Exceptionalism and Its Critics

Clifford May has a fine essay on American exceptionalism and its critics on National Review Online. There's a lot to his essay, but perhaps the heart of his message is these paragraphs:

In May 2011, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, a columnist I admire, wrote an opinion piece titled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism.” In it he opined that the “problem of the 21st century is the problem of culture,” in particular the “culture of smugness,” the emblem of which “is the term ‘American exceptionalism.’ It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God.”

I wrote a rebuttal, contending that exceptionalism means nothing of the sort, and that no one on the right that I was aware of — and no one, evidently, that Cohen was aware of since he quoted no one to substantiate his thesis — would define exceptionalism as he had.

So I was particularly interested to see a recent “news analysis” by the New York Times’ Scott Shane, a reporter I admire, titled “The Opiate of Exceptionalism.” In it, Shane defines exceptionalism differently than Cohen had — but equally incorrectly. He opines — excuse me, analyzes — that American voters “demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.” He goes on to assert that Americans want their presidents to be “cheerleaders,” and that this is a “national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism.”

No, no, and no. American exceptionalism does not imply that — nor is it an assertion of “American greatness,” as Shane also claims. It is something simpler and humbler: recognition that America is, as James Madison said, the “hope of liberty throughout the world,” and that America is different from other nations in ways that are consequential for the world. Let me briefly mention three.

Most nations are founded on blood. America, by contrast, was founded on ideas. This is why anyone from anywhere can move to America and become American. This is among the reasons so many people want to become American — and do. One cannot just as easily move to Japan and become Japanese. Nor can one simply become Ukrainian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Portuguese, or Egyptian.

For those who do become Americans — and especially for their children — anything is possible. Consider such all-Americans as Colin Powell, Jeremy Lin, Bobby Jindal, Tiger Woods, and of course the most obvious example: An African student marries an American girl, and their son goes on to become the president of the United States. When I was a student in Russia years ago, I had friends from Africa and some married Russian girls. Does anyone believe that the children of these couples can hope to succeed Vladimir Putin?

A second way America is exceptional: The ideas on which this nation is based were revolutionary in the 18th century — and still are today. All men are created equal? Governments derive their powers only from the consent of the governed? We are endowed by our Creator with rights and freedoms that no one can take away? China is nowhere close to embracing such principles. Nor is most of the Middle East, the “Arab Spring” notwithstanding. Latin America and Africa have a long way to go. And in Europe, I fear, the commitment to individual liberty has been weakening.

May has much more to say and much that's worth reading in the remainder of his column. Give it a look.

To talk of American exceptionalism is not hubris or chauvinism. It's a simple fact, and an important one. America has been a historically exceptional nation in terms of its power and economy, to be sure, but also, as May stresses, the ideas upon which it was founded and the benefit that has accrued to the world as a result of American largesse.

We need to talk about it more and to value it more deeply because if we no longer think it important that America occupy a special place in the world, if we grow content to just be a nation like every other, if we become satisfied with national mediocrity, then that specialness will rapidly disappear. If those who are at pains to deny that America has been a historically unique place are successful in persuading rising generations of Americans that such thinking is unseemly and unwarranted it'll be much more difficult to persuade our people to make the sacrifices and investments necessary to carry the mantle of American leadership into the future, and both we and the world will be the worse for it.

May adds this thought:

Finally, there is leadership. If America does not accept this responsibility — and that’s how it should be seen, not as a privilege or entitlement, not as a reason to shout “We’re No. 1!” — which nation will? Iran’s theocrats would be eager — but that means they would impose their version of sharia, Islamic law, well beyond their borders. Putin will grab whatever power is within his reach but he would rule, not lead. There are those who see the U.N. as a transnational government. They don’t get why it would be disastrous to give additional authority to a Security Council on which Russia and China have vetoes, or a General Assembly dominated by a so-called Non-Aligned Movement constituted largely of despotic regimes that recently elevated Iran as their president.

There's more at the link.

Scorched Earth Campaign

The Washington Post's Michael Gerson writes a fine essay in which he deftly adumbrates the campaign strategies of both candidates, a strategy that was predicted a year ago by Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen. Read Gerson's column and ask yourself which strategy, of the two, you'd prefer to have your president to have waged.

Here are his opening paragraphs:

In November 2011, former Democratic pollsters — and current gadflies — Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell made a much-discussed argument in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The miserable state of the economy, they claimed, restricted the options for President Obama’s reelection strategy. He could still win. “But the kind of campaign required for the president’s political survival,” they said, “would make it almost impossible for him to govern — not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term. Put simply, it seems that the White House has concluded that if the president cannot run on his record, he will need to wage the most negative campaign in history to stand any chance.”

Schoen and Caddell added a bit of street theater to their political analysis: Obama should step aside to allow Hillary Clinton to run. The left heaped scorn. The argument was “bilge” and “fantasy.” Schoen and Caddell were “con artists” and “losers.”

Except that the 2012 presidential campaign has proceeded much as they predicted. Both parties’ campaigns have been largely conducted according to their theory.

The shape of the race was set in early summer. In April, May and June, job creation dipped well below 100,000 — some of the worst economic news since the worst days of the Great Recession. Public approval for Obama’s handling of the economy dropped. Political scientists often argue that public impressions about the state of the economy get locked in during the summer before a presidential election. In the doldrums of 2012, Americans determined they wanted economic change — though they were not yet convinced that Mitt Romney could deliver it.

The Obama campaign fully internalized this political reality. It could not talk of “morning in America” during a continuing economic twilight. In a remarkable New York magazine article by John Heilemann this May, senior Obama aides frankly described the task ahead — delegitimizing Romney. He would be attacked as a vulture capitalist, a cultural revanchist, a social Darwinist. “For anyone still starry-eyed about Obama,” said Heilemann, “the months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler.”

“Bracing” does not fully capture it. Throughout the summer, the Obama campaign and its allies accused Romney of not paying taxes, of possibly committing a felony, of personally outsourcing jobs to China and India, of stashing money in the Cayman Islands, of bearing responsibility for a woman’s death from cancer. The attempt to discredit Romney had an added political benefit. A presidential campaign consumed by the jabs and parries of the 24-hour news cycle was less focused on larger matters such as the economy.

The Obama folks, with the president's obvious approval, have waged the most negative campaign in modern history. I believe Caddell and Schoen are correct. If Mr. Obama wins it'll be a Pyrrhic victory. He won't be able to govern except by extra-constitutional executive fiat. The campaign has been poisoned by the politics of personal destruction that resulted from the Democrats' decision to not even try to defend their record but rather to attack Romney in any way they thought would gain them purchase with the electorate.

Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reinforces the Schoen/Caddell thesis by threatening to block Romney, should he win on Tuesday, from doing whatever he tries to do to rescue the nation from the disastrous economic trajectory Reid's party has put us on.

It's sad, but we have become so ideologically polarized in this country that it seems the only way to get anything done in Washington, whether it be good or bad, is for one party to control both the executive and both houses of the legislative branch of government. There's so much ill-will between Republicans and Democrats, such a vast philosophical divide on how best to solve the country's problems, or even on what the problems are, that I sometimes think there may be a greater likelihood that the Israelis and the Palestinians will reconcile than that the Republicans and Democrats will be able to work together for the common good.

Seven Things about Mitt

The Obama reelection team has done their best to demonize Mitt Romney, and the press has been complicit in the deed, but what sort of person is he? Is he really the cold, aloof fat cat that he's been portrayed as for the last six months?

If you think so you need to read this column by John Hawkins. Hawkins gives seven examples of Mitt Romney's character that you won't read about in the mainstream press.

Go to the link, read Hawkins' column, and ask yourself whether the man that's been portrayed by the Obama team and the media wing of their reelection effort is anything like the man who did these things.

Is Life Rare?

An article in Science Daily reinforces the view that no matter how many planets there may be in the universe the number that are suitable for life and situated in such a way as to be able to produce and sustain life may be vanishingly small.

Even if another planet like earth exists and possesses all the hundreds of properties that are necessary to engender higher forms of life - a suitable star, an orbit not too close, not too far from the star, a large moon, continental plates, water, the proper period of rotation, and so on - this still may not be enough. It seems that it also has to reside in a system of planets that consists of a belt of asteroids and a large planet like Jupiter:

Here's the lede:

Solar systems with life-bearing planets may be rare if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to a study by Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

They suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun's protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet.

This might sound surprising because asteroids are considered a nuisance due to their potential to impact Earth and trigger mass extinctions. But an emerging view proposes that asteroid collisions with planets may provide a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life.

Asteroids may have delivered water and organic compounds to the early Earth. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, occasional asteroid impacts might accelerate the rate of biological evolution by disrupting a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies.

The astronomers based their conclusion on an analysis of theoretical models and archival observations of extrasolar Jupiter-sized planets and debris disks around young stars. "Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet," said Martin, the study's lead author. "Our study suggests that our solar system may be rather special."

There's much more to this story at the link. The interesting thing about it is that it fits the thesis of two books that have been criticized for suggesting that life-bearing planets and thus life itself, may be very rare phenomena in the universe and indeed may exist only on earth. The two books are Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

This notion contradicts the claim of people like astronomer Carl Sagan who argued that there are likely billions or hundreds of billions of planets in the universe capable of supporting life and that life is doubtless common in the cosmos.

If life really is rare or even unique to earth then it upsets the so-called "principle of mediocrity" which states that there's nothing special about earth and nothing special about human beings. If earth is the only life-bearing planet in the universe and human beings are the highest form of life then there really is something special about humanity after all.

The more scientists learn, the more reason there is to think that the principle of mediocrity is going to someday quietly disappear from the discussion of life in the universe.

Chastened Humanism

I recently read and enjoyed A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living by French philosopher Luc Ferry. I was therefore eager to read an article on the book in the current issue of First Things titled Chastened Humanism. The author, Robert Royal, writes:

Ferry is not a believer, though he presents Christianity with a warm Gallic clarity in a recent volume, La Tentation du Christianisme (The Temptation of Christianity, never translated). He cannot give in to that temptation, he thinks, because Christianity is “too good to be true” and also makes us slightly less lucid in our reasoning than does philosophy straight with no chaser. Or maybe, he muses, he just hasn’t been given the gift of faith.

In any event, he would like to preserve the “humanistic” values he recognizes as indebted to the Christian tradition, even as he goes about trying to find a place for them in a chastened, post-Nietzschean humanism. Though ultimately he parts ways with Nietzsche’s “philosophizing with a hammer,” he believes it impossible to avoid both the great German’s critique of modern humanism and the need to propose something post-Nietzschean and “after deconstruction” that can support a life worthy of human beings.

His current international bestseller, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, is aimed precisely at this ongoing reassertion of humanism. In a lucid and accessible little volume, he tries to offer “spirituality” for the reflective contemporary nonbeliever who has lost faith, usually because of some modern philosophical analysis or scientific discoveries. In Ferry, however, there’s none of the mockery and incomprehension of religion to be found in the new Anglo-atheist school led by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, et al., or even in the old French fire-breathers like Bayle, Diderot, and Voltaire.

For him, the Christian temptation is powerful and possesses its own appealing rationality. That’s the main reason it triumphed over ancient philosophy for close to 1,500 years. Along with figures like the Swiss writer Alain de Botton and the French materialist André Comte-Sponville ... he recognizes that religiosity responds to a human need and that those in the modern age who cannot or will not believe must explicitly seek to create a non-theistic humanist equivalent to fill the void.

A Brief History of Thought looks at five philosophical responses, in historical sequence, to three questions that every philosophy claiming to be the pursuit of wisdom tries to answer: What is the nature of the world (theory), How are we to act in it (ethics), and What should my ultimate goal be (salvation)?

Ferry admits that Christianity offers the most powerful answers to these questions and thus carries a powerful appeal. This was particularly true in the Roman world of the first century. Early Christianity was revolutionary in it's emphasis on individual accountability before God and the possibility of individual, as opposed to group, salvation. It's emphasis on the eternal life of the body rather than a disembodied spiritual existence; its belief that the physical body and the material world are good; the belief that the mysteries of the world can be discovered through human reason because it's the creation of a reasonable, logical God who is not capricious; its teaching that even the lowliest person had dignity and worth in the eyes of God and could be saved, not through their own efforts but because God loved even them; the notion of the equality of all men and women in the eyes of God; and the emphasis on love for one's neighbor as a guiding principle of life, all had enormous attraction in the world of the first century A.D. which knew little or nothing of such things.

But Ferry ultimately settles for the pale imitation of Christianity called humanism which embraces Christian values while rejecting the theistic base in which those values are grounded. Not having any foundation in anything more substantial than one's own personal preference, humanism simply can't withstand the charge of being an arbitrary, subjective ethical taste.

Ferry recognizes this, but for him it's the best alternative because in an age of science he can't bring himself to believe in the Christian notion of God. It's too bad. It reminds me of the man lost in the desert, thirsty and parched, drinking his own sweat and urine until even these dry up. The man improbably encounters a traveler who offers him all the water he can drink from his canteen, but the lost man turns it down because he can't believe that the traveler is really anything more than a mirage. Rather than accepting the traveler's offer he ignores it and presses on, scanning the hot, barren desert of human philosophies for an oasis, hopeful that if he can just make it over the next dune he'll find what he's searching for, all the while thinking that wouldn't it've been wonderful if the traveler who offered him the water wasn't just an illusion.

The Case (in Part) Against the Incumbent

This video lays out part of the argument against reelecting Mr. Obama on Tuesday succinctly and powerfully. I commend it to you with one caveat. I do not support it's endorsement of conservative talk radio, or at least of Sean Hannity who is, in my opinion, a rude, childish narcissist. Otherwise, the video is very good:

Shameful

If, like me, you thought that the Lena Dunham ad was about as bad as it could get then you, like me, were way wrong.

The Democrats - actually Michael Moore and Moveon.org - have made an ad that makes a play for the potty-mouthed senior citizen vote. Because we have certain standards to maintain I'm not going to put the ad on Viewpoint, but you can click on this link to The Daily Caller if you're interested in seeing the sorts of people to whom Obama supporters feel they have to appeal if they're to win the election.

Here's an ad we will show, however. It's a group of children who've obviously been taught to think that Romney is the human incarnation of Lucifer and that their parents are his henchmen:

Here are the lyrics in case you couldn't make them out or couldn't bear to watch:

Imagine an America
Where strip mines are fun and free
Where gays can be fixed
And sick people just die
And oil fills the sea
We don’t have to pay for freeways!
Our schools are good enough
Give us endless wars
On foreign shores
And lots of Chinese stuff

We’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming you

We haven’t killed all the polar bears
But it’s not for lack of trying
The Earth is cracked
Big Bird is sacked
And the atmosphere is frying
Congress went home early
They did their best we know
You can’t cut spending
With elections pending
Unless it’s welfare dough

We’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming you

Find a park that is still open
And take a breath of poison air
They foreclosed your place
To build a weapon in space
But you can write off your au pair
It’s a little awkward to tell you
But you left us holding the bag
When we look around
The place is all dumbed down
And the long term’s kind of a drag

We’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming you

You did your best
You failed the test
Mom and Dad
We’re blaming you!

It's so juvenile one might think the kids wrote it themselves, but according to The Blaze it was actually written by a couple of ad men who, presumably, are chronological adults.

Don't the president's people think there's something sordid about exploiting children, who surely don't know what they're doing, in this fashion? Doesn't the president himself think there's something wrong with this? Does he think it's a good thing to set children against their parents and to brainwash them into believing that there's any truth at all in the lyrics they're singing?

California Bed-Wetters

A piece on the San Francisco Chronicle's blog on nervous California liberals begins this way:

There's no shortage of their kind in the politically bluest parts of California. Liberals so freaked out about the prospect of President Obama losing his re-election bid that they can't sleep at night. Can't talk about anything else. Can't stop parsing the latest polls.

David Plouffe, one of President Obama's top campaign strategists, has a word for supporters he feels are needlessly fretful: bed wetters.

"Oh, I think I'm worse than that," Kay Edelman said.

For the past several weeks, the 60-year-old San Francisco resident has frequently bolted awake in the middle of the night, in "a panic attack," she said. She darts for her computer and checks the latest polls. Some days she's so distraught that she can't exercise.

Every morning, she gets e-mails from friends who've been just as sleepless. Most are so tense, they can croak out only a few words. "Very anxious." "Worried."

"Nothing more needs to be said," said Edelman, a retired educational administrator.

The rest of the article is entertaining, particularly if you find liberal angst amusing.

What I don't understand is what Mr. Obama has done with his first four years that makes these people so despondent at the prospect that he might not have another four. After all, they live in California and can see close up how liberalism wrecks a once-prosperous economy. Why would they want the entire country to suffer a similar fate? Evidently, they do.

Carroll on Nagel's Mind and Cosmos

I have mentioned on a couple of recent occasions a new book by philosopher Thomas Nagel titled Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in which Nagel suggests a tertium quid as an alternative to atheistic materialism and traditional theism.

He believes that materialism fails to explain the most important aspects of human existence and, though he recognizes that theism offers powerful answers, he just can't, or won't, bring himself to believe that there's a God.

Instead he posits a nebulous, mindless purposefulness underlying the cosmos that ultimately gives rise to human consciousness, human cognition, and human values. As I said, Nagel believes that materialism simply can't account for these phenomena and although theism can account for them, he finds the God hypothesis literally incredible. Thus, there must be something immaterial and impersonal that pervades the cosmos and which pushes evolution toward the development of conscious beings who can think and who possess a sense of moral value.

William Carroll examines Nagel's thesis in an article at Public Discourse. Carroll writes:

Can we have a comprehensive view of nature if we do not include an adequate account of consciousness, cognition, and value? Central to the orthodoxy of reductionist materialism is that these features of reality are fully explicable in terms of chemical and physical processes: in some theories they are mere epiphenomena of these processes; in others they are simply dismissed as illusions, shown to be so by the great successes of science.

Nagel, who tells us that he is an atheist, also rejects various forms of theism that appeal to the intentional agency of God to explain the complexities of nature and human nature. The principal focus of his book, as the subtitle indicates, is his criticism of Neo-Darwinian reductionism which, he says, is “incapable of providing an adequate account, either constitutive or historical, of our universe.”

This reductive materialism purports to capture life and mind through an extension of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. “I find this view,” he says, “antecedently unbelievable — a heroic attempt of ideological theory over common sense.” The criticism of materialism is not new; less expected is the criticism of the adequacy of evolutionary biology.

Nagel does not find theism to be more credible as an account of the origin and development of life and intelligence. He is interested in possibilities other than Darwin or God, and he champions a view, “naturalistic teleology,” which he thinks may provide an account of nature that includes mental faculties as constitutive features.

Read the rest of Carroll's analysis of Nagel's book at the link. The significance of what Nagel has written is, in my view, that it's a rejection of materialism by a prominent thinker who is not a theist, and it reveals the deep fissures spreading throughout the edifice of 19th century atheistic materialism.

Nagel's hypothesis has about it a whiff of metaphysical desperation. He can see that materialism has no future, but he's determined to avoid a confrontation with God. Thus, he grasps hold of what seems to some to be a very slender and highly implausible reed - naturalistic teleology.

Uncommon Valor, Uncommon Grace

Tyrone Woods, a former navy SEAL and a CIA operative died a hero in the Benghazi attack on the U.S. consulate there. Knowing that he was putting his career and his life in peril, he and two others disobeyed an order (from whom?) to "stand down" and instead ran to the consulate where he helped save over 30 employees. His father makes a remarkable statement in an interview with Geraldo Rivera on FOX News.

Mr. Woods is certainly uncommonly gracious, but even though he forgives the president for his dereliction that led to the death of his son, nevertheless the voters of this nation must hold him, or whomever was responsible for denying Tyrone Woods the military assistance he requested and evidently thought to be available, accountable.

I say that Woods must have thought he would be getting help, indeed he must have thought that help was directly overhead, because at great risk to himself he positioned himself on the roof of the building and "painted" an enemy mortar battery with a laser to guide incoming missiles. The missiles, for reasons the Obama administration has yet to explain, were never launched but the laser revealed Woods' position and the attackers fired their mortars at him, killing him.

Who gave the order not to fire those missiles? Whether it was the president - who has claimed that he gave the order to do everything that could be done to secure the lives of the American personnel but has not produced a copy of that order - or a subordinate, who would have been guilty of disobeying the president's order, we need to know.

Perhaps the electorate will choose on November 6th to send the whole Obama team home from Washington so they'll have time to meditate on the significance of Mr. Woods' words about heroes and cowards.

A Moral Matter

As we approach Tuesday's election some folks may still be wondering, perhaps, for whom they should cast their ballot.

I believe that one's vote should be based on competence and moral principles like concern for the well-being and flourishing of our nation's citizens. I think these concerns trump party, personal charisma, and even political ideology. I believe we have a moral responsibility to vote for the person whose policies are most likely to improve the lives of most Americans, especially the poor.

In the context of the coming election I think the candidate most likely to do that is Mr. Romney.

Consider several of the issues confronting our nation and their moral implications:

The National Debt. The debt rose about $5 trillion under 8 years of George Bush. It rose about the same amount in a little over 3 years under Barack Obama. It now stands at about $15.5 trillion. This is more money than our entire economy produces in a year.

If Mr. Obama wins re-election and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. That would mean the Debt would have increased by 87 percent, or $9.34 trillion, during his two terms.

The last federal budget sent to Congress by Mr. Obama projects that the National Debt will continue to rise to $25.9 trillion in 2022.

There's simply no way to address such a massive burden without either inflating the currency, raising taxes to confiscatory levels, or defaulting. Any of these options would have devastating consequences, especially for the poor and middle class, and none of them would alleviate the debt problem anyway.

It's manifestly immoral to place this millstone around the necks of our children and grandchildren, but that's precisely what Mr. Obama's profligacy does.

The Economy. Mr. Obama has taken an economy that was bad and made it awful. What's equally as bad is that he has offered no plan to make it better. Mr. Romney's plan may work or may not, but at least he has a plan.

The basic problem we face is joblessness. This is especially devastating for the poor and the young. The unemployment rate is approximately 13% for blacks, 10% for Hispanics, and 23% for young people.

There are several things that Mr. Obama could, but won't, do to fix the problem. Mr. Romney says he will. Mr. Obama spent almost a trillion dollars on a stimulus program to create jobs but partly because so much of the stimulus went to things like welfare programs, unions, and green energy industries that create few or no jobs even if they don't go bankrupt, the real unemployment rate is higher today than it was when he took office.

In order to reduce the jobless rate Mr. Romney proposes to do the following:

1) Reduce corporate income tax rate. At 39% it's the highest in the world and is a powerful incentive for corporations to relocate overseas.
2) Reduce the regulatory burden on businesses which forces them to either layoff workers or put off hiring new workers.
3) Develop our domestic energy resources. By opening up federal lands and offshore sites we would immediately create jobs, stimulate the economy, increase revenue to the treasury, and move toward energy independence from the Middle East.

Under President Clinton permits to drill on federal lands rose 58%, under President Bush they rose 116%, under President Obama they declined 36%.

High fuel prices result in higher costs of everything we buy and crushes those living in or on the edge of poverty. Mr. Obama said in 2008 that he actually wants high gas prices, presumably because it would force consumers to buy less fossil fuel and reduce our carbon emissions. What it does, though, is force more people into poverty.

4) Repeal Obamacare. Obamacare is predicted by many experts to be a disaster for many of the nation's poor because it'll put about 17 million more of them into the medicaid system. The problem with this is that reimbursement for medicaid is so low that many physicians won't take medicaid patients or won't do more for them than the minimum.

Medicare recipients under Obamacare will have the same problem. By cutting $716 billion from the amount reimbursed to doctors it'll make taking on medicare patients unprofitable for 40% of all medicare providers.

Many businesses anticipate much higher costs once Obamacare kicks in which is inhibiting hiring.

The Erosion of Freedom. Mr. Obama wants to make government the source of all our benefits, but the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Government and individual freedom are at opposite ends of a seesaw. As the size and scope of government rises personal freedom falls.

A government that can tell you today that you have to buy a particular product, like insurance, or tells you today how much soda you can drink, will tell you tomorrow what surgical procedures you can have, and will tell you the next day that you cannot voice an opinion on matters like gay marriage or Islamic terrorism or even abortion if that opinion is deemed offensive or hateful by anyone.

If you think this sounds like a stretch consider that pastors have been arrested in Europe for professing a traditionally biblical view of homosexuality. Where Europe is today is where we will be tomorrow.

In fact, the man in California who exercised his freedom of speech by making the anti-Muslim video that the administration blamed for the murder of our ambassador and three others in Benghazi, Libya was arrested on a trivial pretext and is still in jail today.

Foreign Policy. Rosa Brooks, a former advisor in the Obama State Department, concludes a scathing indictment of the Obama foreign policy with this:

In foreign policy as in life, stuff happens -- including bad stuff no one could have predicted. Nonetheless, to a significant extent, President Obama is the author of his own lackluster foreign policy. He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture -- one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.

An incoherent foreign policy and weakened military encourages terrorists and tyrants to greater bloodletting. President Obama was willing to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Libyans in order to prevent Qaddafi from killing even more of his own people. Bashar Assad is killing tens of thousands of Syrians, but we stay out of the fray. What principle governs these decisions? Are they completely ad hoc?

Former Obama National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones recently claimed that our foreign policy in the Middle East and Iran is back to where we started four years ago.

A strong military is the best deterrent to war, but Mr. Obama has promised to pare our navy back to WWI levels. This will deeply diminish our ability to influence world events and, coupled with our economic weakness, will reduce us to little more than a regional power.

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We could add to these reasons for doubting the wisdom of voting to reelect Mr. Obama his administration's inexplicable conduct in the Fast and Furious debacle in which for putative reasons that make no sense, the administration facilitated the smuggling of weapons to Mexican drug cartels which then used them to murder over two thousand Mexican citizens and several Americans.

The administration continues to block congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the operation and refuses to offer a plausible explanation for it.

We could also point out that despite holding complete control of the government for the first two years of his presidency Mr. Obama did nothing to solve our illegal immigration problem or to clarify the status of undocumented immigrants.

His administration squandered billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on green energy boondoggles run, in many cases, by big donors to his campaign.

His administration also seems to have cooperated in stripping thousands of non-union retirees of their pensions as part of the massive bailout to his union supporters in the GM/Chrysler auto rescue and now refuses to release documents that would clarify the government's role in this scandal.

His administration refuses to tell us why four Americans were killed in an attack on our embassy in Libya when, despite repeated calls for help, they were denied any military support.

Mr. Obama has cynically accused Republicans of waging a "War on Women" when, in fact, his own White House, according to a book by Ron Susskind, would have been ripe for a lawsuit if it were a private business because the prevailing environment was so hostile to women.

Indeed, former economic advisor Cynthia Roemer said that she "felt like a piece of meat" in this White House.

We could also point out that however one feels about abortion, most people are strongly opposed to infanticide and should be deeply troubled that as an Illinois state senator Mr. Obama twice voted against a bill that would require that babies born alive after botched abortions not be allowed to die.

Finally, there is the matter of personal integrity. As explained here, Mr. Obama is not above deliberately misrepresenting facts to gain political advantage.

Indeed, for two weeks after the Benghazi assault his administration deliberately misled the American people as to the nature of the attack, presumably to hide from the voters the failure of his foreign policy.

Perhaps Mr. Romney would turn out to be no better, but he could scarcely be worse. If moral considerations are the primary determinant in how one casts one's vote it's hard for me to see how a vote for the incumbent could be justified.

Contact Juggling

Here's something light to brighten the day of those of you living in the northeastern U.S. as you take refuge from Hurricane Sandy.

The Blaze has some astounding video of what's called "contact juggling." It's beautiful to watch and the skill of the practitioners is amazing. Take a look at this video which was captured at a festival in Japan:

A second video explains what contact juggling is:

New Low

I guess the people at the Obama campaign think this ad is very cool, but in my opinion it says something important, and not very flattering, about the modern Democrat party.

That the people in charge of the Obama reelection campaign evidently think this ad might sway young women to vote for Mr. Obama reminds us that those who believe traditional morality is worth fighting to preserve have no friends in the current White House. Not only has Mr. Obama supported gay marriage, abortion, and infanticide, but he now wants to convince young women that casting your first vote for him is as sweet as losing your virginity to the "right guy."

The ad is of a piece with the attitude, evidently prevalent among those who design Mr. Obama's campaign themes, that young women are concerned with little else other than sex, contraception, access to abortion and who's going to pay for it all. It's really pretty degrading to women, I should think.

Great message Mr. President. I wonder if you'll show the ad to your daughters.

We Need Answers

Here are some questions on the Benghazi attack to which Mr. Obama owes us answers:

1. For several months Ambassador Stevens and members of his security detail requested beefed-up security. Despite the fact that he feared for his life and despite intelligence that Libya was growing increasingly dangerous, these requests were denied. Who ultimately made the decision to deny them and why?

2. When the assault on the consulate in Benghazi began CIA operatives requested permission to assist the consulate personnel who were under fire but were told to "stand down." Four of them went to the consulate anyway, in defiance of orders, and rescued some thirty people. Two of those heroes were subsequently killed in a mortar strike. Who told them to stand down and why?

3. During the course of the rescue and also later CIA personnel several times requested assistance from special operations teams stationed about an hour away in Italy. Their requests were denied. By whom and why?

4. Was Mr. Obama informed of what was taking place at the consulate? If not, why not? If he was informed, as it seems he almost certainly must have been, was he not the one who would have made the decision to send reinforcements or withhold them?

5. For two weeks after the Ambassador and three other Americans were killed, Mr. Obama and his surrogates insisted that the attack was provoked by an offensive video made by an Egyptian-American in California. They kept up this pretense even though they knew within hours of the attack that it was a terrorist assault that had nothing to do with the video. Why did they mislead the American people on this?

6. Why is the man who made the video arrested at 1:00 in the morning and still in jail today? Is this normal procedure for someone charged with a simple probation violation?

Not only does Mr. Obama owe us answers, he owes them to us before the election on November 6th. If he refuses to answer these questions then I have one more: Why?

Israelis (Maybe) Bomb Sudan

On October 24th four fighter-bombers destroyed a munitions factory in Sudan believed to have been a manufacturing site for Iranian surface-to-surface missiles. Although it's widely believed that the attack aircraft were Israeli the Israelis have declined to comment. Nevertheless, the strike sends an interesting message to Iran.

Debkafile observes that if indeed Israel was responsible for the bombing raid, it's possible that it had following objectives in mind:

1. Its air force flew 1,800-1,900 kilometers to reach the Sudanese arms factory, a distance longer than the 1,600 kilometers to the Iranian underground enrichment site of Fordo. This operation may have been intended to show Tehran that distance presents no obstacles to an Israeli strike on its nuclear program.

2. The Israeli Air Force has an efficient in-flight refueling capability.

3. By destroying the missiles the raid would have degraded Iran’s ability to retaliate for a potential Israel or US attack.

I wonder whether - if Israeli diplomats requested additional security for their embassy in a foreign land, or if their consulate was under attack and the diplomats posted there pleaded for military help - the Israeli political leadership would have turned them down and then gone off to some resort city to campaign.

Bloodless Warfare

CBS in St. Louis reports that Boeing has developed a new technology that allows the military to attack electronic infrastructure without causing any harm to human beings:

Boeing successfully tested a new missile that can take out electronic targets with little collateral damage.

The aerospace company tested the microwave missile last week on a two-story building on the Utah Test and Training Range where computers and electronic systems were turned on to gauge the effects of the missile’s radio waves, according to a Boeing press release.

The missile, known as CHAMP (Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project), fired a burst of High Powered Microwaves at the building, successfully knocking out the electronic systems and computers, and even taking out the television cameras recording the test.

“This technology marks a new era in modern-day warfare,” Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works, said in the press release. “In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive.”

Seven targets were taken out in total during the one-hour test which left no collateral damage.

There's more on this test at the link. Maybe Boeing can speed up production so the missile can be used against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. That'd put a bee in the mullahs' turbans.

Primer on Foreign Policy

Former congressman Thad McCotter has a brief piece at The Daily Caller in which he offers ten simple truths for those just beginning to learn about foreign policy issues.

Most of the ten are a little silly, but his top three contain more than a grain of truth, and we'd do well to heed them:

• The United Nations is the august international institution where America pays through the nose to get kicked in the teeth.
• The only time to trust a dictator is when he’s promising to kill you.
• No one can follow you when you’re leading from behind.

Amazing Beyond Belief

Cnet.com has a piece on some recent discoveries about the brain in which the researchers can scarcely contain their astonishment. Here's some of it:

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven't been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.

They found that the brain's complexity is beyond anything they'd imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor--with both memory-storage and information-processing elements--than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

Here's a four minute video showing the mouse brain as revealed by the Array Tomography. Those synapses are the little orange-red dots in the tissue.

Keep in mind that this unimaginably complex organ is the product merely of random mutations and natural selection. In other words, it's an accident. If you believe otherwise, then you're just a superstitious ninny with silly blind faith in a supernatural "sky god." Sophisticated people know that this sort of complexity can easily arise by chance.

Just don't ask them to explain how.

Picking Losers

One reason the stimulus package enacted by President Obama in his early years in office has not stimulated the production of very many jobs is that a lot of the money was spent in ways that had nothing to do with job creation. Much of it was used to reward political supporters and some of it was used to prop up union pensions or businesses which were already on their way to bankruptcy. Some of these businesses were run by big donors to Mr. Obama's 2008 campaign.

The Heritage Foundation lists 36 companies in the green energy sector alone that received billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed loans which the taxpayers lost when the companies subsequently went bankrupt. Here's an excerpt from the Heritage report:

It is no secret that President Obama’s and green-energy supporters’ (from both parties) foray into venture capitalism has not gone well. But the extent of its failure has been largely ignored by the press. Sure, single instances garner attention as they happen, but they ignore past failures in order to make it seem like a rare case.

The truth is that the problem is widespread. The government’s picking winners and losers in the energy market has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and the rate of failure, cronyism, and corruption at the companies receiving the subsidies is substantial. The fact that some companies are not under financial duress does not make the policy a success. It simply means that our taxpayer dollars subsidized companies that would’ve found the financial support in the private market.

So far, 36 companies that have received federal support from taxpayers have either gone bankrupt or are laying off workers and are heading for bankruptcy. This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher.

Here's the list. The asterisk indicates that the company has already filed for bankruptcy:

1. Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
2. SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
3. Solyndra ($535 million)*
4. Beacon Power ($69 million)*
5. AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million)
6. Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
7. SunPower ($1.5 billion)
8. First Solar ($1.46 billion)
9. Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
10. EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
11. Amonix ($5.9 million)
12. National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million)
13. Fisker Automotive ($528 million)
14. Abound Solar ($374 million)*
15. A123 Systems ($279 million)*
16. Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million)
17. Johnson Controls ($299 million)
18. Schneider Electric ($86 million)
19. Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
20. ECOtality ($126.2 million)
21. Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
22. Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
23. Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
24. Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
25. Range Fuels ($80 million)*
26. Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)*
27. Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
28. LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)*
29. UniSolar ($100 million)*
30. Azure Dynamics ($120 million)*
31. GreenVolts ($500,000)
32. Vestas ($50 million)
33. LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($150 million)
34. Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
35. Navistar ($10 million)
36. Satcon ($3 million)*

The loans to these companies have been largely forgiven which means the taxpayers will never get their money back. Heritage closes with this:

The problem begins with the government picking winners and losers in the first place. Venture capitalist firms exist for this very reason, and they choose what to invest in by looking at companies’ business models and deciding if they are worthy. When the government plays venture capitalist, it tends to reward companies that are connected to the policymakers themselves or because it sounds nice to “invest” in green energy.

The 2009 stimulus set aside $80 billion to subsidize politically preferred energy projects. Since that time, 1,900 investigations have been opened to look into stimulus waste, fraud, and abuse (although not all are linked to the green-energy funds), and nearly 600 convictions have been made. Of that $80 billion in clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits, at least 10 percent has gone to companies that have since either gone bankrupt or are circling the drain.

What Happened on the Ground in Benghazi

Time has the most thorough account I've read of what actually happened at the American consulate in Benghazi last September 11. It's an account gleaned from the Libyans who were guarding the compound and it's riveting.

Here's the preface to the article:

More than a month after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, U.S. officials have yet to talk to many of the Libyan guards on duty at the American mission on that fatal evening. Fearful of reprisal from the still unknown perpetrators of the attack, the guards have gone into hiding; and their vivid recollections are giving way to a sense of abandonment by the American government, which offered them no protection from the attackers the guards believe want them dead.

TIME’s Steven Sotloff has talked to the guards for their account of what happened on the night of Sept. 11, 2012 and the early hours of the day after. Five of the guards were employees of the British security company Blue Mountain, and three others were members of the Islamist-leaning February 17th militia who were tasked with providing diplomatic security for foreign missions.

To protect them from possible retribution, their names have been changed. What is clear is that, as others have reported, there was no protest, simply a sudden siege of the compound; U.S. security forces–including U.S. Marines who arrived at an American safe house outside the consulate grounds–were overwhelmed and stymied; and that the looters apparently came upon the body of a still-breathing Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Read the rest at the link.

Breathtaking Mendacity

An article by Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and accomplished writer and economist, sheds some light on the integrity and character of Barack Obama. In his column Sowell addresses the speech given by then Senator Obama to a mostly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007.

Speaking in condescendingly affected black accents not natural to him Senator Obama pointed out that after 9/11 and after Hurricane Andrew the government waived the Stafford Act in New York and Florida. The act requires that communities contribute 10% of disaster relief received from the federal government. But, Obama told this audience of black ministers, the government did not waive it after Katrina hit New Orleans. The reason, he suggested, is because the government, i.e. the Bush administration, just didn't care about the black people of New Orleans.

Perhaps Mr. Obama really believed this, but it's false, and it's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt on it because, as Sowell points out, he must have known it was false.

Two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the U.S. Senate voted 80-14 to waive the requirement of the Stafford Act for New Orleans and more federal money was subsequently pumped into New Orleans than was spent in New York and Florida combined.

Moreover, Senator Obama must have known of this vote even as he was denying it to his audience because, according to Sowell who cited the Senate record, Obama himself took part in it.

But here's the kicker. Not only was Mr. Obama indulging in racial demagoguery, not only was he falsely claiming that the government wouldn't do something for blacks that it, in fact, did do two weeks earlier, but when the bill came up for that vote two weeks before he gave that speech in Hampton, Barack Obama was one of the 14 who voted against waiving the ten percent requirement for New Orleans.

Keep this in mind as you watch recently discovered video of his speech. The relevant portion begins at about 2:42:

As we saw again in the wake of the Benghazi attack, after which the administration insisted for two weeks that the assault on the embassy was conducted by a motley mob outraged by an offensive video when in fact they knew almost from the first day that it was a pre-planned terrorist assault, truth is just not held in very high esteem by this president.

Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Maybe Sowell somehow got his facts confused. But if not, the hubris and mendacity Mr. Obama displayed in this speech is breathtaking.

The President's Dysfunctional Foreign Policy Team

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department so when she talks about the disarray in the Obama administration's foreign policy she knows whereof she speaks.

In a recent article in Foreign Policy, Brooks, who is actually an admirer of the president, paints a picture of a foreign policy team staffed by neophytes and led by a chief executive who is, simply put, unqualified for the job he's in. She doesn't put it quite that baldly in her essay, but that's the import of what she says.

After summarizing Mr. Obama's foreign policy inadequacies she writes this:

In foreign policy as in life, stuff happens -- including bad stuff no one could have predicted. Nonetheless, to a significant extent, President Obama is the author of his own lackluster foreign policy. He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture -- one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.

Brooks then lists six things the president needs to do to remedy the deficiencies in his foreign policy "team," and elaborates at length on all six in her article. She states that Mr. Obama needs to:

1. Get a global strategy.
2. Get some decent managers.
3. Get some people who actually know something.
4. Get out of the bubble.
5. Get a backbone.
6. Get rid of the jerks.

Her explanations of each of these make for very interesting reading. She closes her essay with this:

President Obama came into office with so much good will -- from his own staff, from the American people, and from the world. But through his own unforced errors, he's lost much of that goodwill. To some extent, his errors are errors of inexperience: Obama simply undervalued issues of strategy, structure, process, and personnel.

These are understandable mistakes for a first-term president with little prior government experience (or management experience, for that matter). But such errors will be far less excusable if Obama gets a second term. If American voters give Obama four more years, he needs to push the foreign policy "reset" button.

This highlights the foolishness of thinking that qualifications don't matter while electing to the presidency a man who never in his life managed anything. Mr. Obama never ran a business, he was never a governor of a state, he was never an officer in the military. Why did anyone in 2008 think he could manage the most powerful nation in the world and what reason has he given us for thinking that the next four years would be any different than the last four?

Ben Who?

The following video was made at a recent Obama campaign rally at Ohio University. It's cause for despair. One would think that students and others who take the trouble to attend a campaign rally would be at least a little bit informed about the more prominent issues of the day, but perhaps not.

I found myself expecting one of these kids to ask the interviewer who Ben Ghazi is. One wonders what these voters think about the national debt or the state of the economy.

It all reminds me of a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "If a nation expects to remain ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be."

New Review of In the Absence of God

Byron Borger is the proprietor of what may well be the best known independent bookstore in the Middle Atlantic states. I say that not because he's a personal friend but because it's true. His establishment is named Hearts and Minds Bookstore, and it would be hard to come up with a more apt or more succinct description of his shop. I doubt that there are many bookshop owners who know the books and music they carry on their shelves as thoroughly as Byron does nor are there many, I bet, who work harder to please their customers.

Because Byron is so well-known among book lovers in the area and because he's so knowledgeable about books, I was thrilled when he wrote a review of my own book In the Absence of God for his store's website. I urge anyone thinking about purchasing Absence to read his evaluation.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from his review to whet your interest:

So, no, this isn't a quick bit of mindless entertainment, but - happily -- it is quite entertaining. There are colorful characters, true-to-life plot lines, drama, romance, sports (Cleary was a football coach, too, so the athletic scenes of locker-rooms and game films and bus-rides to away games and inter-racial comraderie and tensions on the teams are realistic and believable.) And there is violence. Did I mention this is a tensely wrought, suspenseful crime story? I don't think Dick was being intentionally commercial (he just isn't that kind of a schemer and has too much stubborn integrity to allow anything to alter his vision) but as a bookseller, I can say that, as popular novels go, this truly has something for everyone.

The plot of In the Absence of God is fairly simple to tell, but the long conversations and the numerous sub-plots are many, so I don't want to summarize it too briefly. In a nutshell, the plot revolves around several college professors and their generally friendly intellectual debates and a handful of students that are struggling to determine which basic philosophical starting points are true.

Cleary's thesis, comes up posed as a question over and over: Can we truly say anything is actually wrong/immoral if there is no God? At a garden party near the end of the book, some free thinkers take exception to what they've heard of Dr. Peterson's view, and attack him rudely for daring to believe that atheists cannot be moral. Of course, Peterson has never said this---even in a novel, that would be outrageously dumb. Peterson's position is not that atheists cannot be good, since they obviously can be, but that there is no intellectual basis for saying something is good, no coherent foundation for ethics or morals, no way to really say that something is right or wrong. That is, there cannot be, if there is no universal right or wrong that transcends personal taste or social convention, which there cannot be if there is no God.

In the Absence of God contains episodes that are quite believable for anyone who has worked in higher education: the Christian prof, a biologist that is generally liked in his department, comes to blows with his department chair. There is a debate sponsored by the political science department about U.S. foreign policy and the left-wing perspective gets much more voice in an imbalanced panel - what a show that was, and what a good conversation some of them had afterwards. There is a sub-plot about interracial dating, a sub-plot about middle-aged professors caring for their aging parents (which I found very, very moving.) And there are some exciting football games, described without too much detail, but offering enough sports coverage to qualify as a bit of a novel for sports fans.

You can order the book directly from Hearts and Minds by clicking on this link. I have to say that Absence would make a fine Christmas gift for any thoughtful reader, but especially for a young man, who might be wrestling with questions about God.

What Is Time?

The nature of time has been described as perhaps the universe's most baffling mystery. Immanuel Kant thought that time was a part of our mental structure that enabled us to experience an external world that would be incomprehensibly incoherent without that structure.

Many modern thinkers, on the other hand, think of time as an objective reality that exists statically and through which we somehow pass.

Somewhat between these two views is the theory that what we call time is a collection of states of affairs that we experience, but that time itself is an illusion.

Derek sends along a link to an article in Popular Science by astrophysicist Adam Frank who seems to adopt this latter view. Frank presents us with an excerpt from his book About Time in which he advances the interesting theory that time has no real existence and describes the thinking of physicist Julian Barbour in support of his theory:

Julian Barbour’s solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.

“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” says Barbour. “People are sure time is there, but they can’t get hold of it. My feeling is that they can’t get hold of it because it isn’t there at all.”

Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-Dimensional entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour’s view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right. He calls these moments “Nows.”

“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows,” says Barbour, “and the question is, what are they?” For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.”

Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent.

As Barbour says, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour’s Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.

“What really intrigues me,” says Barbour, “is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules.” The question of “before” the Big Bang never arises for Barbour because his cosmology has no time. All that exists is a landscape of configurations, the landscape of Nows.

“Platonia is the true arena of the universe,” he says, “and its structure has a deep influence on whatever physics, classical or quantum, is played out in it.” For Barbour, the Big Bang is not an explosion in the distant past. It’s just a special place in Platonia, his terrain of independent Nows.

There's more on this at the link. Take the time to read it, or perhaps I should say, enter the Now of reading the article.

No Warming in Sixteen Years

A report released quietly to the internet with no real publicity attached to it bears some surprising and controversial news. It seems that since 1997 global temperatures have not risen at all. Despite all the talk of global warming and the Greenhouse Effect, despite the fears provoked by Al Gore's books and movies, there has been no planetary warming in almost 16 years.

The following chart illustrates the data:

Indeed, since 1887 the mean global temperature has risen only .75 degrees Celsius. hardly enough to produce significant changes in ice cover or biogeography. These changes do appear to be happening, however, but perhaps we should be looking elsewhere than rising temperatures, man-caused or otherwise, for the cause.

Near Death Experience

Perhaps you've heard the story of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was in a coma for a week due to an attack of meningitis. Widely published, Dr. Alexander teaches at the University of Virginia Medical School and has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. The story of his Near Death Experience appeared in Newsweek magazine recently and it's a fascinating account, fraught with difficulties both for materialists and also, perhaps, for some religious believers.

Here's an excerpt of what he writes:

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but -- more importantly -- the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky...

Higher than the clouds -- immeasurably higher -- flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise -- that if the joy didn't come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you wet...

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us -- vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again...

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real -- was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial. The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I'd say they ran something like this:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."
"You have nothing to fear."
"There is nothing you can do wrong."

What happened to me demands explanation.

What to make of this? First, some materialists, i.e. those who believe that physical matter is all there is, are scoffing at the report, claiming that Dr. Alexander simply dreamt the tale, but if he was in a genuine coma then he didn't dream it. Dreams are impossible in a coma.

Second, if he's accurately recounting what happened to him then materialism is clearly false.

But there's a problem here for some religious people as well. Alexander says in the article that:

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

Many Christians believe that a nominal believer like Alexander does not go to heaven when he dies, but, again, if Alexander is correct then it would appear that that may not be the case.

He closes with this:

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

I admit that when I've read stories of NDEs in the past I was skeptical of their reliability, but when a man who's only a nominal believer, a neurosurgeon who works with brains everyday and has no religious axe to grind, relates such a narrative, it has a lot more credibility, at least for me.

Modern Exodus

Once upon a time much of the Middle East and the entire northern tier of African countries was Christian. Then came the repeated and brutal Muslim invasions of the 7th through the 14th centuries and Christians were slaughtered, dispersed, or converted to Islam. Today it's hard to find Christian communities anywhere in North Africa. One place they have existed for two thousand years is Egypt, but the Arab "Spring" is putting an end to that presence as well. Islam is the least tolerant religion in the world, even less tolerant than atheistic communism, and it brooks no competition.

Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom writes a poignant article in the Wall Street Journal in which he describes the plight of Egypt's Coptic Christians. Here's part of his column:

Visit any Coptic church in the United States and you immediately recognize the newcomers. You see it in their eyes, hear it in their broken English, sense it in how they cling to the church in search of the familiar. They have come here escaping a place they used to call home, where their ancestors had lived for centuries.

Waves of Copts have come here from Egypt before, to escape Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalizations or the growing Islamist tide. Their country's transformation wasn't sudden, but every year brought more public Islamization. As the veil spread, Coptic women felt increasingly different, alien and marked. Verbal abuse came from schoolteachers, bystanders in the bus station who noticed the cross on a wrist, or commentators on state television.

But life was generally bearable. Hosni Mubarak crushed the Islamist insurgency of the 1980s and '90s. He was no friend to the Copts, but neither was he foe. His police often turned a blind eye when Coptic homes and shops were attacked by mobs, and the courts never punished the perpetrators—but the president wasn't an Islamist. He even interfered sometimes to give permission to build a church, or to make Christmas a national holiday.

To be sure, Copts were excluded from high government positions. There were no Coptic governors, intelligence officers, deans of schools, or CEOs of government companies. Until 2005, Copts needed presidential approval to build a new church or even build a bathroom in an existing one. Even with approval, state security often blocked construction, citing security concerns.

Those concerns were often real. Mobs could mobilize against Copts with the slightest incitement—rumor of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, a church being built, reports of a Christian having insulted Islam. The details varied but the results didn't: homes burned, shops destroyed, Christians leaving villages, sometimes dead bodies. The police would arrive late and force a reconciliation session between perpetrators and victims during which everything would be forgiven and no one punished. What pained the Copts most was that the attackers were neighbors, co-workers and childhood friends.

Then came last year's revolution. Copts were never enthusiastic about it, perhaps because centuries of persecution taught that the persecuting dictator was preferable to the mob. He could be bought off, persuaded to hold back or pressured by outside forces. With the mob you stood no chance. Some younger Copts were lured by the promise of a liberal Egypt, but the older generation knew better.

Read the rest at the link. Like those younger Copts Tadros mentions, our own political leadership was seduced by the promise of a liberal Egypt, but a lot of other Americans knew better. They knew that the young Egyptians dying in Tahrir Square were simply pawns being used by the Islamists. They knew that when their usefulness was exhausted they would simply be shoved aside and that the radicals would establish themselves in the seat of power. It wasn't hard to predict because it's always been this way, particularly in the Arab world.

What lies in store for Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and everywhere else where Muslim Arabs dominate is less freedom, more oppression, and greater religious rigidity. At best this process has been slowed by the influence of Western nations like the U.S. At worst, though, the West acquiesces in, or even facilitates - as it did in Egypt - the deepening Islamization of these countries and the tyrannical oppression of their people, particularly religious and ethnic minorities.

No Win Situation

A report out of Florida illustrates one difficult situation that educators in districts across the country find themselves in. Here are the highlights:

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”

Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.

As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.

Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.

“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.

Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race.

The Florida Board of Education is between a rock and a hard place. They can hold all students to the same uniform standards of educational achievement and thereby set a large share of minority students up for almost certain failure as they find themselves generally unable to compete academically with members of other groups. Or they can recognize that not all groups, as groups, have the same academic potential, establish accomodations for that fact, and be branded racists for their trouble.

Either course will lead to stratified schools and an equally stratified society for years to come as academically accomplished whites and Asians continue to rise to the top and academically challenged minorities sink toward the bottom.

Although I sympathize with those who wish to help minority kids succeed by facing up to the realities of racial disparities, I think such policies will only lead us back to some form of segregation. Better to hold all kids to the same expectations so that those who can meet those challenges will have the same opportunities to succeed in their life's work as members of other groups. Academic race-norming will only stigmatize the achievements of those who are genuinely capable and reinforce the reluctance of employers to hire minorities for jobs that they'll be afraid the applicant hasn't been prepared to handle.

Stratification may be an insoluble problem but at least we should keep the standards high for those who have the wherewithal to transcend it.

Class Clown

The first video below counts the number of times in last Wednesday's debate that Vice-President Biden interrupted Paul Ryan as Ryan tried to speak. The second video shows Mr. Biden appearing to be auditioning for the role of the Joker in the next Batman movie.

So far from being mortified by their candidate's embarrassing behavior the Democrats have launched a devastating video of their own. In their vid they count the number of times Congressman Ryan ... takes a drink of water. That should win them a couple of votes.

Actually, the utter triviality of the Democrats' video is of a piece with their response to the spanking Mr. Obama took from Mitt Romney in their earlier debate. The country is in dire fiscal peril. Diplomats are being murdered in Libya and Yemen. The biggest terrorist state in the world, Iran, is on the threshold of having a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Obama seeks to persuade people not to vote for Romney on the grounds that he'll kill Big Bird.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that it was Paul Ryan who acted like Joe Biden did last Wednesday and that Biden acted as calmly and professionally as did Ryan. What would the media be saying about the comparative suitability of the two men to be first in the line of succession to the presidency?

Ryan would've almost certainly been declared non compos mentis by the pundits before the hall even cleared and the election would've been pronounced over. America would never, and should never, we would be told every minute of every day from now until November 6th, elect such a buffoon to serve in such high office. Instead, since it was Biden who played the clown, the left is actually reveling in his gaucheries, and the mainstream liberal media is pretty much pretending they didn't notice.

The polls, however, are showing that the American people did notice.

Belief, Disbelief, and Will

One of the claims I make in my book In the Absence of God (see link above right) is that belief and disbelief are for most people, believers and unbelievers alike, matters of the will and not matters of evidence or reason.

It's common to hear "New Atheists," for example, accuse Christians of Freudian wish fulfillment, of believing what they fervently want to be true. Perhaps they're right. I certainly think it's true of many Christians that they believe the Gospel because the Christian story is so compellingly beautiful and they just want that story to be true, but it's also true of most atheists.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel says in his book The Last Word that he is curious

"whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God - anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn't particularly want either one of the answers to be correct ..."

He himself openly admits in the book that his disbelief is not a matter of reasoned thinking about the matter:

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

I think that were most atheists as honest with themselves as is Nagel they'd say the same thing. Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald presents us with another example of what we might call atheistic wish-fulfillment. Back in 1954 he wrote:

There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility....I will not accept [a supernatural creative act of God] philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution.

I confess that though I certainly think that many atheists disbelieve simply because they don't want there to be a God, I have difficulty understanding this desire. Why would someone not want the universe to be the sort of place where there's a ground for moral duties, where life has genuine meaning, where one has good reason to hope that death is not final and that this life is not all there is, where there's good reason to think that ultimately justice will prevail, where human beings have genuine dignity and worth, and where the Platonic ideals of the Good, the Beautiful and the True are actually instantiated in a Being who deeply loves us?

I don't understand why anyone would want the world to be the sort of place where none of these are possible and indeed where life is meaningless, moral obligation is non-existent, where there's no hope of anything transcendent, where human beings are nothing more than transient collocations of atoms, where life is nothing more than a cruel joke and nihilism and despair are perfectly rational responses to the human predicament.

Those are the two worlds each of us must choose between. To want God to exist is to opt for the first, to want him to not exist is to prefer the second.

Shameful Behavior

It's entirely understandable if viewers who tuned into last night's vice-presidential debate promptly switched to the baseball or football games. Watching the debate was a disappointingly unedifying experience. Although not entirely. If, for example, we want the man who stands only a heartbeat away from the presidency to be a rude, ill-mannered, boorish buffoon then we certainly learned last evening that Joe Biden is our man.

Taking a page from the debate tactics of Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity - never let your opponent complete a sentence, talk over him so he can't be heard, and mock him at every turn - Mr. Biden was successful beyond the hopes of even the most partisan Democrat at preventing the viewer from actually learning much of anything about how Republicans would address the grave problems facing the country.

If one were to read the transcript of the debate one might come to the conclusion that both men did reasonably well, but watching it on split-screen television, Mr. Biden's arguments, whatever their merits, were rendered moot by his obnoxious discourtesies directed at his opponent. Focussing on what Ryan was saying was extremely difficult with Biden guffawing on camera at almost every argument and claim Ryan made.

It's really too bad. The American people want to cast an informed vote, but the Democratic candidate made sure that few people who tuned in to last night's "debate" would be more informed when it ended than they were when it started.

Obamanomics

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air claims that the economic policies of the current administration have been a complete and miserable failure, a claim that receives considerable support from this video:

Another Administration Scandal

ABC reports the story of what happened in Benghazi the night that our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered. There are two very troubling aspects of this story that reflect poorly on the Obama administration and on Mr. Obama himself.

The first is that for two weeks after this attack the administration, including Mr. Obama, made a concerted effort to conceal the actual nature of the attack, misleading the American public into thinking that it was a spontaneous raid by an enraged mob which was protesting an anti-Muslim video.

Why the administration repeatedly tried to establish this narrative is unclear, but perhaps they realized that if the attack were seen as a terrorist assault it would show Mr. Obama's foreign policy of rapprochement with Muslims abroad to be pretty much a futile, failed effort. Whatever the case, the administration knew within 24 hours what had happened and that it wasn't the work of an offended mob. It was a planned terrorist atrocity. The administration knew this and continued nevertheless to mislead the American people about it.

The second scandalous aspect of this awful episode is that the ambassador and others in Libya had several times requested more security for themselves and other diplomatic personnel. They had intelligence that their lives were in serious danger but each request for more protection was refused by a State Department official named Charlene Lamb who testified to Congress that she thought the ambassador had sufficient security.

This whole tragic debacle has about it the odor of incompetence, poor judgment, and cynical political calculation for which both the President and his Secretary of State should be held accountable.