Why Invoke Executive Privilege?

President Obama's decision to invoke executive privilege (EP) to prevent documents related to the Fast and Furious operation from being handed over to the House Oversight Committee is very puzzling. It's hard to see how the decision could withstand legal scrutiny and thus hard to understand why the President would have done it in the first place, unless he's desperately trying to hide something.

There are at least two reasons to think Mr. Obama's assertion of EP will not hold up in court. First is that EP applies only to the president and his staff in their role as advisors to the president. It does not apply to cabinet officials or to anyone outside the president's staff.

Second, it does not apply in cases where the purpose of soliciting the documents is to determine whether there has been government misconduct, which is the very reason the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed them.

The fact that Mr. Obama chose to take this route suggests an atmosphere of panic in the Oval Office, but why? It's hard not to think that either the White House knew about Fast and Furious early on, even though they've denied it, or worse, that White House personnel, possibly the President himself, were actually involved in the decision to go ahead with the operation. If this were the case it would be extremely problematic for Mr. Obama to have signed off on an operation that subverted the law, subverted a foreign government (Mexico's), and resulted in two hundred dead Mexican civilians and the deaths of two American agents, all for an operation the rationale for which is incoherent, as we'll discuss tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has some helpful details to add at Hot Air on the use of executive privilege. This is not going to go away, and I suspect that within a couple of days even the mainstream media will start reporting on it.

Is Time Slowing Down?

The assumption among scientists has been that, except for situations in which special or general relativity applies, time always flows at a constant rate. A hundred years today is the same as a hundred years a billion years ago. Now, apparently, there are some dissenters from this view who think that time is actually slowing down:

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether.

The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether.

If this is true then was time passing much more quickly in the distant past such that an event which, say, takes an hour to complete today might have taken only a minute to complete a billion years ago? If so, if a billion years in today's time is much longer than a billion years at the time of the universe's inception what does that do to claims that the universe is thirteen billion years old?

What is time anyway? Is time something "out there," objective, such that were there no minds to experience it it would still exist? Or is time, as Kant thought, a way our mind processes experience so that were there no minds there'd be no time?

If it's the latter, if time is a subjective phenomenon, then until human beings (or at least minds of some sort) appeared in the universe there would have been no time. There would have been only events occurring willy-nilly compressed in a timeless matrix perhaps like data compressed in a zip-file.

If that's so then to ask how much time elapsed from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds is a nonsense question. There was no time. It's as if all the events recorded on a movie film are run through the projector at near infinite speed. All the events happen and they all happen in the same relation to each other but they do so instantaneously.

To ask the question, then, about the age of the universe is to ask simply how long it would have taken to go from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds if someone was somehow observing the process.

It's all very strange.

Yet Another Evolution

The dictionary defines "chutzpah" as unmitigated effrontery or impudence. It defines "hypocrite" as a person who falsely professes beliefs and values he doesn't really possess. I leave it to the reader to decide which of the two, if either, applies to our president.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama granted his Attorney General "executive privilege" so that he would not have to submit subpoenaed documents to the House Oversight Committee trying to get to the bottom of the ignominious Fast and Furious debacle.

Whether the courts will allow this use of executive privilege to stand is uncertain. It's unclear what grounds Mr. Obama has for asserting executive privilege when national security is not at issue and the matter does not involve the White House (of course, we only have Mr. Obama's and AG Holder's word for it that F&F doesn't involve the White House. The fact that EP is being employed leads one to suspect that perhaps they're trying to hide something damaging).

In any case, executive privilege is something to which Senator Obama took a dim view when it was invoked by a Republican president.

This makes about the five thousandth flip-flop Mr. Obama has executed since becoming president. Like a freshly landed trout he twists and gyrates whenever he thinks it'll confer a political advantage to abandon any belief he professed in the past. He certainly gives the appearance of lacking any underlying core principle that guides those beliefs. Perhaps his apologists will construe this invocation of EP as merely another evolution in the President's thinking, like his reversal on gay marriage, Gitmo, the Bush tax cuts, and numerous other positions, but taken together with so many other such reversals, it begins to give one the impression of a hollow man devoid of any real character or virtue.

Now comes on top of all these a biography of Mr. Obama by David Maraniss in which he reveals that the President's autobiography Dreams of My Father is riddled with dozens of false claims about his family and himself. The man is simply not who he has claimed to be. It's very sad for the country.

Music of the Spheres

There's a cool video at New Scientist for all you math types.

Musician Michael Blake has composed a piece of music based on the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is an irrational number whose decimal places go on to infinity. It has fascinated mathematicians, architects, artists, and musicians for two thousand years.

Blake assigned a musical note to each of the first fifteen digits and as the music plays he adds instruments to the composition producing a beautiful melody. Here it is:

Isn't it a rather startling coincidence that the mathematical structure of the universe should be musical? How did that happen?

Dreadful Public Policy

The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decision on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in the next few days, but economist Robert J. Samuelson at the Washington Post argues that whether the legislation is constitutional or not it's terrible policy. Samuelson writes:

We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care “reform” a centerpiece of his first term. Ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — and regardless of how the court decides — it’s clear that Obama overreached. His attempt to achieve universal health insurance coverage is a massive feat of social engineering that, by its sweeping nature, weakens the economic recovery and antagonizes millions of Americans.

He goes on to list five reasons why the ACA (“Obamacare”) is "dreadful" public policy:

1. It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty.
2. The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring.
3. Uncontrolled health spending is the U.S. system’s main problem — and the ACA makes it worse.
4. Obama’s program also worsens the federal budget problem.
5. The ACA discriminates against the young in favor of the old.

Samuelson fleshes out each of these problems in his column and concludes with this:

To all the ACA’s substantive defects is now added a looming political and constitutional firestorm. Whether the Supreme Court upholds the whole law, strikes it all down or discards only parts, anger and outrage will ensue. The court may be accused of usurping legislative powers or of cowering before White House intimidation. The ACA has become an instrument of the political polarization that the president regularly deplores.

When historians examine Obama’s first term, the irony will be plain. A president bent on burnishing his legacy acted in ways that did the opposite. It’s a case of bad judgment.

It's a very informative piece and causes one to hope that the Supreme Court strikes the whole thing down.

Why It's Hard to Trust Liberal Media

I don't like to accuse the media of being dishonest, but at least at MSNBC it's getting ever more difficult to avoid that conclusion. A few months ago they edited George Zimmerman's 911 call before he shot Trayvon Martin to make it sound as if Zimmerman was racially motivated when in fact the full audio provides a completely different picture than the MSNBC edit.

Now the same network has edited a portion of Mitt Romney's speech in Pennsylvania the other day to make it appear as if "the rich guy" is completely out of touch with common people, and then they laugh about it after they air it. Here's Andrea Mitchell doing her best to make Romney look like a buffoon:

The problem for MSNBC, however, is that someone recorded the whole speech on a cell phone, and it's obvious from the context that what Romney was doing was not expressing astonishment at WaWa's touch screen technology but rather making the point that private initiative is far more innovative and efficient than the ponderous bureaucracies spawned by government:

In her attempt to impugn Romney as someone who lives in a different world from the rest of us and thereby discredit him in the eyes of the average voter Andrea Mitchell only succeeded in shining a light on her own dismal professional ethics and/or competence.

This is the sort of thing that evidently passes for journalism at NBC.

Why Mr. Holder Must Go

Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to meet today with the House Oversight Committee to try to bamboozle them enough to avert a vote on a contempt of Congress citation tomorrow. How successful he'll be we should know by this evening, but I'm not optimistic that he'll be any more forthcoming today than he has been over the last 18 months of hearings on the ill-conceived Fast and Furious operation.

In any case, Clarice Feldman at American Thinker walks us through all the reasons for thinking that Eric Holder is either the the most incompetent or the most corrupt Attorney General in American history. Whichever of those two disjuncts you find most agreeable there's not much doubt that it's time Mr. Holder decided to "spend more time with his family" and the sooner the better.

Feldman's bill of particulars against Mr. Holder includes an examination of his shameless cover-up of the Fast and Furious shipwreck, the racial bias of the department he runs, and sundry other malfeasances and pecadilloes. Feldman writes:

Whether he resigns or is removed or spends the rest of this year responding to Congressional inquiries, Attorney General Holder has treated the Department of Justice as a partisan arm of the Obama Administration. Now and for the foreseeable future he is just another albatross around Obama's neck.

You can read the unpleasant details of Mr. Holder's tenure at the link.

Dawkins Shows His Sensitive Side

At Richard Dawkins' website there's a story about how a video on evolution shown to a middle school class caused a young girl to begin to cry. The video, she said, went against everything she believed. There was very little sympathy among Dawkins' epigones at the site for this distressed eighth grader, least of all from Dawkins himself who weighed in with this boast:

I too caused a girl to cry, for the same reason, when I made a cameo appearance in a classroom at a small university in America earlier this year. I felt remorseful at the time, but afterwards I thought about it and remorse turned to anger. Anger at the girl's stupid parents. Anger at the girl herself for being so weedy. What the hell did she think a university was for, if not to encourage her to think in new and unfamiliar ways, going beyond what she was exposed to when living with her ridiculous family? I didn't in any way insult the girl herself or say unpleasant things about her or her family. I didn't even tell her to grow up, although I should have. All I did was lay out the facts of evolution and the evidence for it, in unemotional, scientific terms. And that was enough to make the little fool cry.

The story above is about a school, not a university but, even so, what a pathetic little idiot. All remorse having left me, I now think the undergraduate I encountered thoroughly deserved her self-imposed distress, and it sounds to me as though the teacher in the present case was bending over backwards, further than she should, to be nice and accommodating.

I suppose calling a young girl whose worldview he was shattering a "fool" and a "pathetic little idiot" made Dawkins feel pretty macho. I wonder how macho he felt as he shrank from debating philosopher William Lane Craig last October on the existence of God. People like Dawkins feel tough making young coeds cry but cringe from facing someone who's not intimidated by his overblown reputation. It's the mark of a coward that he feels smug about devastating helpless victims but flees in fear from those he knows will make him look bad. It's the sort of person for whom the word "punk" is perhaps not too strong a descriptor.

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the link.

Rapid Evolution

In announcing Friday that he was going to do what in 2011 he said he lacked the legal authority to do, i.e. grant de facto amnesty to over 800,000 illegal aliens under the age of thirty, the President said this:

They play in our neighborhoods, they're friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one -- on paper.

I wonder whether halting the deportation of those who can't produce the paper to prove they were born in the U.S. was motivated by sympathy or empathy.

In any event, here's Mr. Obama - a constitutional scholar, mind you - declaring in 2011 that such presidential action exceeds his constitutional authority.

Evidently, not only has President Obama evolved rapidly on this issue, as he has on gay marriage, so has our constitution. Charles Krauthammer, however, thinks it's more about disregard for the law than it is about evolution:

Krauthammer may be understating the case. What Barack Obama has done in choosing not to enforce the law, just as he has in choosing not to enforce The Defense of Marriage Act, is to effectively change the law without congressional review. This is the sort of thing dictators do. We live in a constitutional republic where the elected representatives of the people decide what the laws will be. If the President isn't going to enforce those laws he invites impeachment proceedings for violating his oath of office and failing in his constitutional duty to uphold the laws of the United States.

Same Old Song

The Republican National Committee has produced a funny video (well, I think it's funny) which juxtaposes President Obama's recent speech in Cleveland, Ohio with another speech he gave last April.

It's one thing to borrow a few phrases from previous speeches, simply repeating an earlier speech almost word for word gives the impression that the President is either too lazy to put some fresh material together or has exhausted his store of ideas. In either case perhaps he deserves to have a little fun poked at him:

There's more on the President's speech at Hot Air.

I wonder how many times between now and November we're going to hear Mr. Obama blame George Bush for our economic troubles:

Fathers' Day Contemplation

Since tomorrow is Fathers' Day here in America let's talk about a couple of fathers. First is the father in Shiner, Texas who beat a man to death when he discovered the victim sexually molesting his four year-old daughter. The story received a lot of publicity, and watercooler talk all across the country focused on whether the man should be prosecuted for homicide.

Then, just as that case began to fade from the news reports, we found ourselves confronted with yet another variation on the theme. The LA Times reports the story:

Barry Laprell Gilton and Lupe Mercado watched, dismayed and helpless, as their 17-year-old daughter was lured away from home by a known Compton gang member, who wound up as her pimp.

The couple tried to persuade the teenager to break ties with 22-year-old Calvin Sneed. They sought help from law enforcement — to no avail — and later added the girl to several missing and exploited children registries, according to their lawyers.

According to prosecutors Gilton went looking for Sneed and shot and killed him. His defense attorneys deny it.

Sneed, officials said, was gunned down in his car on June 4 at 2 a.m. by Gilton, who allegedly fired a .40-caliber weapon from a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV.

District Attorney George Gascon said that as a father, he understood "the frustration that the parents must have felt.... But taking the law into your own hands is not an acceptable solution."

Gilton, 38, and Mercado, 37 — who began dating in middle school and have three younger boys — were deeply concerned for their daughter, who left home about a year ago, Safire said. They had discovered that she was appearing in escort ads, and that she seemed to be working for Sneed.

"They … had come to learn that she was being unduly influenced by this fellow," Safire said. "They encouraged her to stay away, and tried to get help to encourage him to stay away."

The 17-year-old returned with Sneed to the Bay Area on the weekend of June 2 to visit an ailing relative, Safire said. She argued with her parents, who tried unsuccessfully to get Sneed to leave.

Remember that according to reports Gilton had gone to the police and other agencies to plead for help, but no one would, or could, help them, so Gilton apparently felt he had no recourse if he was going to save his daughter than to take matters into his own hands.

Dean Maye said he had known Gilton since he was a guard on the Mission High School basketball team. Maye later coached him in the San Francisco Bay Area Pro-Am Summer Basketball League. Gilton since has volunteered countless hours to the league, helping Maye scout prospects and working with local college players, while also coaching at the nearby Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco.

"He's a dedicated father, a great father," Maye said. "We're shocked about this. I know the whole family. I can't picture it. I don't believe it."

Okay. Let's stipulate that the LA Times has the essential facts correct. Let's also stipulate that the parents really were the shooters and that Sneed wasn't the victim of some random act of violence as Gilton's defense attorney is alleging. What should happen to the girl's parents? What is justice for the fathers, in both Shiner and Los Angeles, of these two daughters? Do the two cases differ in any significant respect? What would you do if you were the father of either of these two girls?

Happy Fathers' Day

Contempt

Polls indicate that only about 50 percent of likely voters have either “very closely” or “somewhat closely” followed the Fast and Furious scandal as it has unfolded so a lot of people are probably wondering why the Republicans are so upset over a movie and why they're so mad at that nice man, Mr. Holder.

Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, is facing contempt of Congress charges (I'll bet you're surprised that it's a crime to hold Congress in contempt) for refusing to comply with demands for documents related to the Department of Justice's Fast and Furious debacle.

What happened, for those who may have been trying to make a living the last year or so and don't have time to follow the news, is the DOJ, or more specifically its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, set up a secret operation wherein they colluded with gun dealers to sell guns illegally to people who had no business buying them because ATF knew that the buyers were drug cartel thugs and that they would smuggle the guns into Mexico to be used in violent crimes.

The ostensible purpose of this bizarre ploy was to somehow track these guns to the criminals who used them and thus, and here it gets murky, to somehow more easily apprehend them and their bosses. At least that's the official rationale. Many people suspect, and there's some evidence to support the suspicion, that the guns were allowed to "walk" into Mexico because the Obama administration wanted them to turn up at crime scenes so Mr. Obama would have justification for arguing for more stringent gun control laws. That seems awfully cynical, but ....

Anyway, the whole operation blew up in the DOJ's collective face when several of the weapons were found at the scene of the murder of an American Border Patrol agent, not to mention having been used in dozens, if not hundreds, of crimes in Mexico.

Congress started holding hearings to try to find out who approved this ridiculous operation and what the motivation was behind it. To that end they have subpoenaed tens of thousands of documents from the DOJ, but Attorney General Holder has refused to turn them over. Moreover, the DOJ has sought to punish those whistleblower employees who have provided information to Congress.

Consequently, the House of Representatives is going to declare Mr. Holder in contempt next week which, unless Mr. Holder has a change of heart and produces the materials, will probably end his career - a denouement devoutly wished for by a large segment of the population. Indeed, polling data shows that 40 percent of likely voters want Mr. Holder to resign, whereas only 27 percent think he should stay. The rest are, for one reason or another, undecided.

You can read more about some of the latest developments in this case here.

It all got me thinking that June could potentially be an absolutely devastating month for Mr. Obama's reelection prospects. In addition to the possible contempt vote on his AG next week, the Supreme Court is also scheduled to hand down its decision on both the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the DOJ's lawsuit against Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law that Mr. Obama won't enforce. If those decisions go badly, and if the jobless numbers still hover around 8.3% or worse, and if the Eurozone looks like it's going to break up, Mr. Obama might find himself begging somebody else to take over the job so that he can just play golf and go on vacations.

Crony Capitalism

The Wall Street Journal has a story that recounts how Big Pharma and the Obama administration climbed in bed together to get Obamacare passed. It's a story of "Crony Capitalism" that seems to recur frequently with this administration. Here's the lede:

On Friday House Republicans released more documents that expose the collusion between the health-care industry and the White House that produced ObamaCare, and what a story of crony capitalism it is. If the trove of emails proves anything, it's that the Tea Party isn't angry enough.

Over the last year, the Energy and Commerce Committee has taken Nancy Pelosi's advice to see what's in the Affordable Care Act and how it passed. The White House refused to cooperate beyond printing out old press releases, but a dozen trade groups turned over thousands of emails and other files. A particular focus is the drug lobby, President Obama's most loyal corporate ally in 2009 and 2010.

The business refrain in those days was that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. But it turns out Big Pharma was also serving as head chef, maître d'hotel and dishwasher. Though some parts of the story have been reported before, the emails make clear that ObamaCare might never have passed without the drug companies. Thank you, Pfizer.

The joint venture was forged in secret in spring 2009 amid an uneasy mix of menace and opportunism. The drug makers worried that health-care reform would revert to the liberal default of price controls and drug re-importation that Mr. Obama campaigned on, but they also understood that a new entitlement could be a windfall as taxpayers bought more of their products. The White House wanted industry financial help and knew that determined business opposition could tank the bill.

The long and short of it is that in return for industry support, including $80 billion in rebates, the Obama administration put language in the legislation that would prevent drug re-importation - the practice of importing back to the U.S. prescription drugs that were originally manufactured in the U.S. and exported for sale in another country such as Canada and Mexico. These drugs are often manufactured in the U.S., but price controls in countries like Canada keep the costs of prescription medications lower than the U.S. market prices. Re-importing drugs on a large scale would be devastating to pharmaceutical companies' profits and R&D.

The WSJ notes that:

Crony capitalism undermines public trust in capitalism itself and risks blowback that erodes the free market that private companies need to prosper and that underlies the productivity and competitiveness of the U.S. economy. The political benefits of cronyism are inherently temporary, but the damage it does is far more lasting.

As for Big Pharma, the lobby ... avoided some truly harmful drug policies — for now. But over the long term their products are far more vulnerable to the command-and-control central planning that will erode medical innovation [under Obamacare], and their $80 billion fillip is merely the teaser rate.

Read the whole thing for an example of how an administration that promised us an end to this sort of collusion between government and business has been instead an eager practitioner of it.

The Case for Staying Out of Syria

Foreign policy expert Daniel Pipes of the Hoover Institute argues compellingly that the United States should avoid overt involvement in Syria:

As the Syrian government makes increasingly desperate and vicious efforts to keep power, pleas for military intervention, more or less on the Libyan model, have become more insistent. This course is morally attractive, to be sure. But should Western states follow this counsel? I believe not.

Those calls to action fall into three main categories: a Sunni Muslim concern for co-religionists, a universal humanitarian concern to stop torture and murder, and a geopolitical worry about the impact of the ongoing conflict. The first two motives can be fairly easily dispatched. If Sunni governments – notably those of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar - choose to intervene on behalf of fellow Sunnis against Alawis, that is their prerogative but Western states have no dog in this fight.

Pipes considers the reasons, including the humanitarian rationale, for intervening in Syria and finds them all problematic. He then looks at the matter from a purely strategic point of view and writes this: Finally (as earlier was the case in Iraq), protracted conflict in Syria offers some geopolitical advantages:

• It lessens the chances of Damascus starting a war with Israel or re-occupying Lebanon.
• It increases the chances that Iranians, living under the thumb of the mullahs who are Assad's key ally, will draw inspiration from the Syrian uprising and likewise rebel against their rulers.
• It inspires greater Sunni Arab anger at Tehran, especially as the Islamic Republic of Iran has been providing arms, finance, and technology to help repress Syrians.
• It relieves the pressure on non-Muslims: indicative of the new thinking, Jordanian Salafi leader Abou Mohamad Tahawi recently stated that "The Alawi and Shi'i coalition is currently the biggest threat to Sunnis, even more than the Israelis."
• It foments Middle Eastern rage at Moscow and Beijing for supporting the Assad regime.

There's more at the link but the upshot is that we're better off staying out of the Syrian morass. I agree that we should not do what we did in Libya, but then I didn't think we should do in Libya what we did in Libya. Nevertheless, anything we can do, short of direct military involvement that would save lives, prevent massacres, and make life miserable for Bashar Assad and his lovely wife, should be on the table.

Recolonizing the Bottom Billion

Some years ago while reading Paul Collier's book on third world poverty titled The Bottom Billion I was surprised to see his suggestion that perhaps the only way to save the state basketcases in Africa and Haiti is to, in effect, return to colonialism. That's not how he put it, exactly, but he essentially called for managing the economies of these nations and being willing to intervene militarily in their domestic affairs. It was a particularly surprising proposal given that Collier has a reputation as a liberal and liberals tend to abhor not only colonialist policies but also the suggestion that blacks cannot manage their own affairs and that they need white supervision.

Even so, many of those who deeply care about doing something that works to help the people of black Africa and Haiti seem to be increasingly coming around to the view that the only way these dysfunctional states can be saved is for first world nations to pretty much take over their governance.

This, at any rate, is the gravamen of Hannes Wessels' essay at Taki's Magazine. Wessels writes:

In his book The Trouble With Africa, Robert Calderisi recounts the sad story of two African teenagers who stowed away in the cargo hold of a Brussels-bound Airbus. They died on the journey from asphyxiation and cold. One of them was still clutching a crumpled note that lamented their misery while petitioning Europe:

Therefore, we African children and youth are asking you to set up an efficient organisation to help with the development of Africa. Thus, if we are sacrificing ourselves and putting our lives in jeopardy it is because we are suffering too much in Africa and we need your help to fight against poverty and bring war to an end in Africa.

The left-of-center British monthly Prospect has also ventured out of comfortable territory with an intriguing article by Paul Romer on “charter cities.” He makes a strong case for the construction of metropolitan areas under a charter granted to a foreign entity. Using Hong Kong as an example, he argues in favor of importing experts to Africa who know how to create the conditions needed for economic prosperity.

He argues that hundreds of billions in foreign aid have already been squandered and proposes that future financial flows to Africa should be channeled into schemes which will provide engines for economic growth. “The answer to Africa’s gloom is obvious: Reinstate the rule of law through intervention that leads to effective governance.”

Both The Trouble With Africa and Paul Romer’s article appear to call for a form of neo-colonialism. A relentless flow of empirical evidence from Harare to Haiti and from Dakar to Detroit shows that “black”-dominated administrations follow a familiar path. They destroy established structures, leading to degradation, ruin, and chaos.

In South Africa the Western Cape Province (which includes Cape Town) is one of precious few highly developed, heavily populated areas on the continent where there is a semblance of order, where services are provided and the rule of law is enforced. It is also the continent’s last white-led political entity of any significance. The Provincial Administration is led by the formidable Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, who is setting an embarrassing example of good governance for the ANC, which rules all the other eight provinces with varying degrees of incompetence and dishonesty. Mrs. Zille recently attracted furious fire from the media and the ANC leadership for referring to people streaming west from the atrociously governed Eastern Cape as “refugees.” She was right, but she struck a raw nerve.

There's more at the link. The suggestion that white nations need to rescue those run by blacks by taking them over is a mortal sin in the catechism of the politically correct, but what's the alternative? We can go on pretending that someday those failed states will somehow manage to pull themselves together and that meanwhile we should continue to squander billions of dollars in aid until they do, or we can ignore them altogether and let them go their own way, or we can do something that will actually help them. The latter may require that we set aside our "white guilt" and our fear of being labelled "racist" and recognize that, as Wessels concludes, "unpalatable as it may be, without the intervention of 'white' governance skills, there is little hope for Africa." He may have also said the same about Haiti.

Repeating Rwanda

New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff is an Obama supporter who's finding it increasingly difficult to suppress his disillusionment with what he sees as Mr. Obama's fecklessness toward both Sudan and Syria. The regimes in both countries are conducting genocidal war against their own people, but the situation in Sudan gets considerably less attention on the evening news than that in Syria.

The government in Khartoum is seeking to exterminate the people of the Nuba Mountains through bombings and deliberate starvation, and the U.S. is apparently doing little to save them and is even discouraging rebel forces from preventing the Sudanese government from bombing their villages.

Kristoff writes:

When a government devours its own people, as in Syria or Sudan, there are never easy solutions. That helps explain President Obama’s dithering, for there are more problems in international relations than solutions, and well-meaning interventions can make a crisis worse.

Yet the president is taking prudence to the point of paralysis. I’m generally an admirer of Obama’s foreign policy, but his policies toward both Syria and Sudan increasingly seem lame, ineffective and contrary to American interests and values.

Obama has shown himself comfortable projecting power — as in his tripling of American troops in Afghanistan. Yet now we have the spectacle of a Nobel Peace Prize winner in effect helping to protect two of the most odious regimes in the world.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. But days of seeing people bombed and starved here in the Nuba Mountains have left me not only embarrassed by my government’s passivity but outraged by it.

The regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is dropping anti-personnel bombs full of ball bearings on farming villages. For one year now, Bashir has sealed off this area in an effort to crush the rebel force, blocking food shipments and emergency aid, so that hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nubans are now living on tree leaves, roots and insects.

What should I tell Amal Tia, who recently lost a daughter, Kushe, to starvation and now fears that she and her four remaining children will starve to death, too? “We’ll just die at home if no food comes,” she told me bleakly.

Perhaps I should tell her that Nuba is an inconvenient tragedy, and that the White House is too concerned with Sudan’s stability to speak up forcefully? Or that Sudan is too geopolitically insignificant for her children’s starvation to matter?

Nothing moved me more than watching a 6-year-old girl, Israh Jibrael, tenderly feed her starving 2-year-old sister, Nada, leaves from a branch. Israh looked hungrily at the leaves herself, and occasionally she took a few. But, mostly, she put them into her weak sister’s mouth. Both children were barefoot, clad in rags, and had hair that was turning brown from malnutrition.

Their mother, Amal Kua, told me that the family hasn’t had regular food since the Sudanese Army attacked their town five months ago. Since then, she said, the family has lived in caves and subsisted on leaves.

Yet the Obama administration’s special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Princeton Lyman, generally a smart and hard-working diplomat, said in a December newspaper interview: “We do not want to see the ouster of the regime, nor regime change.” Huh? This is a regime whose leader has been charged with genocide, has destabilized the region, has sponsored brutal proxy warlords like Joseph Kony, has presided over the deaths of more than 2.5 million people in southern Sudan, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains — and the Obama administration doesn’t want him overthrown?

In addition, the administration has consistently tried to restrain the rebel force here, led by Abdel Aziz Al-Hilu, a successful commander who has lived in America and projects moderation. The rebels are itching to seize the South Kordofan state capital, Kadugli, but say that Washington is discouraging them. In an interview in his mountain hide-out, Abdel Aziz noted that his forces have repeatedly been victorious over Sudan’s recently.

“Their army is very weak,” he said. “They have no motivation to fight.” He seemed mystified that American officials try to shield a genocidal government whose army is, he thinks, crumbling.

Kristoff has more to say about what should and could be done at the link. It's fascinating to see liberals who were so outraged that George Bush refused to allow tyranny to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan now perplexed and dismayed that Obama is doing the same thing in Sudan that Clinton did in Rwanda, i.e. nothing.

He closes with this:

Obama was forceful in demanding that President George W. Bush stand up to Sudan during the slaughter in Darfur, so it’s painful to see him so passive on Sudan today. When governments turn to mass murder, we may have no easy solutions, but we should at least be crystal clear about which side we’re on. That’s not too much to expect of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I don't know why it'd be "painful." It's not as if in the Sudanese tragedy the pattern of candidate Obama's words being ignored by President Obama is appearing for the first time. One would think that people like Kristoff would be used to it by now.

Unbroken

Last Memorial Day I began to read a book by Laura Hillenbrand titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. Upon its release in 2010 it zoomed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was named the top book of 2010 by Time. Once I started it I could scarcely put it down. Hillenbrand skillfully relates the story of Louie Zamperini, who, I'm ashamed to admit, I had never heard of before.

Zamperini was a juvenile delinquent in the 1920s who transformed himself into a world famous Olympic class long distance runner in the 1930s. When war came Zamperini served as a bombardier in the Pacific. While doing search and rescue duty his plane went down and all but three of the eleven-man crew were lost. The survivors, including Zamperini, bobbed on a tiny raft in the Pacific for 47 days until they made landfall on an island held by the Japanese.

The account of how Louie and his pilot Russell Allen Phillips survived the ordeal (the third man died at sea) is astonishing, but their travails were just beginning. Once captured by the Japanese they were sent to one POW camp after another where they endured unimaginable hardship and brutality for two and a half years.

To give an indication of what it was like for these men I'll quote a passage from Hillenbrand's account:

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four. Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935 - more than 37 percent - died. By comparison only 1 percent of the Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died.

Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo's Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein to be murdered without the world ever learning of their fate.

In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down.

Even those who survived and returned home were permanently disfigured, physically and emotionally, by their experience. It was horrific. Reading Hillenbrand's account I found myself asking over and over how civilized human beings could behave like this. It was the same question I had when reading about the "Rape of Nanking" in the 1930s, where hundreds of thousands of Chinese were tortured and murdered by Japanese forces in the city of Nanking.

One might be inclined to attribute the Japanese soldiers' suppression of their humanity to their militaristic, racist, totalitarian society, but I think it goes deeper than that. To be sure, people often fall into cruelty when they believe they're racially and ethnically superior to others, but when racism is conjoined with a lack of belief in one's accountability to God it issues in something especially virulent, savage, and demonic. Contrarily, when people have been steeped in the teaching of Christ to love their enemies, to see others as loved by God, and to see themselves as accountable to God for how they treat others they'll be far less likely to submit to their basest hatreds, prejudices, and desires.

Cruelty and savagery lurk in every human heart. Take way the constraints imposed by belief in the Christian God, replace them with racism and militarism, and the awful horrors perpetrated by the German Gestapo and the Japanese military are what one should expect. In a world without God rape and genocide, torture and massacre, violate no moral law because there is no moral law. Nor are they criminal when it's the legal authorities who order the atrocities. Indeed, if the Axis powers had won the war the loathsome architects of these evils would have been feted as heroes. As it is many of the worst tormenters of the American POWs, as Hillenbrand tells us, never had to pay for their crimes.

Zamperini's amazing story doesn't end with his liberation from the camps. I suggest you buy the book and read it. The heroism and courage on display, not just by Zamperini but many, many others, including some Japanese who tried to do what they could to mitigate the POWs suffering, will inspire you.

Is Darwinism Losing It's Grip in Asia?

Darwinian evolution is the view that all of life came to be what it is today through purely natural processes like natural selection acting on chance variations. The popularity of this view, which technically makes no allowance for the action of an intelligent designer, seems to have crested in the mid-twentieth century and is showing signs today of being in retreat.

Nowhere is this more evident, perhaps, than in Asia. Even in China, whose ruling communists cast a hostile eye on anything that might suggest that atheistic explanations of origins are inadequate, there's reason to think that that may be changing.

Evolution News and Views has a report that discusses some of these developments. Here's part of it:

While some Darwinists have worriedly taken note of spreading doubts about evolutionary theory in Europe, Asia has emerged as the hottest new frontier for the scientific critique of Darwinism.

In Korea, a mainstream publisher of popular and science texts, Book 21 Publishing Group, has brought out an edition of Explore Evolution, a textbook presenting both sides of the evolution debate. The translation was done by a pair of Korean academics, Seung Yup Lee and Eung Bin Kim, whose scientific specialties are respectively in biomimetics and environmental microbiology. Both teach at universities, Sogang and Yonsei, ranked in Korea's top ten.

Dr. Lee's research fuels his questions about macroevolution. His work on the amazing "natural design" of the South American Hercules beetle and its humidity-sensing shell was highlighted in Nature. In the Preface to the Korean Explore Evolution, Lee advocates investigating "alternative theories" to undirected Darwinian evolution.

Korea also has its own Research Association for Intelligent Design, with an impressive masthead of biologists, chemists and other scientists at top research institutions. Sogang University in Seoul hosts an Annual Symposium on Intelligent Design. The event has included presentations on William Dembski and Robert Marks's Law of Conservation of Information and on protein translation as evidence of intelligent design.

China, of course, is Asia's biggest market for ideas. Illustra Media has had considerable success distributing DVDs of prime ID-related titles there....

Producer and director Lad Allen had Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Privileged Planet dubbed into Cantonese and Mandarin, moving a hundred thousand copies into China via Hong Kong. He estimates that three or four times that many DVDs were illegally pirated and copied. "They're sold on the street for a buck," said Allen, who's not complaining. Non-existent copyright enforcement is a fact of life in China.

Illustra has completed a Japanese translation of The Privileged Planet, lip-synced by Japanese actors in Tokyo. But Unlocking the Mystery of Life is Illustra's most-translated film, with editions in Khmer (Cambodian), Thai, Sri Lankan, and Mongolian as well as a variety of European languages.

The problem Darwinians face, whether in the East or the West, is that unless students already have a prior commitment to naturalism the argument that massive amounts of information, plus levels of complexity in every microscopic cell that exceed anything ever built by human beings, just happened to arise by blind processes acting on random mutations is literally incredible.

Darwinian evolution is a major prop of naturalism which would have far less purchase were it shown that Darwinism were doubtful. Yet to sustain one's belief in Darwinism one almost must be a priori committed to naturalism. Those whose minds are metaphysically open to the possibility of intelligent agency, on the other hand, often find that the evidence being adduced almost daily by scientists in the field often strongly suggests an intelligence underlying the phenomena they're studying.

This is why Darwinians fight with almost superhuman tenacity to prevent students from being made aware of alternatives to the naturalistic explanation of origins. When students are made aware of the difficulties with Darwinism and of the arguments for intelligent design they'll abandon Darwinism in a nonce. The Darwinians know this and it gives them, or at least some of them, night terrors.

Distinctions

Bill Whittle explains in the following video why Gov. Scott Walker's decisive victory in the recent Wisconsin recall election gives America hope.

For those who may be a little confused by all the talk in Wisconsin during the last year of public vs. private unions Whittle's explanation will be especially helpful. Check it out:

Dan Quayle Was Right

Perhaps you remember George H.W. Bush's Vice-President Dan Quayle. I've mentioned him in a couple of posts recently, mostly in the context of how he was dismembered by our cultural sages for misspelling "potato" on national television. You might also recall the savage drubbing he suffered at the hands of those same folks for proffering the opinion that unmarried motherhood was causing a lot of problems in our society and that it didn't help matters to have a popular television show (Murphy Brown) depict its lead character having a child without benefit of matrimony.

The media cacophony this seemingly innocuous and self-evident assertion ignited was startling. One might have thought that Quayle had desecrated the grave of Martin Luther King or something of similar magnitude.

Isabel Sawhill, however, writes in the Washington Post that now, some twenty years later, Quayle has been vindicated. Here's her lede:

On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Quayle’s argument — that Brown was sending the wrong message, that single parenthood should not be encouraged — erupted into a major campaign controversy. And just a few weeks before the ’92 vote, the show aired portions of his speech and had characters react to it.

“Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes,” Bergen’s character said.

Her fictional colleague Frank, meanwhile, echoed some of the national reaction: “It’s Dan Quayle — forget about it!”

Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. The only group of parents for whom marriage continues to be the norm is the college-educated.

"Yes, but so what?" ask those who see marriage as little more than a temporary alliance that need not impose any constraints of any sort on the participants.

Sawhill answers the question:

There are three reasons to be concerned about this dramatic shift in family life. First, marriage is a commitment that cohabitation is not. Taking a vow before friends and family to support another person “until death do us part” signals a mutual sense of shared responsibility that cannot be lightly dismissed. Cohabitation is more fragile — cohabiting parents split up before their fifth anniversary at about twice the rate of married parents.  Often, this is because the father moves on, leaving the mother not just with less support but with fewer marriage prospects. For her, marriage requires finding a partner willing to take responsibility for someone else’s kids.

Second, a wealth of research strongly suggests that marriage is good for children. Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. Meanwhile, children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed....

Third, marriage brings economic benefits. It usually means two breadwinners, or one breadwinner and a full-time, stay-at-home parent with no significant child-care expenses. Unlike Murphy Brown — who always had the able Eldin by her side — most women do not have the flexibility afforded a presumably highly paid broadcast journalist. And it’s not just a cliche that two can live more cheaply than one; a single set of bills for rent, utilities and other household expenses makes a difference. Though not necessarily better off than a cohabiting couple, a married family is much better off than its single-parent counterpart.

Perhaps equally as important, marriage often establishes a family support structure that extends beyond just the two parents. One of the advantages that children of married couples have that children of single moms don't is two sets of grandparents plus a network of uncles, aunts, and so on, all of which have resources and connections which they're often willing to contribute and from which children often derive enormous advantages. One reason it's hard to break out of poverty, even if one earnestly wants to, is that this adult support structure is often lacking for many poor children of single mothers.

Sawhill has more to say in her article. Give it a read and give Dan Quayle a thumbs up for having the guts to stand against the liberal zeitgeist and brave the demeaning slings and arrows those folks often substitute for reasoned argument.

No Plan at All

Economist Tino Sandanjani at Super Economy gives us some helpful perspective on the question of whether allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would do anything to alleviate our deficit problem. He begins by making an important distinction, one that doesn't often get made in media discussions of the looming fight over whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts:

Don’t confuse the “Bush Tax Cuts” with “Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich”. Obama’s plan to repeal the Bush Tax Cuts only for those making $250,000 per year will raise one quarter as much revenue as the entire tax cut.

Over the next decade, the total Bush tax cuts reduce revenue by about 1.7% of GDP per year (0.4% of which represents tax cuts for those making more than $250,000). During this period the deficit is expected to average about 6.7% of GDP.

Over ten years, the deficit is expected by the Congressional Budget Office to be about $13 trillion dollars. Repealing the Bush tax cuts on the rich as President Obama proposes will raise $0.7 trillion. Repealing all Bush tax cuts would raise $3.3 trillion. In addition, if all tax cuts are repealed, the U.S will save $0.7 trillion in interest on debt.

The Bush tax cuts on the rich (the part Obama wants to repeal) barely makes a dent in the deficit. If you include the cuts for the middle class, the Bush tax cuts are a non-negligible cause of the deficit, but even then not the main cause.

[The] claim - common among the left - that the Bush tax cuts would “basically solve the deficit problem” is an exaggeration, seventy percent of the ten year deficit and an even larger part of the long term deficit would remain even if all Bush tax cuts are repealed, since the main cause of the fiscal imbalance is expanding expenditure as a share of GDP.

For the long term deficit the Bush tax cuts are even less important. The tax cuts represent about 1.7% of GDP in increased revenue per year, while the federal deficit on its current path is projected to explode to above 10% of GDP by 2026.

Let me finish by citing the Congressional Research Service:

“The Obama Administration has proposed allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for high income taxpayers and permanently extending the tax cuts for middle class taxpayers.... This proposal is projected to increase tax revenues by ... $678 billion over 10 years, but still leaves federal debt on an unsustainable path.”

All of which is to say that higher taxes are not the answer to our deficit problem. The problem is caused by too much spending. Raising taxes will do little to solve fix it and may even exacerbate it, if, as is usually the case, raising taxes motivates people to shelter their money. The only way we can avoid the day of fiscal reckoning is to reduce entitlement spending, which means reforming social security, medicare, and welfare, none of which the Obama administration has shown any appetite for.

It may be that a new administration in Washington will fail to avert calamity, and that in a year or two we'll wind up like Greece, but it's almost certain that the current administration will fail to take the steps necessary to avert it. Mr. Obama has given us no insight at all into what he would do in a second term to restore us to fiscal health. He seems to have no plan other than to "tax the rich" which, as Sandanjani shows above, is no plan at all.

Not the Man He Claims to Be

Whenever someone ventures the claim that President Obama is a socialist his allies in the Democratic party and the media race to deride the assertion, citing the lack of substantive evidence that Mr. Obama is anything other than a mainstream Democrat. That, one might plausibly argue, is in itself confirmation of the charge of socialism, but, be that as it may, there's now what amounts to direct evidence that Mr. Obama was in the 1990s a member of a socialist third-party, something he and his surrogates have consistently and vigorously denied.

Stanley Kurtz lays it all out in an article in the current issue of National Review which he summarizes in a post at National Review Online.

The party is the New Party, and though there's nothing illegal about having been a member, there's something disreputable about having persistently denied one's affiliation and having tried to hide that connection from the American electorate. It's just one more indication that Mr. Obama is not the man he wanted the American public to think he was during the 2008 campaign.

Here's Kurtz' lede:

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is not a socialist, but just thought it'd be fun to become a dues-paying member of the socialist party. Who knows?

Solar Transit

Jason sends along this three minute NASA video of the solar transit recently made by Venus. The video appears to be shot with a variety of filters producing a beautiful effect. Take a look:

When the News Reached the Bunker

Scott Walker decisively defeated the Wisconsin public employees unions and their Democratic surrogates on June 5th. Late that night word reached the offices of the president's reelection committee. Someone managed to smuggle out video of what happened next:

Progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, discussing the debacle with Nancy Pelosi, notes that the Democrats can't win without union support and that legislation like Wisconsin's will kill the unions. She's only partly right. Wisconsin's legislation affects only public employee unions and not even all of those (police and firefighters are exempt). Even so, if PEUs lose strength it'll certainly diminish the ability of the Democratic party to elect candidates to office.

It should be noted that the strength of union support depends on their ability to compel employees to join and pay dues. Until Walker's reforms, union membership was mandatory and union dues were automatically deducted by the state from the employee's paycheck. The employee had no say in the matter. The state then gave the dues to the union which returned much of the cash in the form of political contributions and other forms of support to Democrats.

It was a hypocritical scam perpetrated on the taxpayers. I say hypocritical because it was foisted on the taxpayers by the party that proudly calls itself "pro-choice." Apparently, they believe you should be able to choose whether you will kill your unborn child, but not whether you will belong to a union.

In any event, Act 10 has done away with that system and allows people to choose whether they wish to join the union or not. As a result thousands of people, to the dismay of Democrats, have voted with their feet. The Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, a labor organization representing 17,000 public-school teachers, has seen 6,000 members leave its ranks in the last year.

The state chapter of AFSCME, the union that represents state, county, and municipal workers, has suffered the loss of 30,000 members in the same span, although many of these losses were due to government layoffs. Even so, when Walker first proposed his fiscal reforms in early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at 62,818. By February 2012, membership had shrunk to 28,745.

Look for the trend to spread across the nation and for more video of enraged Democrat party officials to appear on You Tube.

The Next Step

Debkafile has a story outlining what their sources tell them will be the next step in the war of nerves with Iran:

U.S. President Barack Obama has again persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to hold off attacking Iran’s nuclear program in the coming months by promising a new set of severe sanctions against Iran. U.S. administration officials assured debkafile’s Washington sources that Israel’s leaders were won over by the Obama administration’s promise to ratchet up U.S. and Europe sanctions against Iran if the next round of negotiations with the six world powers in less than two weeks gets bogged down again.

These are the new sanctions hanging over Iran as reported by our sources:

• On July 1, the Europeans will activate the embargo that left pending on Iranian oil exports and banks.
• In the fall, the US administration will bring out its most potent economic weapon: an embargo on aircraft and sea vessels visiting Iranian ports. Any national airline or international aircraft touching down in Iran will be barred from US and West European airports. The same rule will apply to private and government-owned vessels, including oil tankers. Calling in at an Iranian port will automatically exclude them from entry to a US or European harbor.

This sanction would clamp down an air and naval siege on the Islamic Republic without a shot being fired.

If the U.S. imposes this embargo they wouldn't need to confront ships or aircraft heading to or from Iran. They'd simply deny these craft any future access to sea and air ports in the U.S. and Europe. The result, hopefully, would be that no one will want to trade with Iran if it means loss of access to American and European markets.

Let's hope that some of these measures convince Iran to back off their plan to build nuclear weapons. I'm not optimistic that they will, but I do applaud the administration for trying everything it can before it sends in the bombers.

Debkafile has more on this story at the link.

A Lost People

Celebrated science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury died Tuesday at age 91. David Klinghoffer remembers a passage from his Martian Chronicles in which humans escape a doomed civilization on earth to colonize Mars and in the process wipe out the native Martians. Writes Klinghoffer:

The Martians, his protagonist Jeff Spender explains, saw their religion and their science as compatible, "each enriching the other." Not so the men of Earth as Bradbury imagines it in the near future:

That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.

We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.

When people have no hope that their lives really mean anything, when they believe that they exist for no greater purpose than to indulge their senses and leave offspring, then culture collapses in a swirl of degenerate diversions, as Suzanne Collins illustrates so vividly in The Hunger Games. Jean Paul Sartre, who once wrote that his project was to "draw the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position" writes in Nausea, "I was thinking (as he sat in a cafe) ... that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing."

Perhaps we, too, are a "lost people," but still too absorbed in our amusements to realize it.

Most Americans at Odds with Most Scientists

A recent Gallup poll of slightly more than 1000 adults reveals that despite the monopoly Darwinists have in public education they've made scant progress in persuading Americans that evolution is a purely naturalistic process in which God had no part:

Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. Thirty-two percent of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process which is up from 9% thirty years ago.

Why, despite the best attempts of secularists to indoctrinate students with naturalistic Darwinism do so many still resist? I think there are a couple of reasons. First, a lot of high school biology teachers are not on board with the indoctrination process. Many of them are not convinced themselves that the evolutionary process could have proceeded apart from some intelligent guidance.

Second, the more students learn about biology the less credible it seems to them that the amazing structures and processes in the cell are the result of chance. The enormous complexity and high information content built into biological structures fairly shouts that intelligent input has somehow been inserted into the process. And the more science discovers about how life is organized the more astonishing it all seems.

Indeed, it might be said that the greatest impediment to the acceptance of naturalistic Darwinism is science itself. This is as true in cosmology as it is in biology. When scientists have to resort to something like the multiverse hypothesis to avoid the conclusion that the incomprehensibly precise tuning of the parameters and values stitched into the universe are intentionally engineered they lose a lot of people who are inclined to think that the simplest explanation is that there's just a single universe rather than an infinity of such worlds. And if there's no good reason to believe there are other worlds there's very good reason to think that intelligence underlies this one.

The Walker Win

The Wisconsin recall election should never have happened in the first place. It's an abuse of the process to attempt to recall a duly elected official over a policy dispute. The recall is for office-holders who've betrayed the public trust, not to punish people for implementing policies which a segment of the electorate doesn't like.

The opposition to Walker has been ugly, consisting as it does mostly of unions and liberals. Death threats and insults have been received by virtually every supporter of the governor, and still are.

Nevertheless, the Governor refused to bend or be intimidated, and he has prevailed. The power of the public employee unions to coerce taxpayers into paying an ever-increasing share of their income to subsidize ever-increasing salaries, health care, and pensions for government workers and public school teachers has been diminished with the failure of this recall.

Walker's win is a win for Wisconsin, to be sure, but it's also a win for much of the rest of the nation. His success will encourage other governors and legislators in other states to likewise rein in their public employee unions and return their states to a sensible, responsible fiscal footing. Those which don't, like California, will gradually slide into insolvency.

I also believe that it very well may put Wisconsin in play in November. The state went for Mr. Obama by fourteen points in '08 and exit polls yesterday showed that a substantial number of voters who pulled the lever for Walker still plan to vote for the president this fall, a result that strikes me as inexplicable, but those same exit polls also showed Walker and his opponent at 50/50 when in fact Walker is winning by almost 8 points as I write this.

Even if Wisconsin stays blue in November, though, the results there suggest that other states in which Mr. Obama eked out a much narrower victory in 2008 than he did in Wisconsin might well be undergoing a red shift. Mr. Obama no longer has the cachet he had in '08 and he's confronting a much more formidable candidate in Mitt Romney than he faced in John McCain.

Moreover, the electoral news since 2008 has been almost uniformly bad for the Democrats. Several GOP governors and Senator Scott Brown won in off-year elections, some in traditionally Democratic states, then came the landslide defeats the Democrats suffered in 2010, and now the bitter pill in Wisconsin. Add that momentum to the state of our economy and the growing perception that Mr. Obama has proven singularly unsuited for the job he's in, and one must assume that the atmosphere in the Obama reelection campaign is pretty gloomy this morning.

Mr. Obama's only solace, perhaps, is in the fact that there are still a lot of people riding in the wagon who will vote for the candidate most likely to crack the whip on those who are pulling it.

A Brief History of Thought

In his bestselling book A Brief History of Thought French humanist philosopher Luc Ferry asserts that the paramount philosophical question throughout the history of civilization has been the question of how we find meaning in life when death looms for all of us.

He calls this the question of "salvation," and in his book he surveys the answers proffered by the ancient Stoics, Christians, Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche and the post-moderns, and comes, after much meandering, to the disappointingly tepid conclusion that salvation consists in loving others until we die. In considering others, he argues, we achieve a kind of transcendence without the metaphysical baggage of God.

Ferry himself anticipates the complaint that his conclusion is unsatisfying:

You might object that compared to the doctrine of Christianity - whose promise of the resurrection of the body means that we shall be reunited with those we love after death - a humanism without metaphysics is small beer. I grant you that amongst the available doctrines of salvation, nothing can compete with Christianity - provided, that is, that you are a believer.

So why does Ferry settle for what is really a hopeless, meaningless "humanism without metaphysics"? Because he simply can't, or won't, bring himself to believe that there's more to reality than matter and energy:

If one is not a believer - and one cannot force oneself to believe, nor pretend to believe - then we must learn to think differently about the ultimate question posed by all doctrines of salvation, namely that of the death of a loved one.

Ferry is correct, of course, that one cannot compel belief, either in oneself or another, but what he might be asked is whether he sincerely wants the Christian message to be true. Regardless of his disbelief, does he hope that he's wrong? Many if not most people who claim not to believe that we'll in some sense exist beyond death and that "we shall be reunited with those we love after death" by their own admission do not want such a notion to be true. They don't believe the Christian proclamation, and they don't want the world to be the sort of place where such claims are in fact correct.

I suspect that the person, on the other hand, who wants those propositions to be true, who is open to them, is much more likely to find belief slowly creeping over him than those others whom C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce as having, "their fists clenched, their teeth clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see." They refuse to allow themselves even to hope that there really is salvation in the Christian sense.

Ferry doesn't seem to be this sort of person, though. He writes at the end of his book:

I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting [than any of the alternatives] - except for the fact that I do not believe in it. But were it to be true I would certainly be a taker.

He seems to recognize, even though he doesn't explicitly say it, that unless what we do in this life matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. If death is the end of individual existence then nothing we do has any genuine meaning or significance.

If Ferry's being honest with his readers and himself, if he really is open to "the Christian proposition," then I suspect he's closer to faith than he might realize.

The Bigger Danger

In a recent column Dennis Prager argues for the fairly obvious proposition that leftism is a religion, but in the course of his argument he asks a very interesting question.

Specifically, he wonders why people on the left fear big corporations but are enthusiastic about big government.

The left is generally supportive of Occupy Wall Street which is hostile to big business and reviles the Tea Party which fears big government. So which fear has most justification? Here's Prager:

No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago -- big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death -- big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes -- the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide -- committed by big governments.... That the left demonizes "Big Pharma," for instance, is an example of leftwing thinking. America's pharmaceutical companies have saved millions of lives, including millions of leftists' lives. And I do not doubt that in order to increase profits, they have not always played by the rules. But to demonize big pharmaceutical companies while lionizing big government, big labor unions and big trial law firms, is to stand morality on its head....

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can't knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

But, we're often told, big business is greedy and greed victimizes and hurts the masses. A powerful government, on the other hand, is necessary to keep business from exploiting the poor and to insure an equitable distribution of a nation's goods. Prager's not impressed with the objection:

To which the rational response is that, of course, government also does good. But so do the vast majority of corporations, private citizens, church groups, and myriad voluntary associations. On the other hand, only big government can do anything approaching the monstrous evils of the last century.

As for greed: Between hunger for money and hunger for power, the latter is incomparably more frightening. It is noteworthy that none of the twentieth century's monsters -- Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- were preoccupied with material gain. They loved power much more than money.

The left craves power through big government, the right craves freedom, including freedom in the marketplace. Which of the two is more dangerous?

On Wisconsin

Tomorrow's recall election in Wisconsin is arguably the most important political event this year aside from the presidential contest in November. Governor Scott Walker is being challenged by Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett in a recall attempt because Walker has stripped the public employees unions of a lot of their power to extort ever-increasing benefits from the taxpayers of the state of Wisconsin.

As a result Walker has in two years turned the state from economic infirmity to fiscal robustness. John Fund at National Review summarizes Walker's accomplishments:

Walker can claim to have wiped out a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes or seeing service cutbacks. Indeed, property taxes fell statewide by 0.4 percent last year, the first time they’ve fallen since 1998. The average homeowner’s property tax bill would have been about $700 higher if the previous rate of increase had continued. The state now expects to have a surplus of $150 million at the end of the current budget cycle.

Voters can see Walker’s reforms working at the grassroots level as well. Brown Deer, a suburb of Milwaukee, is saving $1 million in pension and health-care costs. More flexible work rules enabled the city to make changes in teacher schedules. “We had many teachers tell us, let’s save everybody’s job,” Brown Deer superintendent Deb Kerr told the Chicago Tribune. “We didn’t cut programs. We didn’t raise class sizes. And we maintained our level of staffing.”

At least 52 local school districts are saving an average of $220 per student because they can now shop around for health insurance for their employees. Before the reforms, unions forced the schools to do business exclusively with WEA Trust, the group run by the state’s largest teachers’ union.

The jobs picture is also improving. Last year, the state added 24,000 new jobs. Chief Executive magazine reported in 2010 that Wisconsin ranked 41st out of 50 states in terms of the ease of doing business. In its new survey, the state has jumped to 20th place, the fastest surge in the history of the magazine’s survey.

Separately, the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce survey just found that 62 percent of the members it surveyed plan to create jobs in Wisconsin by year’s end. A full 95 percent of CEOs surveyed said the state is headed in the right direction. “The word is out from Main Street to Wall Street that Wisconsin is the place to create jobs and expand,” says Kurt Bauer, the president of WMC.

So why are the Democrats trying to recall him after only two years of his term? One of the things Walker has reformed is collective bargaining (See here for a summary of what's in the new law). Another is that public employees will now have the freedom to choose whether they want to belong to a union or not. Both of these reforms have outraged liberals who believe that union membership should be compulsory for public employees like government workers and teachers and that unions should have the right to bargain for perks and benefits with the same people to whose political campaigns they contribute.

Both of these practices are unjust and Walker has shown a lot of courage in ending them. Now he's paying the price for that courage by possibly being booted out of office by those who feel entitled to demand that taxpayers pay for benefits far in excess of anything anyone in the private sector enjoys. It's the same mindset that was on display so obscenely in the GSA scandal.

If Walker wins tomorrow, and polls have consistently shown him to be ahead, the defeat of the progressives will reverberate across the national political landscape. This is why the left is so angry that President Obama declined to campaign for Mayor Barrett. There's a lot at stake and the leader of their cause was AWOL. If Walker wins, buy some popcorn, sit back and watch the recriminations fly.

China's One-Child Policy

The plight of the courageous blind activist Chen Guancheng has confronted the world with some uncomfortable facts with which it would rather not have been confronted. One of these is the repressive nature of China's one-child policy. Some liberals in the West would rather not have to talk about it because it's a form of population control to which they're not altogether opposed themselves, at least in theory, but which is in practice extremely cruel.

Robert Zubrin summarizes the history of the policy in an article in the Washington Times:

In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control-system theory and design. While in Finland, he picked up copies of "The Limits to Growth" and "Blueprint for Survival" - publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian propaganda - and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were promoting the reports' method of using computerized "systems analysis" to predict and design the human future.

Fascinated by the possibilities, Mr. Song returned to China and republished the Club's analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his reputation for brilliant and original thinking. In no time at all, Mr. Song became a scientific superstar.

Seizing the moment to grasp for greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of mathematicians from within his department and, with the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China's "correct" population size was 650 million to 700 million people - which is to say, some 280 million to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population.

Mr. Song's analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for China's continued poverty was not 30 years of disastrous misrule, but the very existence of the Chinese people. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Mr. Song used to dress up his theory and even more impressed by the possibilities that arrogating the power to permit or deny children would provide to the state.

Thus began the most forceful population-control program since Nazi Germany. Qian Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People's Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered all women with one child to have a stainless steel IUD inserted and to be inspected regularly to make sure they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted.

Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down, and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan - about three years' income for a peasant - was paid for their release.

Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be "black children," illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care or reproduction. Millions have been confiscated from their mothers and placed in "orphanages" where, if not adopted in short order, they are left to expire without food in "dying rooms."

Zubrin has more details at the link. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his claims, but I know Viewpoint has a few Chinese readers, and I invite them to weigh in on the matter via the "Contact Us" key.

Bad News on the Doorstep

May was a disastrous month, both for the economy and perhaps for Mr. Obama's reelection prospects. Larry Kudlow writes about it at National Review:

You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent GDP, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you’d think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.

But it hasn’t happened.

The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It’s the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that frankly, at 2 percent growth, we’re back on the front end of a potential recession. If anything goes wrong — like another blow-up in Europe — there’s no safety margin to stop a new recession.

And that brings us to the grim May employment report, which generated only 69,000 nonfarm payrolls. It’s the third consecutive subpar tally, replete with downward revisions for the two prior months. It’s a devastating number for the American economy, and a catastrophic number for Obama’s reelection hopes. All momentum on jobs and the economy has evaporated.

Inside the May report, the data is just as bad. The unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1 to 8.2 percent. The so called U6 unemployment rate, tracking the marginally employed or completely discouraged, increased to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent. And labor earnings are barely rising at 1.7 percent over the past year, almost in line with the inflation rate. In fact, through April, after-tax, after-inflation income is scarcely rising at 0.6 percent for the past year.

"Don't blame me. It's all his fault."

Why is the news so bad? One reason is fear of a massive tax increase when the Bush tax cuts expire in January:

If all the Bush tax rates go up, incentives will go down and liquidity will leave the system. You can’t pick up a newspaper these days and not find a story about how the fiscal cliff is elevating uncertainty and slowing U.S. growth. House Speaker John Boehner asked Obama for help in extending the Bush tax cuts this summer. But Obama said no. Instead, he wants to raise marginal tax rates on successful upper-income earners, capital gains, dividends, estates, and many successful corporations.

A business tax cut would help enormously, but it’s nowhere in sight. Neither is the Keystone Pipeline, which is a surefire job-creator.

A second uncertainty facing businesses is the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare due in a few weeks. If all those crazy tax-and-regulation mandates are deemed unconstitutional, it’s Katy bar the door as businesses put profits to work and hire. But they’re not going to move until they see that court decision.

Then there’s the whole European mess with the threat of banking contagion from Spain, Greece, and Italy. That could blow up the whole world economy if it goes completely sour. The Europeans should guarantee all bank deposits, interbank loans, and bank debt until this story is straightened out. But they’re not. So the problem festers.

The President's policies - his intention to raise taxes, to prevent energy development, to impose Obamacare - are like a clog of matted hair in the economic pipeline. The president is determined to establish Eurosocialism on our shores and gives the impression that he cares little what price must be paid to achieve it.