Coolness

An essay by National Review's Victor Davis Hanson does a good job of describing the distressing shallowness of much of our cultural and political life. His column is titled The Power of Cool and it makes the point that what matters, at least for many people, especially those in the commentariat, is not one's behavior, ideas, competence, or ability to help the country, but rather the fashionableness of one's political positions and the personal chic with which they express them.

How one looks, speaks, and carries oneself, but most of all, the views one champions, matter far more among many of those who pontificate upon such things than the quality of those ideas and the character of the person who holds them.

If you hold the right opinions then you're immune from criticism. If you don't, then you can expect to be savaged by a culture and a media that worships ideological fashion. This is not something that others haven't commented upon before, certainly, but Hanson amasses so many instances of the phenomenon that it's almost stunning to be reminded how superficial, frivolous, and unfair the culture, particularly the major media, is.

After opening with some general examples Hanson turns his attention to the political sphere:

The power of cool is evident also in politics. State quite correctly that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska, and you are ditzy white-trash Sarah from Wasilla; state falsely that Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on television in 1929, and you are just “good ol’ Joe Biden.”

John Kerry’s second married-into fortune probably dwarfs the one that Mitt Romney made himself, perhaps by a factor of ten. While we heard in 2012 that Romney wanted a car elevator in one of his many houses, we never heard much in 2004 of presidential candidate Kerry’s various mansions, boats, or assorted playthings, or how he proved to be a keen investor as a senator helping to set U.S. financial policy.

Kerry, you see, was cool. He windsurfed and wore spandex as he cycled, and found his exemption by championing the poor he rarely saw.

The same was true of John Edwards of “Two Americas” fame. Do we now recall how he ran to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite the $500 haircuts and the self-indulgent mansion, replete with “John’s room,” a hideaway with all sorts of adolescent toys? Edwards, remember, earned those spoils by charming juries in his smarmy style, and nearly destroyed the practice of obstetrics in North Carolina through his flurry of malpractice suits. No matter, Edwards was liberal, Kennedyesque, and cool — and he earned prophylaxis in the manner of JFK himself, of whose White House orgies we did not learn until a half-century later.

Likewise we have been taught that there is no “power imbalance” or “insidious asymmetry” when a “mentor” has sexual relations with his young intern — as long as he is a feminist like Bill Clinton.

What, then, exactly, is this cool that allows you to earn whatever you like without censure, and then to spend it as you please without fear of public scorn?

It would seem that the disconnect is liberal politics, the coin by which one buys a sort of medieval indulgence from liberal gatekeepers in the media, academia, the arts, and the foundations that permits one to continue the pursuit and enjoyment of lucre and to indulge the baser appetites without harassment — in the manner that the medieval moneylender or sexual zealot still got to heaven by buying marble for the cash-strapped cathedral.

Bill Clinton could sexually assault women and it didn't matter because he had the correct view on abortion. He was cool. The married Al Gore could urge a masseuse to release his "third chakra" and the media ignored the risible incongruity of the mental image it conjured because Al Gore was cool on global warming. Bill Maher can get away with the most vile, degrading discourse about women because, as everyone knows, Bill Maher is on the right side of the issues. He's cool.

Here's an example Hanson cites that I thought amusing:

We simply don’t mind that Google and Amazon rake in billions, but we despise Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland for doing the same. It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in flipflops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.

Those of a certain age will remember how George H. W. Bush was mercilessly ridiculed for expressing surprise at how a laser scanner in the supermarket checkout worked and how Vice-President Dan Quayle become the object of derision for misspelling potato, yet no one on the left mocked Barack Obama for claiming to have campaigned in all 57 states nor have they found anything mirthful in any of Vice-President Biden's endless stream of howlers.

We live in an age when image, style, and holding whatever opinions the "enlightened ones" hold are all that matters. Those on the correct side of the ideological divide are cool and above any reproach, those on the wrong side are not cool and deserve scorn and ridicule.

All of which explains, I suppose, why some of us have never achieved the enviable state of utter coolness (nor hotness, for that matter).

Did Iran Murder Its Own Scientist?

ABC News is running an interesting story by Randy Kreider in which he explores the possibility that at least one of the Iranian nuclear scientists to have been dispatched to the hereafter by assassins was actually murdered by the Iranians themselves.

They did this not because the scientist was a mole or a defector but because he supported Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man who is widely believed to have won the last election, the corruption of which briefly launched protests in Tehran and elsewhere.

Here are a few excerpts from the ABC story:

Iranian dissidents have long suspected that the country's Islamist regime has used the cover of its not-so-covert war with Israel to crack down on internal opponents, and that a leading Iranian nuclear scientist whose death was blamed on Mossad might really have been killed by his own government.

Now a prominent opposition blogger based in London says that discrepancies in the recent trial and execution of the "Israeli spy" officially charged with killing scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi are yet more evidence that Iranian intelligence agents may have been the real assassins.

Mohammadi, a nuclear physicist, died in January 2010 when a motorcycle parked outside his house was detonated by remote control when he walked past.

More than two years later, on May 15, 2012, the Iranian government executed 24-year-old Majid Jamali Fashi, who had been convicted of assassinating Mohammadi. Iranian authorities claimed that Fashi, 24, was recruited and trained by Mossad and was paid $120,000 to kill Mohammadi.

In January 2011, Iranian media had broadcast Fashi's confession, in which he said he "received different training including chasing, running, counter-chasing and techniques for planting bombs in a car" while in Tel Aviv. Fashi also confessed to receiving forged travel documents in Azerbaijan to travel to Israel, Iran's Press TV reported.

Iranian dissidents, however point to discrepancies in this story and adduce evidence that Fashi was never executed at all. Check it out at the link.

The Multiverse Explained

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast.

In the piece he quotes Carl Sagan as saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that the universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision. If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^40 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist. Just as the probability of a blind-folded shooter hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe like ours appearing increases as the number of different universes that are produced increases.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so very little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so. It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

Why Israel Will (Almost Surely) Attack Iran

The question, it seems to me, is no longer whether Israel will attack Iran. The question is when and how hard. Iran's spokespersons have made it impossible for the Israelis not to launch a preemptive strike. For example, last Sunday Iran's top military commander proclaimed his government's dedication to the annihilation of the nation of Israel:

The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense gathering Sunday in Tehran.

While many within the Islamic regime, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have often stated that Israel should be annihilated, until Sunday no one in the nation’s leadership has announced Iran’s determined intention to carry it out.

In a statement, American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris said Firouzabadi’s comments “should also put to rest, once and for all, the fanciful views of those remaining political leaders, diplomats, and journalists who contend that Iran is a ‘peaceful’ nation which has simply been ‘misunderstood’ by the global community.”

The mullahs leading Iran’s Islamic regime believe in the messianic return of the 12th and last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi. According to Shiite belief, Mahdi will reappear at the time of Armageddon, and his coming — as the Iranian documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” revealed – will be triggered by the destruction of Israel.

Lest there be any doubt about the global ambitions of the fanatics and psychopaths who hold power in Tehran consider this statement by a prominent Iranian imam:

In a recent statement, Grand Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a religious authority and a top Iranian “Twelver Shia” — one who believes in the 12th Imam — addressed the future world described in the Quran. “The Quran is the proof that the world will be controlled and managed by the forces of truth and that there will be one government ruling everyone throughout the world,” he explained.

The Quran promises — twice — the worldwide rule of Islam and its victory over all other religions, Sobhani said, and this will only happen when the last descendant of Muhammad, Imam Mahdi, returns and takes the rule of Islam across the world.

Ayatollah Khamenei referred to this prophecy in a recent speech. “In light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God,” he said, “the Zionists and the Great Satan [America] will soon be defeated. Allah’s promise will be delivered, and Islam will be victorious.”

The article also includes this bit of Muslim kumbayah:

In February, conservative Muslims writing on a website tied to Khamenei told their followers that the Quran’s promises were “a ‘jurisprudential justification’ to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

When it is the stated purpose of a nation to annihilate another and when they're working feverishly to produce the weapons that will make that possible, the intended victims would have to be insane to sit back and wait to see if it happens. I can't see the Israelis doing that.

I wonder, though, how hard they will hit Iran. Will they seek to decapitate the regime so that the current leadership is not left in place to resume progress toward their goal after what might be a temporary setback or will Israel do what is necessary to insure that Iran is not in a position to do them further harm?

Machiavelli wrote that “the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” I suspect the Israelis agree.

What Recovery?

There's an article at Investors.com which puts the President's rosy economic claims in some perspective:

Just 16 states have seen job growth since President Obama took office, according to state employment data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The remaining states have lost a combined 1.4 million jobs since January 2009.

Even 34 months after the recession officially ended in June 2009, there are still 11 states that have fewer people working now than at the start of the recovery. Meanwhile, 20 states have unemployment rates at or above 8%, including nine with unemployment at 9% or higher, according to the BLS.

Obama has attempted to assuage such concerns by boasting about the "extraordinary progress that we've been able to make," including "4 million jobs created over the last two years." But the nation's workforce is still 5 million smaller than it was at the previous employment peak, set way back in January 2008, BLS data show. At 51 months, it's already the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression, with no end in sight.

There's more at the link. One interesting, an ironic, point is that states which tend to vote Republican have, on average, gained jobs at nearly twice that of states which tend to vote Democratic. In fact, Democratic states ("Blue" states) have had an average job loss of almost 1% since Mr. Obama took office whereas Red states have experienced net job gains.

In other words, what recovery there has been has largely been produced by Republican states. That might tell Mr. Obama and his economic advisors something they should heed.

Principles, Schminciples

This is very sad. I admired Cory Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J. He has a great story, giving up a profitable career in finance to become a public servant, even saving someone's life in a house fire a couple of months ago, and doing a lot to get Newark turned around. He always seemed to me to be honest and principled. This assessment was reaffirmed as recently as Sunday morning when he went on Meet the Press and strongly criticized the Obama campaign, which he's a part of, for its absurd demonizing of private equity firms like Bain Capital for whom Mitt Romney worked for a number of years.

But then someone from the Obama campaign must have made a phone call and by Sunday evening Mr. Booker was moonwalking away from his earlier views in what Joe Scarborough at Morning Joe Monday morning was calling a "hostage video." Here, thanks to The Blaze, is the video of the Morning Joe segment. The relevant portion is the first six minutes after the commercial:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I guess everyone has feet of clay, but to see Booker cave so far so fast, to find him to be so unprincipled and so willing to make himself a laughingstock is very sad.

Speaking of a lack of principles, allow me a couple more thoughts about the Obama attacks on Romney over his association with Bain Capital. The Obama campaign is running ads featuring interviews with people who once worked for a Kansas City steel company named GST that went bankrupt in 2001 costing 750 people their jobs, but from which Bain nevertheless made a handsome profit. They're tying Romney to this unfortunate episode as though he were Mephistopheles himself, but there are three facts about this ad that should be noted: First, Romney hadn't been with Bain for two years when the company went under.

Second the guy who was running Bain at the time turns out to be one of Mr. Obama's biggest campaign bundlers and fund raisers, a man named Jonathan Lavine. If Mr. Obama is so outraged at Romney for what happened two years after he left Bain, if Mr. Romney is so tainted by his association with Bain, why is Mr. Obama associating with and taking huge amounts of cash from the man who succeeded Romney and was in charge during the bankruptcy of GST?

Third, Mr. Obama himself forced the layoffs of tens of thousands of employees at almost 3000 auto dealerships, often with less than a month's notice, as part of his bailout of GM and Chrysler. For the Obama campaign to criticize Romney because some of the companies Bain purchased in order to make them more profitable and efficient couldn't be saved is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Cultural Relativism and Double Standards

Imagine that large numbers of white Christian men were deliberately seeking out Muslim teenage girls for gang rape. Imagine that the numbers of girls victimized by these degenerates approached fifty. What do you suppose the reaction might be?

Surely Muslims around the world would use these crimes as an excuse to murder any Christian they could find. Here at home liberals would be shedding their opposition to capital punishment as fast as if it were a jacket set afire and demanding that the perpetrators be hung from the nearest tree. The media would be pointing to these crimes as just another confirmation of the inherent racism and sexism of the evil white male and of the moral poverty of Christianity.

But imagine that the roles in the story were reversed. What would be the reaction? Well, in England it was about what you might expect. Nicholas Farrell at Taki's Magazine fills us in:

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded...a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists. Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

Farrell goes on to say that the liberal British media insist that every cultural group has its sociopaths and that we shouldn't make too much of the ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators, but Farrell's not buying it. These men would not have dreamed of assaulting Muslim girls like this, which suggests that the victims were selected on the basis of a religious bias, nor would white Christians be given a similar pass were they found to have behaved in such an abominable fashion.

It's a simple fact that no racial or religious group is held to the same standard as liberals hold whites, particularly white Christians. Why this should be the case is an interesting question. Is it that liberals deep down simply don't believe that other groups can realistically be expected to measure up to the high behavioral standard set by Western Christians? If so, isn't that more than a little chauvinistic, even bigoted, of our liberal friends? It certainly seems so.

The Stupidity of Political Correctness

A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.

Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.

So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment. The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.

Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic. They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy. They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.

They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.

What Is Going On?

What's going on with our president? He reportedly has a social security number issued in a state in which he's never lived. He's unwilling, or unable, to produce an original birth certificate, and now it seems he must have told a literary agency that he was born in Kenya. He apparently told them this in 1991 and the agency was still using that information on its biographical blurb until 2007, just after he started running for president.

Perhaps there are good explanations for all of these oddities (I think there probably is a plausible explanation for the social security number), but taken in the aggregate they certainly give the impression that all is not as it seems with our president. This last development is particularly troubling because the agency that used the Kenya reference for more than a decade must have gotten the information from Mr. Obama himself, and, if they misunderstood it, he nevertheless allowed the misunderstanding to continue until after he started campaigning for president.

Did he fabricate being born in Kenya before he ever anticipated a run for the presidency in order to make himself look more exotic, as did Elizabeth Warren with her ludicrous claim to be Native American, or did he fabricate being born in Hawaii in order to make himself constitutionally eligible for the presidency?

As I said, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it would go a long way toward alleviating legitimate concerns if he would just give us an explanation for these incongruities. It would also be nice if our supine media would show a little interest in the president's provenience. Maybe Erick Erickson at Red State hit the mark when he attributed the media's disinterest in the matter of Mr. Obama's birthplace to the fact that they're already convinced he was born in Bethlehem.

The War Against the West

Imagine living the rest of your life with armed police guards outside your door. You're unable to leave your house except in an armored van with a police escort. Whenever you go out in public you must wear a bullet-proof vest. No one can visit you without passing through several security checks and metal detectors. You have committed no crime nor are you a head of state in some third world country. You're a simple member of parliament in one of the most enlightened countries in the world, but you live under a permanent death sentence because you have dared to tell the truth about Islam's war against Western culture and values.

Nor are you an imaginary figure. You are Geert Wilders a member of the Dutch parliament and a man who refuses to truckle to the threats of the Islamist fanatics who seek to deny him and everyone else in the world the basic freedom of being able to speak out against those with whom you disagree.

Part of the reason Wilders is living under a threat of death is that he was primarily responsible for the movie Fitna, a 16 minute documentary in which he lays out the case against the Islamists. You can watch it here:

The following is excerpted from an essay Wilders recently wrote for the Washington Times. After describing the conditions under which he must live that I summarized above he says this:

[B]ecause I speak out against expanding Islamic influence in Europe, I have been marked for death. If you criticize Islam, this is the risk you run. That is why so few politicians dare to tell the truth about the greatest threat to our liberties today. The Islamic threat to the West is worse than the communist threat ever was. Think of it this way: Politicians who warned against the Soviet threat weren’t forced into hiding, as we who speak out against Islam are.

I received my first death threats in September 2003 after I asked the Dutch government to investigate a radical mosque. When the death threats became more frequent, the Dutch authorities assigned me a team of police bodyguards. In November 2004, after a Muslim fanatic murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a movie about the abuse of women under Islam, policemen armed with machine guns came to my house, pushed me into an armored car, and drove me off into the night. That was the last time I was in my house. Since then, I have lived in an army barracks, a prison cell and now a government-owned safe house.

I have grown accustomed to this situation. After more than seven years, the security detail has become part of my daily routine, but in a free society, no politician should have to fear for his life because he addresses issues voters care about.

Nor should special-interest groups be allowed to trump our Western rights of free speech, as Islamic and leftist organizations tried to do by dragging me to court on accusations of “hate speech.” After an almost three-year legal ordeal, I was acquitted of all charges.

I used to travel widely and frequently in the Islamic world, but now it’s no longer safe. I have read the Koran and studied the life of Muhammad. It made me realize that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion. I feel sorry for the Arab, Persian, Indian and Indonesian peoples who have to live under the yoke of Islam. It is a belief system that marks apostates for death, forces critics into hiding and denies our Western tradition of individual freedom. Without freedom, there can be no prosperity and no pursuit of happiness. More Islam means less life, less liberty and less happiness.

That is why I consider it my duty to sound the alarm about the relentless expansion of Islam. While many Muslims are moderate, Islam is not. Some Muslims take Islam seriously and wage jihad - holy war - against the West, and they do so from within our borders.

Fifty-seven percent of the Dutch people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history. Many politicians, however, downplay the most dramatic sociological change of their lifetime. They ignore the worries of the people out of political correctness and cultural relativism, which insist that all cultures are equal; hence, immigrants do not need to assimilate: Islamic values are just as good as Dutch, British or American values.

If we do not oppose Islamization, we will lose everything: our freedom, our identity, our democracy, our rule of law. To preserve Western civilization, we must do four things: Defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization, and cherish our Western national identities, whether we are Dutch, French, British or American.

Of all our liberties, freedom of speech is the most important. Free speech is the cornerstone of a free society. So long as we are free to speak, we can make people realize what is at stake. In Western democracies, we do not settle our disagreements with violence, but through spoken and written arguments. In the search for the truth, we allow everyone to express his or her honestly held views. That is how we outgrew barbarism and became a free and prosperous society. We must pass it on to our children.

Wilders goes on to talk about his new book Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me in which he elaborates on his message in much more detail.

It's frightening to think that where Europe is now, America will soon be unless we teach our children to value the basic freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights and unless we are prepared to fight for them and our way of life over the long haul.

Perhaps the first step is to stop pretending that there really is no war being waged by the Islamists against the West and that they really don't hate us and everything we stand for. The fact that Wilders and others like Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have had to live in a kind of protective prison is pretty strong evidence that there is and they do.

Why Is Death Bad?

Philosophers like to think about questions that would never occur to normal people to ask. A Yale philosopher named Shelly Kagan does precisely this in an article at Chronicle.com. Kagan wonders why it is, exactly, that we all think that death is a very bad thing. He stresses that he doesn't mean the process of dying, but rather the state of not being alive. Here's his lede:

We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad?

In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person....But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I'm dead, I don't exist. If I don't exist, how can being dead be bad for me?

From this starting point he launches a very interesting examination of a question whose answer we all take for granted until someone like Kagan invites us to think more deeply about it. Here's more:

People sometimes respond that death isn't bad for the person who is dead. Death is bad for the survivors. But I don't think that can be central to what's bad about death. Compare two stories.

Story 1. Your friend is about to go on the spaceship that is leaving for 100 Earth years to explore a distant solar system. By the time the spaceship comes back, you will be long dead. Worse still, 20 minutes after the ship takes off, all radio contact between the Earth and the ship will be lost until its return. You're losing all contact with your closest friend.

Story 2. The spaceship takes off, and then 25 minutes into the flight, it explodes and everybody on board is killed instantly.

Story 2 is worse. But why? It can't be the separation, because we had that in Story 1. What's worse is that your friend has died. Admittedly, that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend. But that upsets you because it is bad for her to have died. But how can it be true that death is bad for the person who dies?

Maybe nonexistence is bad for me....because when I'm dead I lack life — more particularly, the good things in life. That explanation of death's badness is known as the deprivation account.

Despite the overall plausibility of the deprivation account, though, it's not all smooth sailing. For one thing, if something is true, it seems as though there's got to be a time when it's true. Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I'm not dead now. What about when I'm dead? But then, I won't exist. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote: "So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more."

Kagan's essay is worth reading in its entirety as it really is thought-provoking. I just have one or two comments about it that I'd like to offer. If we accept his belief that death is annihilation, complete non-existence, then there are two things which make it bad, one of which he discusses later in the article and one of which he doesn't. The first is that just as we gain something from passing from non-existence to existence, i.e. life and all of its attendant possibilities, to pass from existence to non-existence is to lose something wonderful and precious. Kagan offers an analysis of this position in his piece which I leave to the interested reader to consider.

The second point, the one that Kagan doesn't discuss, is that if what awaits us is total non-existence then it renders this life that we have now utterly meaningless and pointless. In other words it's not so much that the state of non-existence is bad, but rather the implications of that state for our life now is bad.

Many who agree with Kagan that death is annihilation want to nevertheless cling to the belief, or hope, that life can still be meaningful, but I think this is a case of whistling past the graveyard. As the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said, "Life has no meaning once you lose the illusion of being eternal." It's hard to see how it could be any other way. Unless what we do matters for eternity it doesn't matter at all.

And, of course, if Kagan's assumption that death is the end is incorrect, which I think and hope it is, then, depending upon what it leads to, death can be very bad indeed.

Corroborating Evidence

Let's let our imaginations run wild and suppose that a black man shot and killed a white youth. The shooter claimed that he'd been punched in the nose, knocked to the ground, and was having his head smashed against the concrete when in desperation he pulled his firearm and shot the attacker once in the chest.

Suppose then that white groups go beserk, placing a bounty on the shooter. Agitators show up to fan the flames of racial rage. The media pronounces the shooter guilty of homicide, disregarding his side of the story. The president identifies with the victim, suggesting that the shooting was racially motivated. I know it's hard to imagine all this, but just suppose....

Then in the discovery phase of the trial it was learned that all the forensic evidence supported the black man's version of events. Don't you think that all of the above groups would be forever discredited for their inexcusable prejudice against the black man? Wouldn't they be forever made objects of shame and derision, just like those who jumped at the chance to condemn the Duke lacrosse players in 2006, for their closed-minded, racially bigoted stupidity?

Well, we'll see. Meanwhile, here's the latest on the George Zimmerman/ Trayvon Martin incident:

A medical report compiled by the family physician of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation.

Zimmerman faces a second degree murder charge for the Feb. 26 shooting that left the unarmed 17-year-old high school junior dead. Zimmerman has claimed self defense in what he described as a life and death struggle that Martin initiated by accosting him, punching him in the face, then repeatedly bashing his head into the pavement.

And that's not all:

WFTV has learned that the medical examiner found two injuries on Martin’s body: The fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles.

If this is all true, if Zimmerman's account is corroborated, then a lot of people in the media and in the black "community" should socially ostracize themselves in penance for their sin of inexcusable prejudice. They would also owe Zimmerman a huge apology, but don't hold your breath while you wait. People that small don't usually do things that big.

Should Everyone Vote?

MSNBC political analyst Andrea Mitchell says on a promo for her network that she thinks it's a scandal that some people are trying to prevent other people from voting. We should try to get as many people as possible to vote, she opines, regardless of which party benefits.

Well, no we shouldn't. In the first place no one is trying to prevent anyone who has the right to vote from voting. What some people are trying to do with voter ID legislation is to prevent the system from being abused by people who are not legally eligible to vote. Ms Mitchell and others of her ideological persuasion think that the voting franchise should be as broad and as easy to exercise as possible, but this is ludicrous.

Should we extend voting rights to 16 year-olds? How about resident non-citizens? How about citizens of other countries who once upon a time visited this country? Why not let anyone anywhere vote in our elections? If we adopt what we might call the Mitchell Principle there's no obvious reason why we shouldn't.

Should we make it hard for eligible citizens to vote? Not especially, but neither should we encourage people to vote who have not taken the time to inform themselves on the matters upon which they'd be voting. Someone who cannot name at least four Supreme Court judges or explain what the Supreme Court is or does should not be encouraged to vote. Someone who pays no federal income tax and thus has no economic stake in the country should not be encouraged to vote. Someone who cannot name their U.S. Senators should not be encouraged to vote. Indeed, they should be encouraged not to.

People like Ms Mitchell want these folks to cast a ballot, of course, because she knows that the less well-informed people are the more likely they are to vote for candidates who have charisma and who promise them access to goodies that must be paid for by the rest of the population. In other words, the more uniformed a voter is the more likely he or she is to vote for the liberal candidate.

This may seem a bit unkind, but in the last election Mr. Obama won largely on the basis of the support he received from two groups of people who are generally the most indifferent toward politics - young voters and poor minorities.

People like Ms Mitchell argue that we all have a civic duty to vote, but this isn't true either. We have a civic duty to inform ourselves so that we can vote responsibly. If we haven't done that then we actually have both a civic and a moral duty not to vote.

Major League Baseball doesn't allow just anyone to vote for their MVP. They restrict the process to sportswriters who make it their business to follow the game. There's a reason for that. The MVP shouldn't be a popularity contest, it shouldn't be based on which player is the best looking or the best speaker at off-season events, it should be based on his merits as a baseball player. The same is true of the office of the President. People who only read the sports pages of the newspaper shouldn't vote for president anymore than people who only read the editorial page should vote for baseball's MVP.

Dodd-Frank

The Economist's Tom Easton talks briefly in this 4 minute video about why he thinks Dodd-Frank is terrible legislation and will be repealed one way or another:

Determinism and Moral Coherence

James Atlas of the New York Times, in a review of books on the subject of thinking, touches briefly on the subject of the relationship between free will and morality. He closes his essay with this thought:

Does this mean we have no “agency,” no capacity to act on our own? Or can autonomy thrive within the prison of self-ignorance? “We have to believe it does,” says Steven Lukes, a professor of sociology at New York University highly admired for his work in moral philosophy. “If we seriously thought that our intentions made no difference to how we behave, we couldn’t go on using the language of ethics. How would we go on living the lives we live?” Or doing what we think is right? “People have free will when they ‘feel’ they have free will,” says Professor Kahneman. “If we didn’t believe in it, we would have no responsibility.”

But of course what one “feels,” as we’ve learned from all these books, could well be — indeed, probably is — an illusion. As Timothy Wilson puts it with haunting simplicity: “We are strangers to ourselves.”

We can't have it both ways, however. If we believe free will is an illusion then we have to believe the same thing about morality. If determinism is true and we have no genuine choices then words like "ought" and "should", when used in an ethical context, are purely emotive. If I say A ought to do B all I'm saying is I would like it if A did B. It doesn't mean that B is "right" in any moral sense. If A doesn't do B there's no reason for him to feel guilty about it since A is not guilty of anything other than doing something that disappoints, or perhaps angers, others.

It would not be "wrong" in any transcendent sense if A did not do B. If there's no genuine choice in the matter there is no morally right or wrong choice. There are only alternative behaviors. Whether Mersault in Camus' The Stranger shoots the Arab on the beach or doesn't shoot him is morally the same. Whether one "chooses" to help hungry children or refuses to help them is morally indifferent. Our behavior was determined by the laws of nature and we're no more capable of doing otherwise than what we do than the moon is capable of choosing to change its orbit around the earth.

Of course, there are some who would welcome the ethical nihilism that would result from the widespread recognition of this fact, but most would blanch at the moral chaos that would be unleashed on our social landscape. Ethics would quickly devolve to a matter of simple power, of might makes right, and few would want to live that way.

Most people are convinced in their hearts that they and others are indeed in some sense free to choose even if they can't articulate exactly what a free choice is. Most people are profoundly persuaded that they and others are morally responsible for what they do, but if one is an atheist (or naturalist) it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that determinism is true and that there is, therefore, no genuine moral responsibility.

That's one reason why atheism is irrational. The atheist has to live as if his atheism is wrong in order for him to live in harmony with his moral instincts. In order to be consistent with his atheism he has to sacrifice moral coherence, and this most atheists are just unwilling, and psychologically unable, to do.

Alphas and Betas

Bill Whittle observes in this short but punchy video that conservatism is an alpha male political philosophy whereas beta males tend to populate the more liberal ideological precincts. See what you think:

Another example Whittle might have used is the difference between the stranger (Clint Eastwood) in High Plains Drifter and the timorous beta males who hire him to protect their families and property from a gang of thugs.

I also think Whittle makes an interesting point about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin not talking about the problems of their moon landing because alpha males just don't talk about their heroics nor their brushes with death. Alphas tend to be stoics, in other words. It reminded me of the unflattering contrast between the navy SEALS who took out Osama bin Laden and the President and his surrogates who couldn't shut up about how much courage it took to authorize it.

Messy Quest

I recently finished reading a book written by a friend and former student of mine named Stephen Martin. Steve's work, titled The Messy Quest for Meaning: Five Catholic Practices for Finding Your Vocation, is a wonderful, gentle guide to finding meaning and purpose in the life we've been given. He draws deeply on his own life experience, his Catholic faith, and numerous vignettes from the lives of people as diverse as U-2's Bono, former Duke basketball star Bobby Hurley (and Hurley's father), Newark mayor Cory Booker, Catholic author and monk Thomas Merton, actor Martin Sheen, social activist Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, the French artist Matisse, and numerous others, to illuminate a path for those who may feel their own lives are empty, shallow, and listless.

Steve's a deft story teller and a gifted writer whose narratives about the lives of some famous, and some not-so-famous, people are filled with humor, wisdom, and insight. I should also add that he says some nice things about me which have in no way, I assure you, influenced my enthusiasm for his book.

I invite you to check out his blog to read more about Messy Quest which can be ordered from my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Off with Her Head!

Last Friday we mentioned the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley from The Chronicle of Higher Education because she dared to question the academic value of Black Studies programs. Riley subsequently wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal revealing more details on the episode, and what she tells us does nothing to make her treatment at the hands of the Chronicle look any less craven.

Here's an excerpt: So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

There's much more at the link and almost all of it makes her critics sound petty, intolerant, juvenile, and stupid. I.e. they sound pretty much like one might expect a bunch of liberal academics to sound. Read it and weep for the kids who are being taught by these closed-minded chuckleheads whose concept of the ideal university, evidently, is something resembling a North Korean reeducation camp.

Landslide?!

Dick Morris is a sharp political strategist who worked for Bill Clinton and who has since become more conservative. He argues that, current polls notwithstanding, were the election held today Romney would win in a landslide.

Here's his reasoning:

The published polls reflect a close race for two reasons:

1. They poll only registered voters, not likely voters. Rasmussen is the only pollster who tests likely voters, and his latest tracking poll has Romney ahead by 48-43.*

2. As discussed in previous columns, a study of the undecided voters in the past eight elections in which incumbents sought a second term as president reveals that only Bush43 gained any of the undecided vote....

So when polls show President Obama at 45 percent of the vote, they are really reflecting a likely 55-45 Romney victory, at the very least. If the election were held today, Obama would lose by at least 10 points and would carry only about a dozen states with fewer than 150 electoral votes.

It gets worse, at least it does if you're a Democrat:

The Republicans would keep their Senate seats in Arizona, Texas and Nevada while picking up seats in Virginia, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and Montana. The GOP will also have good shots at victory in the Senate races in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and — if Chris Shays wins the primary — Connecticut. Only in Maine are their fortunes likely to dim.

So why do the folks in Big Media seem to think that an Obama victory is all but inevitable?

The journalists in the mainstream media, who are not politicians and have never run campaigns, do not realize what is happening. The Democrats, as delusional in 2012 as they were in 2010, are too much into their own euphoria to realize it. But America is sharply and totally rejecting Obama and all he stands for and embracing Romney as a good alternative. While few are saying these words, they are the truth.

I don't know if Morris is right about this, but I do think that Mr. Obama will go into November with fewer advantages than he had in 2008. I don't think he'll have nearly as much enthusiasm behind him as he did then, nor will he have a lock on the youth vote. Blacks and Hispanics still favor him by large pluralities, but I doubt the turnout among these two groups will be what it was four years ago. People knew almost nothing about him in 2008, today they still don't know him well, but what they do know they don't like much.

I also think that Mr. Obama's string of good luck in the opponents who have faced him from his days in the Illinois legislature through his race against John McCain is about to run out. Romney appears to be much more formidable, and his campaign more adroit, than anything Mr. Obama has faced before.

The election may or may not be a landslide, but if it is I'm pretty sure that Romney will be the one doing the celebrating. Mr. Obama may win in November, but if so it'll be a squeaker.

*Actually as of today Rasmussen has it 50/42 Romney over Obama with 4% going for a third party candidate and 3% undecided.

Censorship by the Mob

I remember the days when liberals would stand on the barricades proclaiming that though they may despise what you say they'll defend to the death your right to say it. That seems like such a long time ago. Today liberals are much more likely to cave under even the mildest pressure and fire someone who voices any opinion that aggrieves any member of an approved minority group.

That's what happened to Naomi Riley at The Chronicle of Higher Education who had the insolence to scoff at the academic frivolousness that typifies so much black studies scholarship. For stating out loud what most people already know and thereby rousing the ever-alert liberal speech police who read the Chronicle, Ms Riley found herself thrown unceremoniously into the street.

There was no discussion about whether what she said was actually true - truth is irrelevant in these matters, you understand - it's that many readers found it offensive that she would actually poke fun at a field that is, in fact, eminently pokable, but which is a refuge of liberal black intellectuals who probably couldn't succeed in a legitimate academic discipline.

Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard has the details:

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to The Weekly Standard and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive....

Last week she wrote about the world of “Black Studies” in a post titled “The most persuasive case for getting rid of Black Studies? Read the dissertations.” You should read the whole thing, because it’s only 520 words, but here’s the gist of Naomi’s argument:

I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Naomi then went on to dissect two other incredibly silly “Black Studies” dissertations. One of these was written by TaSha B. Levy. Here’s how the Chronicle itself—not Naomi—described Levy’s work:

Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

Chronicle readers were outraged. Not that a graduate student was earning a doctorate by claiming that Sowell, Thomas, and McWhorter are threats to civil rights. Oh, no. They were outraged because Naomi would dare poke fun at such insanity. Because, you know, that’s racist.

Eight days and 497 comments later, the Chronicle’s Liz McMillen fired Naomi.

You should follow the link to read McMillen's rationale for firing Riley. It's a wonderful profile in pusillanimity. What McMillen says, without saying it, is that she succumbed to the pressure of the outraged mob to silence a voice with which they disagree.

I wonder if Riley had been a black blogger writing about, say, the superficiality of the religious beliefs of white liberal protestants if she would have been fired. I know. Silly question. Liberals don't fire anyone for offending whites, especially religious whites, and besides, white liberal protestants don't take their religion seriously enough to be offended by a someone poking fun at it anyway.

In the Cathedrals of liberal academia there's only so much tolerance for dissenting opinions, and those who show themselves guilty of the heresy of making fun of a sacred scholarly endeavor, like those unfortunate Muslims who have the temerity to blaspheme Islam by parodying its dogmas, must be put to the sword, so to speak.

Nowhere do we find more intolerance than among those liberals for whom tolerance is supposed to be the highest virtue.

Permanent War

The White House and its subsidiary offices seem to be in a state of denial concerning Muslim extremism. They refuse to publicly acknowledge what everyone in every mosque seems to recognize which is that there's a war against the West being waged by a substantial fraction of the Islamic world. Strategy Page has a good piece on this strange delusion.

Here's part of it:

The senior commander in the U.S. military recently ordered a course taught at a staff school for the last eight years to be revised to eliminate any mention of a war between Islam and the West. The course (“Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism”) pointed out that Islam, at least according to many Islamic clerics, is at war with the West.

The U.S. has officially denied that since shortly after September 11, 2001, despite the fact that many Islamic clerics and government officials in Moslem nations agree with the "Islam is at war with the West" idea. But many Western leaders prefer to believe that by insisting that such hostile attitudes are not widespread in Moslem countries, the hostility will diminish.

To that end the U.S. government has, for years, been removing any reference to "Islam" and "terrorism" in official documents. This comes as a shock to military or civilian personnel who have spent time in Moslem countries. The "Islam is at war with the West" angle is alive and well among Moslems.

The article goes on to amass a lot of evidence for this claim, and the entire essay is well-worth reading.

Islam is not just at war with the West, however, they're at war with anyone who is not a Muslim as well as any Muslim who is not of the same sect as they. Islamic terrorism accounts for over 95% of all the terrorism in the world, and almost all religious violence is instigated by Muslims against Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Baha'is, and other Muslims.

Nor is this a recent development. The slaughter started with Mohammed in the 7th century and continued for over 700 years directed primarily against Christians and Jews. It abated for a time because Muslim civilization degenerated to the point where it could no longer strike against enemies beyond its borders, so they contented themselves with simply killing each other. The twentieth century, however, brought the discovery of oil and with it unimagined riches as well as access to weaponry and technology they could never have developed on their own. Now they're able to purchase and employ modern weapons in their jihad to make the whole world submit to Allah.

Some observers have emphasized that the radicals are just a small percentage of the Muslim population, which may be true, but it's not very comforting. There are a billion Muslims in the world. If only 1% of them are radical extremists who want to kill you and your children that's still one million terrorists on the loose. Moreover, many of the rest are sympathetic to the goals of the radicals, and most of the remainder who aren't sympathetic are too intimidated to do anything about the malignancy in their midst.

We find ourselves immersed in a war that began some 1300 years ago and will not end in any of our lifetimes. It may ebb and flow, but too many Muslims believe that it's Allah's will that they purge the world of all unbelievers, and as long as they believe this, as long as they believe that they'll be rewarded in Paradise if they contribute to the bloodshed, and as long as we're dependent upon their oil and keep pumping our billions into their bank accounts, there'll be no end to the violence.

We may, like the last two administrations, foolishly pretend that Islam is not really waging a permanent, existential war against the rest of the world, but the moment we relax and believe that fantasy, we'll be hit again as we were in the 90s and on 9/11. The next time, though, it may well be nuclear bombs rather than jet airliners that are used against us.

Phony Truth

For those who may not be aware of the amusing events transpiring in the Massachussetts Senate race between Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Republican Scott Brown, here's a quick summary:

Back in the 1990s when Warren was seeking employment at Harvard's law school she checked the box on the application indicating that she was Native American.

Presumably, she hoped this would give her a bit of an edge in the hiring process, and, anyway, there was a legend in her family that her great, great, great grandmother was part Cherokee. That would have made Ms Warren at most 1/32 Cherokee if it were true, which is still no excuse for checking the box. By Ms Warren's standard, after all, George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, could call himself black (his great grandfather was black) and Barack Obama could call himself white (his mother was white).

Nevertheless, Warren was still claiming to be Native American as recently as April 27th.

At any rate, it turns out that there's no evidence that the ancestor in question was in fact Cherokee.

As if all this didn't make Ms Warren look silly enough it now turns out that the g.g.g.grandmother's husband, Ms Warren's g.g.g.grandfather, was a member of the Tennessee militia, and as such was almost certainly one of the men tasked with rounding up the Cherokee people into holding pens and then sending them off to Oklahoma along the infamous Trail of Tears. He also likely fought against Indians in Florida in the Seminole War of 1837. Breitbart has the story.

A lot of people have a had a good laugh at how Ms Warren's risible, if not dishonest, attempt to identify herself with an oppressed ethnic minority has blown up in her face, but there's a more serious point to all this. In the postmodern world of much of contemporary liberalism, truth is "whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying," as the late philosopher Richard Rorty once put it. It's whatever grabs you personally, whatever appeals to your subjective desire. It has no objective component. Thus, Ms. Warren's Native American heritage is true for her regardless of what the objective "facts" are.

This is the sort of nonsense one must accept when one gives up belief in the objectivity of truth and embraces the tenets of liberal postmodernism, and it explains why so many politicians can lie so glibly. They're probably convinced they're telling the truth, at least as they see it.

On the Wrong Side of Gay Marriage

President Obama has finally decided to end the charade he's been conducting on his position on gay marriage. He claimed to have been against it in 2008, and presumably more recently, but having consulted with Michelle and his daughters, as well as his neighbors, whoever the neighbors of the White House may be, he has decided that after a long process of evolution his position has mutated to the point where today he's all for it.

Rarely does one see a scientific theory confirmed by a president, but Mr. Obama has just demonstrated that Darwin was right after all. Politicians, like species, are in a struggle for survival and such a struggle rewards those most agile in adapting to changing environments. Thus Mr. Obama's evolution makes him more fit, he apparently believes, to survive in the current political climate.

Even so, Mr. Obama is simply wrong on this issue. Most people who favor gay marriage do so because they think it to be the compassionate thing to do, but this is a case of favoring the wrong thing for a good reason. Contrary to conventional opinion, permitting gays to marry is not a matter that affects no one but the blissful couple. It will have, probably sooner rather than later, a deeply corrosive effect on our social fabric by emptying marriage of any real meaning.

The traditional view is that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. Mr. Obama is telling us that he no longer believes that the gender of the couple entering the union should matter, but if the gender shouldn't matter why should the number of people in the union matter? Once we open up marriage to any combination of genders what logical ground will there be for limiting marriage to just two people?

Mr. Obama would have us step out onto a slippery slope which would lead almost inevitably to a nadir at which we'd have no rational basis for excluding any marital arrangement into which any combination of people wish to enter.

Indeed, what basis would there be, and I'm serious when I ask this, to limiting marriage to an assemblage of humans? What logical objection could anyone have, once we've crossed the gender threshold, to someone who wished to marry his or her pets? If people deeply love their pets why should they not be permitted to formalize their relationship? We can't just say that that's gross. We have to have logical reasons if we are to deny people this right and once we've discarded traditional and religious strictures there simply aren't any.

The point is that once the word "marriage" means any congeries of people (or animals) - and anyone who thinks it won't is either naive or hasn't thought this through - it has ceased to mean anything at all. Marriage will cease to exist as an institution in this country except, perhaps, among those backward religious folk who lack the wit to embrace the moral progress that our enlightened elites are foisting upon us.

Re: Carson, Emory, and Darwin

Yesterday we noted the disgraceful reaction of some Emory University biology faculty members to the invitation of Dr. Ben Carson to speak at the University's commencement.

There's an i-petition being circulated requesting Emory to reaffirm Dr. Carson's right, and that of any scientist or any thoughtful person at all, to hold a dissenting view on Darwinian theory without having to face rude and distorting attacks. You can go here to read about it and follow the links to the petition if you wish to affix your name to it.

Flipping and Evolving

Chris Matthews talks to his guests in the video below about how the president is trying to finesse his view on gay marriage to which he has publicly claimed to be opposed. Fearful, apparently, of alienating the gay sympathy vote or antagonizing anti-gay marriage independents, Mr. Obama has been loath to explicitly reaffirm his previously stated position or renounce it, opting instead to have his spokespersons disingenuously aver that the president's thinking on the issue is "evolving":

Everyone knows the president supports gay marriage but doesn't want to acknowledge that support for fear that it will cause him political trouble. So the most transparent administration in history dances around the issue rather than having the fortitude to tell us clearly where he stands on it.

It's ironic that the president was lauded in the media for having the courage to give the order to take down bin Laden, but seems to lack the courage to take a forthright position on a social issue like gay marriage.

It's also interesting that when Mitt Romney changes a position he's said to be a "flip-flopper," but when Mr. Obama changes a position he's said to be "evolving." Republicans "flip-flop," which sounds unprincipled, while Democrats "evolve" which sounds thoughtful and wise. It's a clever political tactic, I suppose, but rhetorical artifices like this do little to edify either the public or our political discourse.

Darwin and Ben Carson

World famous neurosurgeon Ben Carson is scheduled to give the commencement address at Emory University, an invitation which has some of the Emory biology faculty in a bit of a snit. Carson, understand, does not subscribe to the Darwinian orthodoxies, and his appearance at Emory, despite his remarkable scientific and medical accomplishments, is therefore a matter to be protested.

Here's the gist of it from the Baltimore CBS News affiliate:

World-renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is under fire from several biology professors at Emory University, where he’s scheduled to give the commencement address.

They wrote a letter to the school newspaper after learning Carson does not believe in evolution, calling it “deeply concerning . . . That he equates the acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality.” And that “not only encourages the insertion of unnecessary and destructive wedges between Americans but stands against many of the ideals of this university.”

“Dr. Carson was a childhood hero of mine, and he still is a hero of mine,” said Arri Eisen, Ph.D., Emory University Department of Biology. “What worried me the most was the fact that he said if you do accept evolution that you’re somehow ethically lacking.”

Well, now, that's an interesting objection to having Carson address the Emory grads. He has the temerity and bad manners to take Darwinism to its logical conclusion and to take Darwinians at their word when they acknowledge the incompatibility of a Darwinian worldview and any meaningful ethics.

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent (Comment #8) elaborates:

[S]o the Darwinists at Emory complained about Dr. Carson associating evolutionism with the lack of ethics. Why then don’t they write letters of complaint to their own! Consider the words of evolutionists themselves.

Evolutionism says rape is as natural as the leopard’s spots:

“Just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the result of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape.” — Randy Thronhill and Craig Palmer

It says about the same about murder

“over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition” — David Buss

and

“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.” — William Provine

and

“No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.” — William Provine

And here are some other delicious quotes from Darwinists:

We assume that cannibalism is always an aggressive, barbaric and degrading act,.... But that is a serious over-simplification, one that has kept us from realizing that cannibalism can have positive meanings. Beth Conklin, Vanderbilt University

and

Sexual relationships between humans and animals come as such a shock to people, but it doesn’t to me. There can be very deep, meaningful relationships between humans and their pets. Skatje Myers

Actually, Cordova is just sifting through the topsoil of what is a rich mine of such admissions. Here are a couple more quotes from Darwinists who admit that the Darwinian view of life pretty much does away with any meaningful ethical standards:

"If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then — then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing." [Biography, "Jeffrey Dahmer: The Monster Within," A&E, 1996.]

"What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Richard Dawkins

"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse

“Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature....We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.” Steven Weinberg

And from the master himself:

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." Charles Darwin

Perhaps the Emory biologists are so busy peering through their microscopes that they've neglected to pay attention to what their colleagues who are more attuned to the big picture are saying about the frightening and dehumanizing implications of the theory they so deeply treasure.

Hummingbird Video

A year or so ago Illustra Media produced a beautiful film about butterflies, and they now have another one in the works on birds. The trailer is a lovely close-up of the amazing phenomenon of hummingbird flight. Note how the hummingbird can fly both backwards and sideways. They can also fly upside down, and are the only kind of bird in the world that can do all this. Their wings beat an astonishing 70 times a second in normal flight and they weigh about as much as a penny.

Some other interesting facts about these birds include:

• Hummingbirds are the tiniest birds in the world.
• The bright radiant color on hummingbirds comes from iridescent coloring like on a soap bubble or prism.
• Hummingbirds are very smart and they can remember every flower they have been to, and how long it will take a flower to refill.
• Hummingbirds have little to no sense of smell.
• Hummingbirds do not drink though their beaks like a straw. They lap up nectar with their tongues.
• Hummingbirds have very weak feet and can barely walk. They prefer to fly.
• Hummingbirds do not mate for life.
• Hummingbirds have an average life span of about 5 years.
• Hummingbirds can live for more than 10 years.
• A hummingbird will visit an average of 1,000 flowers per day for nectar.
• Hummingbirds eat small soft bugs for protein.
• A hummingbird will lap up nectar at a rate of about 13 licks per second.
• Hummingbirds are only found naturally in the Americas.
• There are more than 300 types or species of hummingbirds. Most of which are found in South America.
• There are more than fifteen (15) types or species of hummingbirds that breed in the United States.
• Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, the only species which breeds in the eastern U.S., have been known to travel 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico to breeding grounds, a 20 hour non-stop trip.

Check the link for more.

U.N. Priorities

The United Nations is taking up the cause of Native Americans who believe they're being discriminated against:

James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".

"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said. Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.

"For example, with the treatment of children in schools both by their peers and by teachers as well as the educational system itself; the way native Americans and indigenous peoples are reflected in the school curriculum and teaching," he said.

"And discrimination in the sense of the invisibility of Native Americans in the country overall that often is reflected in the popular media. The idea that is often projected through the mainstream media and among public figures that indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they're out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong."

I do not wish to diminish the plight of Native Americans who often feel like second class citizens. Many of them suffer from desperate poverty and its concomitant dysfunctions, but surely there are far worse human rights problems around the globe to which the U.N. should be directing its attention and resources.

Christians in Muslim lands are being violently murdered, their property seized, their churches burned. Jews are portrayed in Muslim schoolbooks as monsters and pigs. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities.

North Korea and Cuba are statewide prison camps, shackling, starving, torturing, and killing hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was to question their political leadership. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities.

Human rights dissidents in China live in fear of their lives. Jews in Europe are being threatened in ways reminiscent of the 1930s. White farmers in Zimbabwe continue to have their property expropriated by the government and given to political cronies of President Robert Mugabe. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities instead of fretting about how Native Americans are treated in American school books.

Julia

Iowahawk has a funny caricature of the Obama campaign's Julia ad here.

Nothing could make more pellucid the sort of future liberals envision than does this ad. Julia seems to have no real family support, no friends, no husband, no church. She's a ward of the state, almost completely dependent upon others to see her through life's challenges. The government is her ersatz family. It's a dependency the left fervently desires to achieve universally.

Russ Douthat of the New York Times puts it like this:

All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of Julia is ripe for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal upper middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will not surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)

What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.

But if the slide show is easy to mock (and conservatives quickly obliged, tweeting Julia jokes across the Internet), there’s also a fascinating ideological purity to its attitudes and arguments. Indeed, both in its policy vision and its philosophical premises, the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism.

On the one hand, its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math. In addition to ignoring the taxes that will be required of its businesswoman heroine across her working life, “The Life of Julia” hails a program (Head Start) that may not work at all, touts education spending that hasn’t done much for high school test scores or cut college costs, and never mentions that on the Obama administration’s own budget trajectory, neither Medicare nor Social Security will be able to make good on its promises once today’s 20-something Julias retire.

At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness.

It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

Someone should do a clip that urges us to stay in school, get good grades, don't have children until you're married, stay married once you have them, shun drugs, alcohol and pornography, join a church, show up for work every day on time, and strive to be the best employee your employer has. If everyone followed these eight simple rules we'd have a lot fewer people in poverty and we'd hardly need government social welfare programs at all.

Hannity vs OWS

A few days ago I had some harsh words for a guy named Chris Mooney who claims in his book that Republicans are, by nature, intellectually inferior, or something like that. I thought his thesis was absurd, but afterward I got to thinking that maybe Mooney had a point. After all, I thought, a lot of Republicans adore Sean Hannity, a phenomenon I have never understood, and it seems to me that I should admit that that has to count at least a little bit in favor of Mooney's claim.

Anyway, Hannity recently had a guy from Occupy Wall Street on his television show, and the fellow's ideas were so incredibly naive that he made Hannity look, if you could somehow set aside his typical boorish self-righteouness, like a font of sagacity and reason. Here's the clip:

This is why OWS is going nowhere, and why people like Nancy Pelosi and others among the Democrat left simply make themselves look foolish when they embrace them. The guy evidently thinks that the rest of us owe him a living. He wants everything to be free, much like it is in Greece. One wonders how much he's really thought about any of this.

Musings on the News

A couple of thoughts on recent events in the news:

When it was discovered that the GSA had squandered a million dollars of our tax money to amuse themselves in Las Vegas there was justifiable outrage in the media. It seemed so irresponsible, so insensitive, to be wasting citizen's money on personal entertainment. Heads rolled as they should have.

But someone explain to me why there's not similar outrage when Mrs. Obama spends many millions of our tax dollars to amuse herself and her friends on her frequent vacations? What's the difference? She spent almost half a million of our dollars on a single trip to Spain. The individual responsible for the GSA disgrace was rightly dismissed. Why does Mrs. Obama get a pass?

When American intelligence agents located Kalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, George Bush didn't remind the nation that he was ultimately the man responsible for catching the big fish. When American forces killed Abu al Zarqawi, the sadist who beheaded Daniel Pearl and who turned Iraq into an abattoir, George Bush didn't strut around pointing to himself and beckoning audiences to applaud him. When American troops captured Saddam Hussein George Bush didn't do an endzone dance. Nor did Mr. Bush ever suggest that his opponents wouldn't have done any of these things.

Yet, Mr. Obama gives the "go ahead" to the American team that took out Osama bin Laden and you'd think from how often he and his surrogates remind us that he rappelled into the terrorist's lair himself and throttled bin Laden with his bare hands. Not only is the president taking every opportunity to remind people that he's the one who "got bin Laden" he's quite explicitly allowed that Mr. Romney would not have done so.

Think what you will about George Bush, he conducted himself with professionalism, dignity, and class. His successor could learn a few things from studying his example.

Finally, as someone asked this week, who is this "Julia" woman, and why do the Democrats think I should have to pay for her whole life?

Occupy Bomb-Throwers

Kevin O'Brien has a piece at the Cleveland Plain Dealer talks about the Occupy Movement's continued slide toward the lunatic fever swamps. The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Occupiers are a motley collection of rapists, druggies, vandals, slobs, naifs, all mixed together with incoherent economic arguments, and recent developments have done little to burnish their image.

Speaking of the arrests of five men who plotted to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, O'Brien says:

There was no danger to the public because the explosives were inoperable and were controlled by an undercover FBI employee, the agency said Tuesday in announcing the men's arrests. The target of the plot was a bridge that carries a four-lane state highway over part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Brecksville area, about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland, the FBI said.

What a lucky, lucky week this has been for Greater Cleveland -- especially for whichever unsuspecting souls were driving across the Ohio 82 bridge across the Cuyahoga Valley while five petty criminals associated with Occupy Cleveland were trying to community organize it.

The Occupiers, authorities tell us, thought they had rigged the span with plastic explosives that would detonate when they punched a code into a cellphone. The only thing that went up in smoke, though, was their plot. They were working with dummy devices -- fitting -- sold to them by an FBI informant whom they failed to recognize as the Man.

The arrestees are being dismissed as "fringey," which is downright hilarious, considering who is offering the description. Their self-description as anarchists is being presented as an indication that they're outside of the Occupy "mainstream." Yeah, right.

Take the anarchists out of an Occupy protest and you're down to half a protest. More likely, the bomb plotters are just a little ahead of the curve.

The people who proclaim the nonviolence of the Occupy movement are, for the most part, sincere. But they're riding the tiger.

As the local Occupiers try to regain their stride, we'll hear comparisons to the violence and division supposedly preached by the Tea Party, the movement Occupy was ginned up to counter. We'll hear how Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was really the leading edge of the Tea Party.

Most people, though, will have the sense to recognize the difference. Here's an idea that might generate some useful data: Let's have the FBI infiltrate both movements. Ten years from now, if they both last that long, we'll tally up the arrests and see which side has occupied more jail cells.

This summer will tell the future of the Occupy Movement. It seems to me that, bereft as they are of any coherent policy proposals, the only way they'll be able to keep the nation's attention is to become increasingly confrontational. If they don't, the movement will flicker out. If they do, the bomb-throwers and left-wing ideologues will gain more control and violence will accelerate. I suspect, though, that the movement is so heavily infiltrated by the F.B.I. that it'll all come to naught. Either way, I don't think the movement has much of a future.

Had Enough

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 Peggy Noonan was one of the most loyal of the loyal opposition. She was willing to give the new president the benefit of every doubt, but after three years she seems to have had enough.

Her column deserves to be read in its entirety but here are some excerpts:

[I]t still matters that the president doesn't have a coherent agenda, or a political philosophy that is really clear to people. To the extent he has a philosophy it tends to pop up furtively in stray comments and then go away.

I listen to him closely and find myself daydreaming: This is the best-tailored president since JFK. His suits, shirts and ties are beautifully cut from fine material. This is an elegant man. But I shouldn't be thinking about that, I should be thinking about what a powerful case he's making for his leadership. I'm not because he's not.

There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama's White House. It was seen again this week in Supreme Court arguments over the administration's challenge to Arizona's attempted crackdown on illegal immigration. As Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News wrote, the court seemed to be disagreeing with the administration's understanding of federal power: "Solicitor General Donald Verrilli . . . met resistance across ideological lines. . . . Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is 'not selling very well.' " This follows last month's embarrassing showing over the constitutionality of parts of ObamaCare.

All of this looks so bush league, so scattered. Add it to the General Services Administration, to Solyndra, to the other scandals, and you get a growing sense that no one's in charge, that the administration is paying attention to politics but not day-to-day governance.

The two most public cabinet members are Eric Holder at Justice and Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security. He is overseeing the administration's Supreme Court cases. She is in charge of being unmoved by the daily stories of Transportation Security Administration incompetence and even cruelty at our airports.

It will be interesting over the next several months to see how the president's reelection campaign unfolds. Will he try to make the case that he deserves to be given four more years, or will his team, perhaps feeling they have little in the way of accomplishments to tout, amp up attempts to destroy Mr. Romney?

The Evil Men Do

One of the most hellish places on earth, perhaps the most hellish place there has ever been on earth, is North Korea. Bill Keller of the New York Times has written a review of a book written about a man who managed to escape one of the prison camps in what is a prison camp of a nation, and his account is horrific:

I’ve just read Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14,” the harrowing story of a young man’s flight from one of the slave labor camps where as many as 200,000 political unreliables — a category that includes not just those who run afoul of authority but their relatives for three generations — are sent to be starved, tortured and ultimately worked to death. The political camps are just part of a larger network of detention sites designed to crush any spark of free will.

Harden’s story of Shin Dong-hyuk differs from the best previous refugee narratives — “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” by Kang Chol-hwan, Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy” — because Shin was in every sense a product of Camp 14. Born in captivity to a pair of inmates picked by camp commanders for a loveless bit of procreation, Shin grew up with no awareness of anything beyond the electrified fences. He is like the boy-narrator of Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room,” whose entire world is the backyard shed where he and his kidnapped mother are held captive. Except that the boy in “Room” knows love.

Harden’s book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country. It explains how the regime has endured longer than any of its bestial prototypes: longer than Hitler, longer than Stalin, longer than Mao, longer than Pol Pot. The tools are enforced isolation, debilitating fear, dehumanizing hunger and utter dependence on the state. By the time he was a teenager, Shin had watched a teacher beat a 6-year-old girl to death for hoarding five kernels of corn; worse, he had betrayed his own mother and brother, and had witnessed their public execution without remorse.

Yet Shin, who is not exactly a master escape artist, manages to evade the state’s controls, and along his stumble to freedom he encounters many others who — not in words, certainly, but in practice — are defying the system. What strikes you is how the shackles of totalitarianism are being corroded by bribery, barter and black-marketeering, including a thriving cross-border trade with China. It’s still a crushingly oppressive regime, arbitrary and brutal. But more often than you would imagine, need trumps fear.

Harden’s narrative is reinforced by more systematic studies. When David Hawk of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea researched the first edition of his camp exposé “The Hidden Gulag” in 2003, some 3,000 North Koreans had found asylum in the South, including several score of former political prisoners. When he returned for the second edition, just published, the pool of refugees was 23,000, and included hundreds who had endured detention. The updated report is a vivid chronicle of horrors, illustrated by crisp Google Earth photos that make the slave camps as palpable as suburban real estate on Zillow.

North Korea is a vivid, if extreme, illustration of what happens when materialistic atheism is wedded to absolute power and leftist ideology. We witnessed it throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, Cambodia, Cuba, and dozens of other loci of misery and cruelty around the world. Combine power and leftism with the lack of any basis for moral restraint in the leaders of a state and the result is pure evil. North Korea is but the most current instantiation of the rule.

Fibonacci in Nature

Here's a lovely video that illustrates how the geometry of nature so often exhibits the Fibonacci sequence:

The mathematical order in nature is astounding and quite inexplicable if it were just produced by blind chance. Everywhere one looks one sees why physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked that God must be a mathematician. Mathematics permeates the architecture of the universe, a fact which would be very odd if there's not behind it all a mathematical mind.