Quantum Entanglement

From time to time I've mentioned my fascination with the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement (QE) in which two particles which start out in contact with one another but are then sped at the speed of light to opposite ends of the universe, remain somehow mysteriously connected. Even though there's no conceivable way the particles can be in contact with each other nevertheless a change in one particle instantly "causes" a corresponding change in the other, as if they were somehow still joined together.

When I tell my students this I often get the feeling that they think I'm pulling their collective leg, but this phenomenon is well-known among physicists. Here's physicist Brian Greene discussing it:

All I can do when I see a video like this is paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and on earth than we could ever dream of. QE certainly lends credence to the view of physicist Sir James Jeans that the world looks more like a grand idea than a grand machine. In fact, it looks very much as though, at bottom, it's an idea in the mind of God. At least that might explain how one particle "knows" what's happening to the other.

Materialism and Electrical Bacteria

Rabbi Moshe Averick reports on the discovery of an amazing phenomenon that occurs at the bottom of the oceans. It turns out that certain filamentous bacteria have the ability to conduct electricity through their cells for distances of up to a centimeter. Averick comments:

In layman’s terms it means that living bacteria at the bottom of the ocean act as a network of electrical cables complete with insulation that transmit electricity over a distance of one centimeter. If these “marvelous microbes” were the size of human beings the signals would be transmitted for 12 miles. Several years ago researchers had detected electrical currents on the ocean floor but until now had no idea of their source. Science Daily reports that “they make up a kind of live electric cable that no one had ever imagined existed.” One researcher described it as “unreal and fantastic.”

A single teaspoon of mud contains at least a half mile of these living cables. The electrical currents generated by these bacteria seem to play an important role in the nutrient cycles of sea life.

Averick uses this discovery as a springboard for poking a little fun at Darwinian materialists:

When the Supreme Court of Tennessee reviewed the guilty verdict of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925), Justice Chambliss noted the following statement by Dr. E.N. Reinke, Professor of Biology at Vanderbilt University, which was repeatedly referred to in the briefs of counsel for the defense:

“The theory of evolution is altogether essential to the teaching of biology....To deny the teacher of biology the use of [evolution] would make his teaching as chaotic as an attempt to teach...physics without assuming the existence of the ether.”

In hindsight, Dr. Reinke’s remarks are nothing short of comical. The theory of the luminiferous ether was abandoned by science long ago and even today physicists and historians of science get slightly red-faced when the subject comes up.

Just as the theory of an ether died a slow death among scientists and was eventually buried, so, too, Averick claims is materialism dying a slow death among philosophers. He quotes no less an authority than philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why Neo-Darwinian Materialism Is Almost Certainly Wrong:

“For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms come to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes...It seems to me that...the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported and that it flies in the face of common sense.”

When even atheists like Nagel begin to see materialism as a dead end then you know the theory is in trouble.

More War in the Middle East

The Palestinians have been goading the Israelis into war for a long time. Hundreds of rockets have been launched at Israeli civilians from sites in Gaza, and finally Israel has responded to the provocation.

First came the attack on Hamas' long-range missiles in storage in Sudan a couple of weeks ago and then came the targeted assassination of Hamas terrorist leader Ahmed Jabari on Wednesday. Jabari was responsible for numerous murders of Israeli citizens. Here's video of the attack on his vehicle:

The Israelis followed this up with precision attacks on sites where Hamas has stored missiles capable of covering distances up to 75 km. which brings most of Israel's major cities and towns within range.

The Palestinians responded with yet another missile barrage aimed at civilians, but the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of those missiles which posed a threat and let the rest fall harmlessly in the countryside. Nevertheless, several Israeli civilians were killed.

Whether Israel will now send ground troops into Gaza is unclear, but they're massing men and tanks on the border.

Debkafile has a story on how different the state of the Israeli military's preparation has been this time compared to their war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and operation Cast Lead in Gaza a couple of years ago. Hot Air has some good insights into this as well.

It'll be interesting to see how the U.S. and indeed the rest of the world responds. If the past is an indication there'll be calls for Israel to show "moderation" and condemnations of Israel when the Palestinian casualties start to mount. There have been no calls, however, for Hamas to stop the rocket attacks against Israeli towns and there'll probably be no condemnation of the Palestinians either.

This leads one to suspect that there's a great deal of bigotry afoot. Either the world community, including a large segment of the American media, is anti-Israel or they just don't think that the Palestinians can be held to the same standards of civilized behavior to which the Israelis are held. Or maybe it's both. It's funny how bigotry on the left is acceptable as long as it's the proper sort of bigotry.

Wish I'd Been Wrong

In a post last week I listed a number of things that I'm afraid we can expect in a second Obama term. I took criticism from some readers who thought I was unduly negative and pessimistic. It gives me no satisfaction to point out that a couple of those predictions are already starting to be fulfilled. For example:

Obamacare, according to this report, is forcing dozens of companies to lay off employees:

With 20 or so new or higher taxes set to be implemented, ranging from a $123 billion surtax on investment income, through the $20 billion medical device tax, all the way down to the $600 million executive compensation limit, Obamacare will be a nearly unbearable tax burden on the economy.

Who will pay? The middle-class workforce, of course.

The report goes on to list dozens of companies that are each laying off dozens, or even hundreds, of workers because the employers simply can't afford to carry them now that Obamacare will not be repealed.

At least the laid off employees will still have health care coverage under Obamacare. There's that to brighten their day, I suppose.

Here's a chart that illustrates what the Obama administration has in store for employers over the next ten years. It'll be amazing if after that time anyone at all has a job:



I also expressed fears in the earlier post that the president would continue his assault on our constitutional protections, particularly the first and second amendments to the Bill of Rights. I've been joined in my concerns by no less an authority on the subject than Nat Hentoff, perhaps the most famous leftist civil libertarian in the country. Hentoff is especially concerned, indeed he's obviously angry, in this article about the threat Mr. Obama's policies pose for the fifth amendment. Here's his lede:

President Barack Obama went far beyond his predecessor’s administration to become the most destructive uprooter of our Constitution in our nation’s history....

But never did I even imagine that an American president, without insuring due process in a court of law, would – as Obama does – use a kill list to target suspected terrorists for assassination. So far this list has also included three American citizens.

The secrecy with which Obama discards the Constitution to rule over us is evident in his dictatorial use of the “state secrets” privilege, which actually prevents judges from even hearing cases brought by citizens who claim their fundamental constitutional rights have been expunged by the president’s censors.

There's much in the rest of Hentoff's piece that's worth reading.

Vegetative States and Consciousness

There's a fascinating story at the BBC website about new research being done on persons in a "vegetative" state due to severe brain injury that shows that not only are some of them conscious they can even respond to questions:

It's the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-injured patient has been able to give answers clinically relevant to their care.

Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine.

Vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world.

Mr. Routley was injured in an automobile accident 12 years ago, and none of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate.

But the British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen - who led the team at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario - said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative.

"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."

One of the questions that Owen's patients "answered" was whether they were in pain. Their MRI scans indicated that they were not. Owen was able to get some level of response from one in five severely brain-damaged patients that he tested.

It's hard to imagine what it must be like to be conscious in a body but not be able to make the body function in any way that would allow for communication with the outside world. One would think that such individuals would go insane.

On the other hand, perhaps their level of consciousness is similar to that of someone under an anesthetic like sodium pentathol. They can respond to questions but they're not aware that they're doing it.

In any case, it certainly raises a host of ethical questions about terminating someone's life when they're in a vegetative state. Was Terri Schiavo, for instance, aware of what was being done to her as she was slowly dehydrated and starved to death?

There are more interesting details on this research at the link.

Modernist's Prayer

A recent issue of First Things (subscription required) contains this prayer by Ronald Knox which pretty well sums up the conviction, or lack of it, of at least a few modern churchmen and theologians:

O God, forasmuch as without Thee
We are not enabled to doubt Thee,
Help us all by Thy grace
To convince the whole race
It knows nothing about Thee.

The prayer also seems to inadvertently give an elbow to the ribs of theistic evolutionists who affirm that God is behind the creation but who deny, despite the testimony of Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19:1, that there's any empirical evidence of this.

Sam Harris on Free Will

Atheist thinker Sam Harris has a new book out on the topic of free will in which he ostensibly chooses freely to aver that there isn't any. The logic of atheistic materialism forces one to the conclusion that if there's nothing more to us than the chemical processes that go on in our bodies, especially in our brains, then there's no room for anything which would act independently of the laws of physics and thus there's no room in the human machine for any kind of genuine freedom. Harris says in his book that:

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

Martin Cothran at Evolution News and Views directs our attention to the irony in the claim of those who hold to Harris' metaphysical persuasion:

[They insist that] their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic)....But their very stated position is that any mental state -- including their position on this issue -- is the effect of a physical, not a logical, cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if it's not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) it cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice -- or any other.

I haven't read the book but I wonder if these problems have occurred to Harris. They should've because they're common objections to the position he holds, but if they have I wonder how he would choose, er, be determined to respond to them.

Why Stay?

Victor Davis Hanson, in a piece for City Journal, looks at what's become of California and asks why anyone who could leave doesn't. Most of his article is an elaboration on the reasons why many people, including himself, choose to stay - reasons that include the natural beauty of the state, family heritage, climate, and so on, but how much longer those allurements will continue to work their charm is an open question given all that's wrong:

California’s multidimensional decline — fiscal, commercial, social, and political — sometimes seems endless. The state’s fiscal problems were especially evident this past May, when Governor Jerry Brown announced an “unexpected” $16 billion annual budget shortfall. Two months later, he signed a $92 billion budget that appears balanced only if voters approve an $8.5 billion tax increase in November. According to a study published by a public policy group at Stanford University, California’s various retirement systems have amassed $500 billion in unfunded liabilities. To honor the pension and benefit contracts of current and retired public employees, state and local governments have already started to lay off workers and slash services.

Not just in its finances but almost wherever you look, the state’s vital signs are dipping. The average unemployment rate hovers above 10 percent. In the reading and math tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students rank near the bottom of the country, though their teachers earn far more than the average American teacher does. California’s penal system is the largest in the United States, with more than 165,000 inmates. Some studies estimate that the state prisons and county jails house more than 30,000 illegal aliens at a cost of $1 billion or more each year. Speaking of which: California has the nation’s largest population of illegal aliens, on whom it spends an estimated $10 billion annually in entitlements. The illegals also deprive the Golden State’s economy of billions of dollars every year by sending remittances to Latin America.

Meanwhile, business surveys perennially rank California among the most hostile states to private enterprise, largely because of overregulation, stifling coastal zoning laws, inflated housing costs, and high tax rates. Environmental extremism has cost the state dearly: oil production has plunged 45 percent over the last 25 years, even though California’s Monterey Shale formation has an estimated 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Geologists estimate that 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas sit untapped as well. Those numbers could soar with revolutionary new methods of exploration.

Between the mid-1980s and 2005, the state’s aggregate population increased by 10 million Californians, including immigrants. But that isn’t the good economic news that you might think. For one thing, 7 million of the new Californians were low-income Medicaid recipients. Further, as economist Arthur Laffer recently noted in Investor’s Business Daily, between 1992 and 2008, the number of tax-paying Californians entering California was smaller than the number leaving — 3.5 million versus 4.4 million, for a net loss of 869,000 tax filers. Those who left were wealthier than those who arrived, with average adjusted gross incomes of $44,700, versus $38,600. Losing those 869,000 filers cost California $44 billion in tax revenue over two decades, Laffer calculated.

Worst of all is that neither the legislature nor the governor has offered a serious plan to address any of these problems. Soaring public-employee costs, unfunded pensions, foundering schools, millions of illegal aliens, regulations that prevent wealth creation, an onerous tax code: the story of all the ways in which today’s Californians have squandered a rich natural and human inheritance is infuriating.

You can read Hanson's reasons for sticking it out despite these manifold dysfunctions at the link. He closes with this:

The four-part solution for California is clear: don’t raise the state’s crushing taxes any higher; reform public-employee compensation; make use of ample natural resources; and stop the flow of illegal aliens. Just focus on those four areas—as California did so well in the past—and in time, the state will return to its bounty of a few decades ago. Many of us intend to stay and see that it does.

Unfortunately, last Tuesday Californians chose to disdain Hanson's advice and voted to raise taxes on the wealthy yet again.

One reason this is important for non-Californians is that many of the policies that have plunged what used to be an economic mecca into economic and social decrepitude are similar to what Mr. Obama wishes to foist upon the rest of the nation. Higher taxes, unrestricted immigration, restricted use of natural resources, and more onerous regulations on business are all on the menu for the next four years, and unrealistic public-employee compensation is an integral part of the Democrats' plans in many other states besides California.

We can't afford it any more than California can, and if we continue to tax and spend like we have for the last 4-6 years we'll wind up like California writ large and asking ourselves why anyone who can afford to leave the U.S. doesn't.

Andrew Wilkow and Peter Schiff offer some thoughts on the unintended consequences of taxing the rich in this video:

Cashmore and Pastore on Free Will

Biologist Anthony R. Cashmore, wrote a paper a couple of years ago on the topic of free will and determinism that I think is instructive. It illustrates how determinism, materialism and naturalism entail each other. A person who holds one of these views generally (though not necessarily) holds all three. Cashmore, who is himself a naturalist, writes:

Many discussions about human behavior center around the relative importance of genes and environment, a topic often discussed in terms of nature versus nurture. In concentrating on this question of the relative importance of genes and environment, a crucial component of the debate is often missed: an individual cannot be held responsible for either his genes or his environment.

From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior. Yet a basic tenet of the judicial system and the way that we govern society is that we hold individuals accountable (we consider them at fault) on the assumption that people can make choices that do not simply reflect a summation of their genetic and environmental history. As de Duve has written, “If . . . neuronal events in the brain determine behavior, irrespective of whether they are conscious or unconscious, it is hard to find room for free will. But if free will does not exist, there can be no responsibility, and the structure of human societies must be revised.”

It is my belief that, as more attention is given to the mechanisms that govern human behavior, it will increasingly be seen that the concept of free will is an illusion, and the fallacy of a basic premise of the judicial system will become more apparent. Certainly, the determination of the sequence of the human genome and the assignment of function to these genes is having a dramatic effect on our understanding of the role of genetics in human behavior.

The rest of the article can be summarized in a simple syllogism: Material objects are subject to the deterministic laws of physics. There's nothing about us that's non-material. Thus, there's nothing about us that's not subject to the deterministic laws of physics.

If that much is correct then a further conclusion can be drawn: There's no such thing as a free, undetermined choice for which we could be held responsible. Our choices are simply the product of electro-chemical phenomena occurring in our brains and these are the product of our genes or our past experiences.

There's no room in the world of the materialist for a mind or soul and thus no room for free will. But, if we're determined (pardon the pun) to discard libertarian freedom, we must also discard moral responsibility and any notion that reward or punishment are ever deserved.

If we're not really in some sense free to decide between alternative courses of action, if the choice we make is determined by factors over which we have no control, then no one deserves any blame or punishment, no one deserves any praise or reward, and no one is ever morally guilty of doing anything that violates the behavioral codes of the consensus.

If, on the other hand, one does believe himself to be free then, as is argued in the following video, one may also believe that there's more to us than just the physical stuff that makes us up. Belief in metaphysical freedom entails a belief in something like a non-physical mind or soul that serves as the seat of our freedom.

Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who studied philosophy after his retirement from baseball and who now hosts a radio talk show, discusses the problem materialism poses for a belief in free will and vice-versa:

What's Needed

There's been a lot of soul-searching among Republicans and conservatives - the two intersect but they're not necessarily the same thing - after last Tuesday's election results.

Much of it has focused on how Republicans should bend their principles to appeal to the demographic reality of a "browning" of America. In my opinion this is foolish advice. If conservative principles are right then they should be non-negotiable and not subject to compromise.

What conservatives do need, however, are candidates who are more sophisticated concerning the cultural milieu of modern America than some of GOP candidates have shown themselves to be.

Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Rick Perry, and even Mitt Romney simply don't seem to understand how their words, particularly what they say about abortion, sound to the average voter, especially the average low-information voter. What they say may reflect a mainstream view, but to media elites they sound like they're way out on the fringe and the elites are delighted to portray them that way.

We need candidates who are rhetorically sophisticated, who are conversant with the culture, who are at ease with people from outside their socio-economic class, and who understand that the media will forgive almost anything a Democrat says (Joe Biden is exhibit A) but relentlessly excoriate anything at all uttered by a Republican.

Contrary to what some are saying this week, Republicans don't need to trim their message to appease interest groups like African-Americans, Hispanics, women, or young people. Instead they need to be able to articulate a cogent case for why their principles are in the best interest of all Americans.

Let the Democrats indulge in identity politics and class warfare. Conservatives need to tirelessly make the case that the government is, as Rush Limbaugh says, not Santa Claus, and that those who want more and more from government are ultimately harming both themselves and their communities. Republican candidates do, however, need to spend time in those communities and show the people there that they're not being written off. They need to make the case for conservative principles to the people who don't understand them and do it, not from afar, but from within the communities in which those people live. It does little good to make the conservative case over and over, as talk radio hosts do, to audiences which already accept it.

Speaking of talk radio, although their message is fine, the way the message is delivered is often embarrassing and self-defeating. Conservatives, in my opinion, need to get rid of the shrill and pompous voices on radio and television which do nothing but alienate those who are not already in the conservative camp and which even repel many who are already in the fold. Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and the Rush Limbaugh of recent years need to either change their style or stop speaking on behalf of conservatism because they're doing the cause no favors. They may be right on the issues, they may be informative and offer good insights into contemporary debates, but all that goes for naught if they're only preaching to the choir while offending those who might from time to time stop by to see what conservatism is all about.

Conservatism would be better served and seem much more appealing to those people conservatives wish to persuade if there were more people like the late William F. Buckley fighting the good fight. Conservatism needs more columnists like George Will, Michael Gerson, Cal Thomas, and Peggy Noonan and more radio hosts like Mike Huckabee and Dennis Prager. We need people who can defeat liberalism not by out-shouting it, but by showing with humility the bankruptcy of its basic philosophy in a calm, respectful, humorous and winsome manner.

Sure, there's a time for anger and indignation, but if that's all there is, and if the messenger is typically rude, arrogant, obnoxious, childish, or narcissistic, or worse, if they're all of these together (as, in my opinion, Hannity is), if, when a listener tunes in, all he/she hears is a screed from beginning to end, it's repulsive.

The country needs liberals to call our attention to social problems. They're especially good at spotting them, but their solutions to those problems are often wrong-headed. The country needs conservatives to implement wise solutions, and it needs skillful spokespersons who can persuade those who may be historically averse to the Republican party to articulate in compelling ways why the Republican party offers, at least right now, the only hope that those solutions will ever see the light of day.

What Does it Mean?

In the wake of yesterday's election, a few thoughts:

The American people have spoken and have chosen Mr. Obama to serve as our president for another four years. What does that portend for us as a people and as a nation? There's no way to know for sure, of course, but here are a few conclusions that I think we can draw, or probably draw, from Mr. Obama's reelection.

In my opinion, yesterday's vote tells us that:

• we will continue to amass more and more debt and pay higher and higher taxes to service that debt and our children will find themselves crushed under its weight.
• the value of our money will diminish as the fed prints currency to try to service the debt which means that we'll be able to buy less, perhaps much less, with our paychecks in the coming years.
• the welfare state will grow apace. Those who pull the wagon will be expected to do more for the increasing number of people who'll be riding in it.
• as part of Mr. Obama's vendetta against fossil fuel the coal, oil, and natural gas industries will be regulated out of business, or, at the least, will be forced to curtail production and undergo massive layoffs, and we will grow increasingly dependent upon foreign sources for our energy needs.
• business in general is going to be more heavily regulated and taxed and will thus produce fewer jobs and more expensive products.
• the Supreme Court will probably be dominated by far left progressives for at least a generation.
• our military will be significantly weakened and rendered less effective.
• Israel will probably have to face a nuclear Iran by themselves.
• government assaults on both the first and second amendment of the Constitution will probably continue.
• young people will find it increasingly hard to secure good jobs and the elderly will find it increasingly hard to get good medical care.
• as a nation we have chosen to reelect perhaps the most divisive president we've ever had, a man who rewards his fat cat donors with billions in taxpayer money and who, in his own words, sees political opponents as "enemies" who need to be "punished" and upon whom his supporters should seek "revenge."
• we are ourselves more divided than ever between people who are apparently indifferent to all of the above and people who are deeply concerned about it. We are also probably more polarized along racial lines than at any time since the 1970s and more polarized along ideological lines than at any time in our history.

All in all, it's a very sad day for America, or at least for those Americans who believe the course Mr. Obama has plotted for the country is taking us toward national senescence.

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.

-----------

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."