best sums up his essay:

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork.

They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the [Church] hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package – that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

I would submit that the bishops, nuns, and priests now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for. The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it.

I do not mean to say that I would prefer that the bishops, nuns, and priests sit down and shut up. Barack Obama has once again done the friends of liberty a favor by forcing the friends of the administrative entitlements state to contemplate what they have wrought. Whether those brought up on the heresy that public provision is akin to charity will prove capable of thinking through what they have done remains unclear.

Rahe doesn't mention it, but the administration's attempt to tell insurers what they will cover and what they won't is disturbing as well on grounds other than religious freedom. Suppose down the road the government decides to mandate that insurers not cover the costs of having more than two children, or they mandate that insurers raise the premiums for anyone owning a firearm. The Obama administration is putting itself in position to control a vast swath of behavior simply by controlling what the insurance industry will cover and how much we'll pay for that coverage.

This way lies the road to serfdom, to borrow the title of Friedrich von Hayek's famous book, and it's another reason why Obamacare strikes many Americans as a very dangerous idea.

Hooking Kids on Sex

One of the reasons Planned Parenthood has incurred the wrath of so many Americans has nothing to do with abortion, nor birth control, nor the racist eugenics that animated their founding. Rather it has to do with the way they seek to expose young people to, and indoctrinate them in, a squalid pornographic view of human sexuality.

Tina Korbe at Hot Air discusses a video put out by the American Life League that reveals exactly how perverse are the PP "educational" materials they distribute to elementary and older kids. The video is at the end of her post. I didn't want to put it here because, frankly, although I think it's important and I have no qualms over its pull-no-punches style, the stuff it presents about PP is just too sleazy and disgusting for Viewpoint.

Instead I'll just recommend that if you want to know what your kids will be exposed to in many public schools and other venues in the name of "family planning" go to the link, scroll down, and watch the six minute video. And then marvel that the organization that puts this stuff out is subsidized by your tax dollars. UPDATE: The video has been taken down after someone claimed "copyright infringement."

Freedom to Choose

Hot Air offers video of three people called to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which was conducting hearings on forced union membership. Their stories are sad, especially that of Sally Coomer.

Coomer was forced to join the SEIU by the state of Washington because she receives Medicaid for caring for her severely disabled daughter. She then has to pay the union $95 every month in dues, money which she needs for her daughter. This sounds incredible, I know, but watch the video:

It really is an outrage that Coomer and others like her are forced to join a union because she's considered to be a "health service provider" when she takes government money to care for her daughter.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey writes:

Both Michigan and Minnesota tried to extend this forced-unionism into day-care operations as well as home-care situations. There is no reason to force parents who receive Medicaid to care for developmentally-disabled children into unions, except to pick their pockets for the benefit of union bosses and political parties. It’s positively ghoulish ... and only the efforts of Republican-controlled legislatures in both states kept them from forcing babysitters into unions.

Why is it that when President Obama talks about "fairness" he never seems to get around to questioning the fairness of forcing people like Sally Coomer to belong to a union and then having that union take almost $100 dollars a month out of her pocket for the privilege of being a member and helping to pay for causes she opposes? Mr. Obama won't complain about injustices like these, of course, because the unions, particularly SEIU, are among his biggest supporters and make up a large segment of his party's base.

There are similar videos at the link - testimony of others who've been forced to join a union if they wish to keep their jobs and feed their families. Progressives tout the "freedom to choose" but they only support that freedom for women who want to choose to terminate the life of their unborn child. When it comes to giving poor women the choice of which schools their children will attend or the choice of whether or not to join a union the word freedom suddenly vanishes from the Progressives' lexicon.

Politicians can support compulsory union membership or they can stand for individual liberty, but they can't do both.

What Must Moammar Be Thinking?

The shade of Moammar Qaddafi must be scratching its ghostly head over recent developments in Syria. After all, the Libyan leader was himself peremptorily dispatched to his eternal reward, such as it might be, largely because President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton insisted on humanitarian grounds that we intervene to prevent him from killing thousands of his citizens. So we proceeded to kill hundreds, maybe thousands, of young Libyan soldiers to keep Qaddafi from killing thousands of civilians.

"Very well," Moammar must be musing from his ethereal perch, "I can understand that, but then why not Syria? What's the difference?" Good question. How does Bashar Assad get away with killing thousands of his people with every bit as much remorseless brutality and cruelty as Moammar could ever have mustered and there's no military response from the U.S? Is it that Libya has oil and Syria doesn't? That can't be the reason because Mr. Obama and Ms Clinton are lefties, and if there's anything we know from the Iraq war it's that lefties would never, ever spill blood in order to secure oil. Heck, they won't even build a pipeline to secure oil.

Perhaps we've not intervened in Syria like we did in Libya because thousands of leftists have made it clear to Mr. Obama that if he threatens military force they'll journey to Syria and serve as human shields just like they did when George Bush threatened to invade Iraq. And they did, too, at least until the bombs started falling at which point they disappeared. Maybe they told Mr. Obama that this time they really mean it, and the administration believed them.

Okay, maybe that's not it. The vociferous anti-war left has been as quiet as church mice since Mr. Obama ascended to the Oval Office. It's only when Republicans launch hostilities, it seems, that they're able to find their voice.

Whatever it is, Mr. Qaddafi must be wondering today whether there are any guiding principles governing American foreign policy and if so, what they might be. If he is wondering this he's got a lot of company, except in the American media which seems completely uninterested in the question.

Two Options

Biological animator Drew Berry gave a TED talk in 2011 in which he described his work. In the lecture he displays some of his breath-taking animations of processes that occur around the clock in every cell of our bodies.

Keep in mind as you wonder at the precision and complexity of these molecular machines and the operations they perform that there are only two viable explanations for how they came to be. Either blind forces and chance mutations resulted in these amazingly choreographed molecular dances or they were intentionally designed by an intelligent agent:

The only reason anyone would opt for the first explanation, in my opinion, is that they've ruled out a priori the possibility of there being an intelligent agent capable of having directed the creation of life. Moreover, the primary reason, perhaps, for ruling out such an agent a priori is the fact that one simply doesn't want such a being to exist.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel provides a clear example of this when he writes the following in his book The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I suspect that most people, believers and non-believers alike, hope that God exists or that he doesn't. What I don't understand is why people like Nagel would hope that he doesn't.

Gutter Politics

It's sad, but we've come to expect high stakes political campaigns to be pretty sleazy. We expect character assassination, libel, and other offenses against propriety and civility. What we don't expect is that private, tax-exempt organizations will undertake, for political reasons, the systematic destruction of a television news network by any means that lies at hand. This is, however, what the progressive organization Media Matters for America (MMFA) has undertaken to do to Fox News.

The Daily Caller has been running a series of articles based on revelations from employees and former employees of MMFA detailing exactly what and how they're trying to smear and discredit Fox News and the lengths to which they're willing to go to harass and intimidate Fox's employees.

It's a pretty sordid tale but then the MMFA folks are progressives, after all, and progressives, or at least many of them, are firm believers in the principle that the end justifies the means.

The DC exposé makes for fascinating reading for those familiar with some of the players, and it's certainly important that people be aware of the sorts of things that are being done to insure Mr. Obama's reelection. Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz even observed that all of this is going to backfire and that MMFA will single-handedly cause Mr. Obama's defeat in November because he'll inevitably be associated with, and soiled by, MMFA's squalid tactics. We'll see.

Meanwhile, check out the series at the Daily Caller website. The links to the installments are below the picture of MMFA president and founder David Brock at the top of the DC home page.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller's page has changed so the best way to access their series on MMFA is to go here.

Is it Fair?

Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore notes that President Obama's main criterion for measuring the value of a policy is "fairness." That being so, he writes, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask about the fairness of much of what the president and his party are doing, or would like to do, in the realm of public policy. I leave it to you to decide how fair the following of Moore's facts are:

• Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?
• Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?
• Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?
• Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?
• Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?
• Is it fair that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel and other leading Democrats who preach tax fairness underpaid their own taxes?
• Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?
• Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?
• Is it fair that the three counties with America's highest median family income just happen to be located in the Washington, D.C., metro area?
• Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is "subsidized"?
• Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don't work?
• Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can't afford to repay?
• Is it fair that thousands of workers won't have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?
• Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama's largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees on their investments in renewable energy projects that went bust?
• Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office?
• Is it fair that soon almost half the federal budget will take income from young working people and redistribute it to old non-working people, even though those over age 65 are already among the wealthiest Americans?
• Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?
• Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?
• Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?
• Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Fairness often seems to be in the eye of the beholder. It's a bit annoying of the president and his epigones to insist, for example, that the rich need to pay their "fair share" of taxes but never tell us what's unfair about the rates they now pay and what rates they should pay. No one disagrees that tax rates should be fair, but telling us the "rich need to pay their fair share" is simple-minded demagoguery unless it's accompanied by an explanation of what exactly their fair share would be and why that amount is more fair than what they're currently contributing.

To assert that the rich need to pay their fair share is to imply that they should be paying more than the 40% of the total taxes paid by Americans they now pay even though they comprise less than 1% of the population. Why is it "fair" to demand they do more? Just because they can?

We need to have this discussion about fairness and taxes, but we need to go beyond silly sound bites and no one who's talking about "everyone paying their fair share," least of all the president, seems willing to do that.

Stay Away From Black Holes

One never knows when one might be traveling through space and encounter a black hole. Here's a simulation of what it might look like should such a calamity ever befall you:

Platypus Walk

Whatever you might think of Mr. Obama's politics and leadership there's one thing about this administration that I think is beyond doubt. Mrs. Obama is surely the best dancer of any First Lady in the history of the republic:

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the video.

What's the Difference?

I'm one who believes that the Obama administration was wrong to attempt to compel the Catholic Church to bend to its will on the matter of contraception coverage. I also agree with those who find the subsequent "compromise" little more than a ridiculous charade. For more on why it's all smoke and mirrors read this piece by Hanna Smith at National Review Online. Mr. Obama seems to be telling the Catholic Church that if they don't want to eat their peas that's okay, but he's going to put the peas in a salad and make them eat the salad.

But this post isn't about that. I have a question that no one yet seems to have addressed. How is a government mandate that requires people to violate their conscience by forcing employers to provide coverage for morally problematic products and procedures substantively different from the government requiring people who are opposed on religious grounds to war and capital punishment to pay taxes to support those? Is there a significant difference between being forced by the state to pay for birth control and abortions and being forced by the state to pay for military action and criminal executions when one opposes all of them?

If religious groups can be exempted from mandates to provide certain kinds of insurance coverage on grounds of conscience (which they should) why aren't religious believers exempted from paying taxes on similar grounds? William James once said that "A difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference." So what's the difference here that makes a difference?

I'm just asking the question. I don't have an answer.

Conservatism

A panel of mostly young conservatives discusses what it is to be a conservative, particularly in the context of the current Republican primary race:

Conservatives often refer to themselves as classical liberals which sometimes confuses people. This is addressed briefly at the end of the clip and it's pointed out that the values embraced by conservatives were, a century and a half ago, considered liberal.

The ideological spectrum has since then shifted so far to the left, however, that people who today call themselves liberal would have been considered socialists or communists in the 19th century and people who call themselves conservatives today would have been considered liberal in that earlier age.

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the video.

The Mysterious Epigenome

Recall your tenth grade biology class wherein you learned that the code or blueprint for building a living organism was contained in the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. Segments of DNA form genes and these code for proteins and those build the body of the organism. Well, biologists are learning that that's only part of the story, and maybe a very small part at that. It's beginning to look as if the information that directs the construction and maintenance of the organism is dispersed throughout the cell and maybe even throughout the organism.

This is the thesis of a new book by Thomas Woodward and James Gills who argue that beyond the organism's genome (the set of genetic instructions contained in DNA) there is a deeper level of instruction, the epigenome, that is to the genome what the submerged part of an iceberg is to its tip.

Their book is titled The Mysterious Epigenome and according to Casy Luskin who reviews the book at Evolution News and Views, it's a very accessible introduction which is geared toward the layman interested in the biological sciences. Luskin quotes the authors:

In probing the operation of DNA, scientists have learned much more about a second biological encyclopedia of information that resides above the primary information stored within our DNA. Researchers have discovered a complex system in the cell -- sophisticated "software" situated beyond DNA -- that directs DNA's functions and is responsible for our embryonic development and the differentiation of a single, fertilized egg cell into more than two hundred cell types in a mature body.

This higher control system is also implicated in aging processes, cancer, and many other diseases. It guides the expression of DNA, telling different kinds of cells to use different genes, and to use them in the precise ways that meet the needs of those different cells. This "information beyond DNA" plays a crucial role in each of our sixty trillion cells, telling the genes exactly when, where, and how they are to be expressed.

[T]he living cell possesses vast riches of life-enabling codes, which go far beyond the spiral thread of DNA itself. Information, in a diversity of usable forms, is lodged in virtually every corner of the cell, from the outer cortex to the centrosome, with its system of microtubules, to the histones with their decorated tails, to the methylation patterns attached to DNA. The mutual integration of these systems and layers of information is a marvel to behold. Unraveling these complex relationships will surely occupy the diligent study of biologists for decades to come.

Luskin himself asks the question that is inevitably raised by the discovery of this new layer of information in the cell:

Could this newly discovered information arise by the Darwinian mechanism? A key issue addressed by the book has to do with the implications of the epigenome for the debate over Darwinian theory and intelligent design. The authors believe this new information points to "irreducible complexity" in the cell, and ask: "How can scientists account for a nature-driven origin of the cell's complexity when they stumble upon new layers of information -- a whole new system of coded-language -- above and beyond the cell's DNA?"

Woodward and Giles close by pointing out the challenge posed by the epigenetic revolution to materialist views of evolution:

[T]he epigenome adds tremendous pressure to the already-weak Darwinian explanatory apparatus. Random changes, inherited over generations, must not just explain the explosion of DNA as one moves up the purported tree of life; one must also now explain by these mindless mechanisms the rise of each sophisticated layer of the epigenome.

Biologists are just beginning to understand this new source of information. Indeed, the whole field is really on the cutting edge of a fascinating biological frontier. As Luskin says:

The newly discovered layers of cellular complexity they discuss are astounding. What's even more astounding is the likelihood that if Woodward and Gills were to rewrite this book in another five years, they would have much more to add about known levels of cellular epigenetic information.

The deeper we probe, the more we learn, the more complex, the more information-rich, we find living cells to be. It makes the old 20th century materialism seem almost quaint.

Here's a computer animation which shows in greatly simplified form how the cell constructs proteins. The question that it raises is how the cell knows how and when to perform all these operations? What's the "control center," so to speak, that coordinates and directs all of this activity, and how did such an amazing thing ever evolve?

The amazing choreography of all this makes one wonder if perhaps the panpsychists (those who believe that everything is pervaded by mind) aren't on to something.

Iron Man, Marching Bands, and Embryos

The other night I paused as I was flipping through the channels to watch a part of the Iron Man movie where Robert Downey, Jr. is encased in his hi-tech iron man suit. As all of the robotic assemblers timed and coordinated their operations with magnificent precision to construct the suit around Downey's body I was reminded of an article I'd read that afternoon which describes how a developing human embryo is assembled in pretty much the same way.

The coordination, timing and precision needed to assemble the iron man suit, as exacting as it is, is really a pretty simple affair compared to that which takes place in every developing child. After all, the iron man assembly process was presumably intelligently designed by human engineers, but embryonic assembly is designed to unfold by .... what? Accident?

Here's the article's lede:

Embryonic development unfolds as if it were a symphony and the members of the orchestra were the various genes that are turned on and off in the course of development. Every player must perform his part at the right moment and in the right way, otherwise the delicate balance of turning on and off signals will be disrupted, with catastrophic results. Scientists have been uncovering layer upon layer of complexity that seems to point to a symphony of processes that could only have been orchestrated by design.

In the embryo, cell processes, like musicians in an orchestra, are turning on and off with astonishing precision, but even more astonishing, perhaps, is that while they're doing this they're also migrating to precise locations around the embryo. Embryonic cell activity is actually more like a highly accomplished marching band performing a halftime show than it is like a stationary orchestra.

Imagine a band instructor leaving to chance whether the band members will play their instruments properly while moving to their assigned spots on the field at just the right time. How long would it take for a band of several hundred members to hit upon just the right pattern if every time the wrong pattern was formed the band is disqualified and another band takes its place? After all, if an evolving embryonic process gets it wrong the embryo dies.

It takes enormous faith, blind faith, in chance and serendipity to think that such a process evolved naturalistically, but blind faith is not in short supply among naturalists.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

Giles Fraser at the U.K. Guardian discloses the interesting autobiographical tidbit that it was through reading the work of atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that he was prompted to convert from atheism to Christianity. Giles doesn't explain exactly how such a counterintuitive result came about, veering off course just as he seemed about to tell us, but he does go into a lot of illuminating detail about Nietzsche's hostility toward Christian theism. Here's part of his column:

The Big Ideas series has for several months now explored the meaning of a number of familiar intellectual phrases, among them Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message", Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" and Adam Smith's "invisible hand". But none of these feels quite as big an idea as Friedrich Nietzsche's "God is dead". After centuries of Christianity, a new dawn is being announced. And the language Nietzsche uses in his famous passage from The Gay Science reflects the enormity of his discovery: "How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?" Nothing again will ever be the same.

But what is his discovery? It isn't a eureka moment in which Nietzsche comes to understand that God does not exist. Indeed, he is not all that interested in the question of God's existence. The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson recently told me that he would be an atheist even if God walked into the restaurant. Similarly for Nietzsche, it's not a question of evidence or the lack of it.

He is in a completely different place to the new atheist brigade of Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling. If God walked into the room, Nietzsche would stab him – for his "God is dead" revelation is that humanity can only become free if it rejects the idea of the divine. Christianity is not a mistake. It is wickedness dressed up as virtue.

Nietzsche chafed at the constraints Christian morality places on man's natural inclinations and appetites. To read Nietzsche straightforwardly is to read a call for the "overmen" - the supermen, such as himself - to give free reign to his passion, his selfishness, and his cruelty.

Nietzsche's case against Christianity was that it kept people down; that it smothered them with morality and self-loathing. His ideal human is one who is free to express himself (yes, he's sexist), like a great artist or a Viking warrior. Morality is for the little people. It's the way the weak manipulate the strong. The people Nietzsche most admired and aspired to be like were those who were able to reinvent themselves through some tremendous act of will.

I have never seen anything to admire in Nietzsche's view of morality or immorality. He was badly interpreted by the Nazis. But his ethics, if one can call them that, are founded on the admiration of power as the ultimate form of abundant creativity. His hatred of Christianity comes mostly from his hatred of renunciation and the promotion of selflessness.

Jesus was a genius for having the imaginative power to reinvent Judaism but a dangerous idiot for basing this reinvention on the idea that there is virtue to be had in weakness. The weak, Nietzsche insists, are nasty and cruel. They take out their frustration on those who have the power of genuine self-expression.

It's ironic that nastiness and cruelty are not really wrong in Nietzsche's world. He despises the Christian, in fact, for influencing the strong and noble to suppress their own nastiness and cruelty. These, for Nietzsche are the prerogatives of the strong, and the weak have no business usurping them or imposing a sense of guilt on the strong who would, but for their feelings of guilt, exercise them.

Giles writes an interesting article that serves as a good introduction to the thought of the man who is considered by some to be the first modern existentialist. Give it a read.

Wisconsin Recall

This spring we'll be hearing a lot about the effort in Wisconsin to unseat their governor, Republican Scott Walker, via a special recall election. Who's trying to do this and why?

Christian Schneider at explains. He opens with this lede:

One morning last February, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called his staff into his office. “Guys,” he warned, “it’s going to be a tough week.” Walker had recently sent a letter to state employees proposing steps—ranging from restricting collective bargaining to requiring workers to start contributing to their own pension accounts—to eliminate the state’s $3.6 billion deficit. That day in February was when Walker would announce his plan publicly.

It turned out to be a tough year. The state immediately erupted into a national spectacle, with tens of thousands of citizens, led by Wisconsin’s public-employee unions, seizing control of the capitol for weeks to protest the reforms. By early March, the crowds grew as big as 100,000, police estimated. Protesters set up encampments in the statehouse, openly drinking and engaging in drug use beneath the marble dome. Democratic state senators fled Wisconsin to prevent a vote on Walker’s plan. Eventually, the Senate did manage to pass the reforms, which survived a legal challenge and became law in July.

The unions aren’t done yet: they’re now trying to recall Walker from office. To do so, they will try to convince Wisconsin voters that Walker’s reforms have rendered the state ungovernable. But the evidence, so far, contradicts that claim — and Wisconsinites seem to realize it.

So how have Walker's reforms been working out for the people of Wisconsin? You'll have to read the rest of Schneider's piece to get the details, but the short version is this: In just six months Wisconsin has balanced the state budget, saved the taxpayers of the Wisconsin millions of dollars, and saved the jobs of hundreds of people.

It's not a bad record. It'd be nice if the folks in Washington would follow Walker's example.

Unpersuasive

The Obama administration and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius have come under severe criticism from both the Catholic church and some civil libertarians for their decision to compel Catholic organizations to cover birth control and abortifacients in the insurance they provide their employees. The other day Joan Vennochi, writing for the Boston Globe (subscription required), sought to defend the administration, but in my view she only managed to show how weak the administration's position is. The crux of her case is this graph:

Not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care (the other medical care was abortions)? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That's the Obama administration's argument and it makes sense.

Well, maybe to some people it makes sense, but not to me. In the first place, birth control and the morning after pill are not health care, or at least not primarily so. They're primary use addresses no physiological malady. Although they may be prescribed for certain health conditions like depression or irregular menstruation, that's not why most women buy them.

Secondly, Catholic employers are not imposing their religious beliefs on anyone. On the contrary, they're trying to live by those beliefs themselves. President Obama is saying, in essence, that Catholics can no longer be Catholic. The government will dictate to which of their beliefs they can adhere and which they can't.

Nor do Catholic employers tell their non-Catholic employees that they can't use birth control or have abortions. They're simply telling them that they, Catholic employers, aren't going to pay for them. If anyone is forcing their beliefs on others in this episode it's Kathleen Sebelius and her boss Barack Obama forcing their beliefs on the Catholic church, telling the church that its employers must ignore whatever religious convictions they have about the morality of birth control and abortion and subsidize them. They're telling Catholics, essentially, that they can no longer be Catholics.

I don't know whether the affected organizations receive taxpayer support or not, but why does that matter? If they do receive it it's because they perform a valuable service to society which we want them to continue. If the government forces them to choose between violating their conscience or shutting down everyone will suffer. One in six hospital patients in this country are currently cared for by Catholic hospitals. Close every Catholic hospital, school, adoption agency and other charitable institution run by the Catholic church and their public counterparts would be swamped. Maybe Ms. Vennochio thinks it makes sense to force all those patients into public hospitals, but it's not at all clear to me what's sensible about it.

She closes with this:

Obama isn't trying to regulate religion or undermine Catholicism. He's telling Catholic leaders they can't regulate the beliefs of other faiths. That's fitting in a country that treasures religious freedom, but also values separation of church and state.

Exactly how is it regulating the beliefs of people of other faiths to decline to compensate one's employees for doing things that one believes on religious grounds to be morally wrong? The employee knows when she applies for and accepts employment what her insurance will cover and what it won't. She doesn't have to seek the job, she doesn't have to accept it, nor does she have to remain at the job if she doesn't like the coverage she receives. By taking the job and keeping it she has tacitly consented to the employer's provisions for her and she shouldn't now have the right to demand that the employer start paying for what he considers to be moral vices.

Mandating coverage of morally problematic products and procedures is not the same as the government passing laws about working conditions or minimum wage. Compelling employers to provide work breaks or to pay a certain wage does nothing to violate their conscience or their religion. By treating matters of conscience as if they were the same sort of thing as matters of pay equity or work safety the administration has put us on a slippery slope to eventually dictating to religious organizations how they will be able to practice all their religious beliefs.

Perhaps next the government will require churches, whatever they may believe about gay marriage, to marry gays or lose their tax exemption. Mr. Obama's mandate brings us closer to the day when the Church is entirely in thrall to the state and the statists.

Anyone who values separation of church and state, as Ms. Vennochio implies she does, should be appalled at this unprecedented move by the Obama administration to extend the aegis of government over matters of conscience and the contempt it shows for the principles that undergird the First Amendment to our Constitution.

Michael Ramirez expresses his judgment on the matter in this finely detailed piece of artistry:

Calling for Armageddon

If this report is accurate (it's from World Net Daily, after all, which is not always a sober news source) the Iranians have just made it impossible for the Israelis to refrain from launching an attack on the Iranian nuclear and military facilities. By calling for the complete annihilation of Israel and all Israelis in a massive pre-emptive missile strike against Israel's cities they have pretty much forced Israel to launch their own massive strike against Iran before the Iranians can carry out their plan.

The call for a pre-emption and annihilation seems to have come from surrogates of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and although it could just be bluster and bluff, how can Israeli leaders afford to take the chance that they're not serious?

If there's any chance that this threat accurately reflects the thinking of Iran's leadership, Israel surely will not wait until Iran's missiles are in the air. It would take less than ten minutes for Israel to be laid waste. Let Reza Kahlili, a former CIA operative in the Iranian Republican Guards, tell the story:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people. The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.

Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.

On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel.

Iran’s Defense Ministry announced this weekend that it test-fired an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile and boasted about successfully putting a new satellite into orbit, reminding the West that its engineers have mastered the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles even as the Islamic state pushes its nuclear weapons program.

The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]... and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”

It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles.

In order to attack Iran, the article says, Israel needs the approval and assistance of America, and under the current passive climate in the United States, the opportunity must not be lost to wipe out Israel before it attacks Iran.

Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles, killing all its inhabitants.

The radicals ruling Iran today not only posses over 1,000 ballistic missiles but are on the verge of ICBM delivery and have sufficient enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs even as they continue to highly enrich uranium despite four sets of U.N. sanctions.

The Iranian secret documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” clearly indicates that these radicals believe the destruction of Israel will trigger the coming of the last Islamic Messiah and that even Jesus Christ, who will convert to Islam, will act as Mahdi’s deputy, praying to Allah as he stands behind the 12th Imam.

There's more at the link. The Iranians also threaten to destroy the United States in the piece. It's talk like this that makes war a matter of when rather than if. The Israelis must be thinking that they simply cannot afford to ignore it. An attack on Iran, the Israeli planners must reason, may have disastrous consequences for the world but the consequences of not attacking would be far worse. One way or another the fanatics in Tehran seem determined to precipitate Armageddon.

Holy Grail

Perhaps you've heard the news that a planet 4.5 times as massive as the earth has been discovered occupying the habitable zone of a relatively nearby star.

Artist's rendering of the alien planet GJ 667Cc, which is located in what could well be the habitable zone of its parent sun in a triple-star system.

The properties of the planet and it's star have led to the claim that this star is the best candidate ever for being able to support life, but the author of Privileged Planet, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, dissents:

Here are a couple important points about this particular system. First, the planets orbit an M dwarf star. M dwarfs provide very poor environments for life. They show erratic brightness fluctuations, and they produce powerful flares with dangerous radiation. Planets in the habitable zone of an M dwarf will spin down fairly quickly, leading to a "tidally-locked" situation that leads to all sorts of problems.

Second, terrestrial planets more massive than Earth are likely less habitable than Earth for several reasons. For instance, they will have less surface relief, which makes it less likely they will have dry land.

Some astronomers are eager to discover planets that can support life because if they do it'll be an important step in discrediting the modern argument for an Intelligent Designer. As it is there's no reason to doubt that our planet is unique, perhaps not just in our galaxy, but in the universe. Books like Rare Earth and Privileged Planet make this case pretty convincingly by identifying a raft of characteristics any life supporting planet (and its star and galaxy) must possess.

These books support the claim - inadvertently, perhaps, in the case of Rare Earth - that the earth is extraordinarily special, that in some sense we really are at the center of the universe, at least ontologically.

If it were discovered that our planet is not privileged, however, that it's not special, not unique, then the design argument is rendered a little less compelling. Thus the search for other suitable planets is the "Holy Grail of exoplanet research," not only for those astronomers curious to learn as much as they can about the cosmos and life, but also of those astronomers seeking, for whatever reason, to discredit the belief that the earth is a very special place.

Why the West Is Best

Over the years it's been dispiriting to encounter students who no longer feel confident that they live in the greatest country in the history of human civilization. Their lack of confidence in American exceptionalism is as unwarranted as it is sad.

Of course, anyone who bases their opinion of America upon Super Bowl ads, political ads, or television in general, can be forgiven for scoffing at the claim that the United States is a great nation. Even so, it is. No nation in modern times has been as a great a force for good in the world as has the United States.

It's ironic, therefore, that proclaiming the greatness of the West in general, and of America in particular, falls to foreign-born writers like former Muslim Ibn Warraq. Pamela Geller talks about Warraq's new book Why the West Is Best at The American Thinker. After quoting a passage from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (perhaps a regrettable selection on Geller's part) she says this:

But what about slavery? What about colonialism? What about the usual laundry list of the evils of the West that America-hating leftists trot out at every possible opportunity? This is what they're learning in our own universities these days: that America and the West are the worst things that ever happened to this planet, and if we just gave up and gave it all back to the Native Americans, the world would be better off.

Ibn Warraq shows in Why the West Is Best that the sins of the West are common to the whole world: plenty of other cultures have histories of conquest and colonialism, as well as slavery and exploitation. Only in the Western Judeo-Christian context, however, did the principles of free speech and free inquiry develop to the point that longstanding societal and cultural practices could be questioned and ultimately rejected.

Muslims took plenty of slaves, but only in the Western world did there ever arise an abolitionist movement. Muslim countries have been home to plenty of tyrants, but only in the West did free speech become a valued and protected principle, as one of society's foremost protections against regimes that could do whatever they wanted, no matter how much it outraged the will of the people.

There's more at the link. I hope liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reads Warraq's book. She recently made the baffling assertion to an Egyptian audience that Arabs contemplating a new constitution should not look to the American constitution as their model.

More importantly, I hope Warraq's message about the West percolates through American culture to the point where young Americans take pride in the accomplishments of this country and in what our country means, not only to it's own people, but to the people of the world. No other nation has ever been as powerful, as free, as prosperous, and as just.

Some nations may be able to match the U.S. in one or two of these qualities, but no nation has ever come close to matching America in all four.

Singer's Peculiar Argument

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer certainly is led to some odd conclusions given his premises that there is no God and that human life is not inherently valuable. He's argued in the past that infanticide should be legal and that people suffering from dementia should be euthanized, and his latest foray into the ethics of life is equally controversial. Singer believes it's immoral for the navy to use dolphins to detect mines because it endangers the lives of the dolphins. He writes:

According to earlier reports, the US Navy has trained about 80 dolphins to detect mines. Some reports say that the dolphins only locate the mines and drop acoustic transponders nearby, so that humans can destroy the mines, but it is also possible for the dolphins to set off the mines and die in the resulting explosion, and, of course, using the dolphins in this way makes them – and any other dolphins in the area – targets for the Iranians to destroy if they can.

Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient. To believe that, because they are members of a different species, we can ignore or discount their interests is speciesism, a form of prejudice against beings who are not "us" that is akin to racism and sexism. We should give equal consideration to the interests of any sentient being, where their interests are similar to our own.

Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group. They respond to images of themselves in a mirror, and use the mirror to examine marks on parts of their body that they cannot otherwise see – a test that is widely taken to be a sign of self-awareness, which human children cannot pass until they are somewhere between 18 months and two years of age.

The United States no longer conscripts its citizens to fight its wars. All its human troops are volunteers. But even conscripts have some basic rights. The dolphins have none.

Late last year, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, together with three international orca experts, and two former orca trainers asked a federal court in San Diego to declare that five orcas held and forced to perform by SeaWorld are held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that outlaws slavery. The suit has yet to be heard, but a similar case might be made against the US Navy for its use of dolphins.

I'm a bit surprised that PETA wants to extend constitutional protections to orcas inasmuch as I don't think the drafters of the 13th amendment had orcas in mind when they drafted the prohibition against slavery. Indeed, the logic employed by Singer and PETA would make it both immoral and unconstitutional for Amish farmers to use mules to pull their plows, for police to use dogs to sniff out contraband, and for zoos to keep animals in cages.

I'm also a bit surprised that Singer bases his argument for banning the use of dolphins on these missions on the high intelligence of these animals. If they're so intelligent, and they don't want to do what the navy trains them to do, then they can simply swim off.

Singer concludes with this:

Various civilizations have, at times, enslaved human beings and forced them to fight for their oppressors. That despicable practice is now rightly condemned, as far as human beings are concerned, but the enslavement of other species continues, in many areas of human life, and the use of slaves in war continues in the United States Navy.

What makes a slave a slave is that they are kept against their will and forced against their will to serve their master. How does Singer know that the navy's dolphins meet either criterion?

He doesn't, of course, but the main point to be made here is this: Singer is assuming that people will agree with him that it's wrong - immoral - to place in harm's way intelligent animals against their will, but why, given Singer's atheism, does he think that this is wrong, or, for that matter, that anything is wrong?

Neither Singer nor anyone else who shares his naturalistic worldview can say that there is any moral right and wrong. All they can say is that they don't like how the navy's treating dolphins, but why should anyone care what Professor Singer likes about this any more than we should care what flavor ice cream he prefers? It's absurd for Singer, given his rejection of any ground for objective moral values, to argue for anything on moral grounds, but he does it all the same. It's a very peculiar argument.

The Existential Christian

Philosopher Paul Pardi pens an excellent series of essays at his website Philosophy News on questions of religious faith and reason. He's specifically interested in defending the claim that religious belief is grounded existentially but subsequently argued for rationally.

Students interested in existentialism, Kierkegaard, and the relationship of faith and reason should check it out. Here is the list of topics he discusses:

• Unlocking the Tension Between Faith and Reason
• The Ground of Faith
• How do Faith and Reason Relate?
• Faith and Reason in Existentialist Thought
• Is Faith Practical?
• Faith and Reason in Tension
• Kierkegaard and the Modern Religious Mind
• The Irrational Faith--Proof, Intuitions, and Religious Belief
• Interview with Dr. Paul Moser: On Knowing God
• Interview with Dr. C. Stephen Evans: Kierkegaard, Natural Signs, and Knowing God

One of his key points throughout the series is that it's the failure to comprehend the existential grounding of belief that causes so many atheist writers to go astray in their critiques of Christian theism.

By "existential grounding" he means something like the following taken from his essay on Kierkegaard and the Modern Religious Mind:

I met my wife-to-be when I was 17 and she 14. She was from Oregon, I was from New York. She grew up in a middle-class town consisting mainly of residents of Irish, Scottish, and German descent. I was raised lower-middle class in a homogenous population of second and third generation Italian-Americans. She loved sushi, salsa, smoked salmon, and lima beans. I subsisted mainly on pasta with red sauce and Iceberg lettuce salads. Distance, age, family background, economics, and a long list of other circumstances should have kept us apart. Yet we found ourselves spending a summer together and connected on wholly irrelevant grounds: we both are identical twins. Our relationship made little sense and most everyone we knew let us know it.

My mother regularly reminded me of my full-blooded Italian heritage and the implications of “breaking the chain.” Her father, with a knowing grin on his face, thought that “dating” a scrawny boy of 17 who lived 3000 miles away wouldn’t last more than 3 months. Our twin siblings, amused by the quaint letter writing and phone calls, didn’t get it. Our worlds couldn’t have been more distant. Our families couldn’t have been more different. Yet we were in love. Damn the critics and naysayers and all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. We didn’t care what was reasonable. We cared about each other and we wanted nothing more than to be together and spend each waking minute with each other.

For Søren Kierkegaard, being a Christian is like falling in love. Most passionate, erotic relationships are not rational nor should they be. They are not strictly irrational though reason doesn’t seem to apply to them. When two people fall in love, they may know very little about one another but this is not relevant; in fact its part of its virtue. Common sense becomes a ballast and the lovers discard it, intentionally or not, for the possibility that all the promises they hope are true will be realized.

To those on the outside, their relationship may seem silly at best and dangerous or harmful at worst. Yet they jump in with both feet, critics and naysayers be damned. Theirs is a voyage christened by passion and driven by the excitement of a lifetime of discovery and private, personal moments that only the two will share. Their relationship is lived each moment, and only analyzed or talked about or reasoned with when disaster strikes. They have nothing to prove to outsiders and seek to be true only to themselves and what they’ve committed to each other.

If one is to be a true Christian, says Kierkegaard, one must take a similar leap of faith.

In other words, arguments against Christian belief that are based on reason, to the extent that the argument itself has any validity, is not going to be particularly effective because Christian commitment is a matter of the heart, not of the head. It's much more like falling in love than it is like working a problem in geometry.

The critic can tell the believer that his belief is irrational, just like friends and family can tell a person in love that his love is irrational, but the effort is usually pointless and unavailing.

White Tribes

Charles Murray is a sociologist of some repute having to his credit several very prominent books on race and class (The Bell Curve, Losing Ground). His newest book, like his others, is generating a considerable amount of discussion.

Bradford Wilcox, for example, has a piece about it in the Wall Street Journal and David Brooks writes on it in the New York Times.

It's often assumed, at least by conservatives, that the repository of traditional values (faith, work, family), and the key supporters of traditional institutions (church, family), had always been the middle class and that the greatest threat to these values came from liberal elites in the upper middle class and higher. What Murray has shown is that this paradigm is not true, or at least is no longer true. Today it's the upper classes which cherish the traditional values of religion, family, work, etc. and the lower classes that are sloughing them off, at least this is the case among whites (Murray didn't study other racial or ethnic groups).

His book is titled Coming Apart: The State of White America, and its message is important.

Here are some excerpts from Wilcox's column:

Mr. Murray contends that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four "founding virtues"—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation's most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and non-marital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America's best neighborhoods.

But it's a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and non-marital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Who would have guessed, for instance, that the white upper class is now much more likely to be found in church on any given Sunday than the white working class? Or that, just before the recession struck, white men in the 30-49 age bracket with a high-school diploma were about four times more likely to have simply stopped looking for work, compared with their college-educated peers? By Mr. Murray's account, faith and industriousness are in increasingly short supply among working-class whites.

Mr. Murray's sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness.

As I read this I found myself wondering which way the cause and effect arrow points here. Has the loss of values created poverty and unhappiness, or is it the other way around? I suspect it's largely the former. When people no longer value family, hard work, and faith they, or their children, almost inevitably wind up inhabiting the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, but the reverse is far from true. People who value the traditional virtues may start out poor, but they're often able to rise out of it.

In any event, David Brooks adds these thoughts:

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe...live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

All of this is fascinating and perhaps - for those of us of a certain age and sociological background - counterintuitive. Brooks, however, isn't content to simply describe Murray's analysis. He feels compelled to give voice to his inner progressive and offer a typically liberal solution to the problem:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Egads. This prescription is absolutely execrable. People work hard and sacrifice so that they can get away from those who don't, but Brooks calls for government to force them to live together whether they want to or not. Like so many on the Left Brooks labors under the delusion that if you throw people with weak values and lousy social habits together with those who possess strong values and good social habits the good will pull the bad up to their level. Perhaps no dogma in the liberal catechism has been more thoroughly discredited by human experience than this one.

It flies in the face of the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Good apples don't make bad apples good. Good money doesn't drive out bad. Putting weak students in classrooms with good students only slows down the good students and frustrates the weak students even more. The examples are legion.

But Brooks is a liberal and liberals cling to their fantasies and superstitions regardless of what traditional wisdom teaches or empirical facts demonstrate. His solution has all the attractiveness and merit of the old forced busing nostrums of the 1970s.

Mr. Brooks opines that the solution to our increasing tribalism is to forcibly "jam the tribes together." I wonder how economically diverse his own neighborhood is.

Obama's War on Religious Conscience

Michael Gerson is one of the most irenic, even-tempered columnists in journalism. He's a man who eschews fiery, over-heated rhetoric and scarcely ever utters a cross word. So when he writes a column in which he sounds like he's angry there's probably good reason to be angry. It turns out that in this case there is, and he's not the only one who's upset.

The column in question was animated by the latest assault on the First Amendment and freedom of conscience by the Obama administration. It comes on the heels of a decision by Democrats in the state of Illinois to give Catholic adoption agencies the choice of going out of business or placing children with gay parents.

Soon thereafter President Obama's Secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, cut funding to an organization that works with girls rescued from the sex trade because the organization would not recommend abortion services.

Now Secretary Sebelius has refused to grant exemptions to religious organizations (such as hospitals and universities) which hire people of other faiths from provisions in Obamacare which require them to violate their conscience and provide free contraception and abortifacient coverage in their health care plans. Mr. Obama could have issued a waiver for religious organizations but chose not to, earning him a storm of condign criticism.

Rod Dreher, for instance, quotes a friend, a liberal lawyer and Obama supporter, who is astonished at this move:

But Obama, to placate the abortion lobby, has decided to not merely ignore Catholic concerns as he already did, but now to affirmatively attack them. It is unimaginable that he could be this politically stupid. He now provides evidence that makes me (largely a liberal Democrat) wonder if this administration and elements in the Democratic Party are not in fact pursuing a wider agenda to reduce religious voice and presence in the public square. Until now, I had left that kind of theorizing to the conservative talk shows — but what else explains this move?

Dreher's friend has a lot more venting to do at the link.

Here are some excerpts from Gerson's column:

In politics, the timing is often the message. On Jan. 20 -- three days before the annual March for Life -- the Obama administration announced its final decision that Catholic universities, hospitals and charities will be compelled to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.

Catholic leaders are still trying to process the implications of this ambush. The president had every opportunity to back down from confrontation. In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, a unanimous Supreme Court reaffirmed a broad religious autonomy right rooted in the Constitution. President Barack Obama could have taken the decision as justification for retreat.

And it would have been a minor retreat. The administration was on the verge of mandating nearly universal contraceptive coverage through Obamacare without public notice. There would have been no controversy at all if Obama had simply exempted religious institutions and ministries. But the administration insisted that the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's Hospital be forced to pay for the privilege of violating their convictions.

Obama chose to substantially burden a religious belief, by the most intrusive means, for a less-than-compelling state purpose -- a marginal increase in access to contraceptives that are easily available elsewhere. The religious exemption granted by Obamacare is narrower than anywhere else in federal law -- essentially covering the delivery of homilies and the distribution of sacraments. Serving the poor and healing the sick are regarded as secular pursuits -- a determination that would have surprised Christianity's founder.

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama's decision -- an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 -- a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists.

Obama is claiming the executive authority to determine which missions of believers are religious and which are not -- and then to aggressively regulate institutions the government declares to be secular. It is a view of religious liberty so narrow and privatized that it barely covers the space between a believer's ears.

Obama's decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-clericalism.

The administration's ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared.

Whatever Mr. Obama's motivations, if he has his way Catholic institutions will be a fading presence on our cultural landscape, and all of us, Catholic and non-Catholic, will be the poorer for it.