Et Tu, Unions?

As public confidence in Obamacare suffers one blow after another even Democrats are heading for the tall grass. Senator Max Baucus called it a train wreck a few weeks ago. Then a vote Tuesday in the House of Representatives on legislation that would make licit Mr. Obama's legally dubious postponement of implementation of the employer mandate secured 35 Democratic votes despite Mr. Obama's vigorous opposition to the bill.

Mr. Obama's disapproval put the House Democrats in the peculiar position of incurring the President's displeasure by agreeing with him that the mandate should be delayed.

Anyway, a second vote to postpone as well the individual mandate garnered 22 Democratic votes.

One must wonder why so many Democrats are bailing out? I'm reminded of an old cartoon that showed the interior of an airplane. The cockpit door is open, and the passengers are startled to see the pilot and co-pilot - hands in their pockets, casually whistling, looking at the ceiling and trying to appear unconcerned - nonchalantly walking down the aisle toward the rear exit door of the plane with parachutes strapped to their backs.

It looks like the people who brought us Obamacare are strapping on the parachutes. The most recent group to express their disillusionment are some of the Affordable Care Act's biggest boosters, the nation's unions. Union leaders are beginning to realize that Obamacare is going to be a disaster for a lot of union workers who'll lose either their jobs, their hours, or the excellent insurance coverage they'd won via collective bargaining.

Charles Krauthammer discusses their epiphany:

Captain Obama tried to allay concerns with a speech yesterday in which he assured us that Obamacare is doing just fine. Unfortunately, as is his wont, he spun so many yarns and tall tales that an AP fact check almost ran out of column space trying to correct all of the misrepresentations and deceptions.

Some are predicting the ACA will, like an overloaded plane, never get airborne and will crash to the ground under its own weight, complexity, and unworkability. The question is how high will the plane rise before it falls out of the sky and how many passengers will go down in flames with the plane.

Random Thoughts on a Tragedy

I thought I'd share some ruminations I had (and you probably had, too) in the wake of the Zimmerman trial:

• It's disturbing, I think, that, despite the evidence, so many blacks thought O.J. Simpson was innocent, and thought, despite the evidence, that George Zimmerman was guilty.
• It's also disturbing that so many people apparently believe that if you find yourself in the midst of being beaten to death you have no right to use deadly force to save yourself if your assailant is black.
• I also thought it disturbing that so many people apparently think that evidence shouldn't matter in determining guilt or innocence. All that matters is the race of the parties involved.
• Part of this tragedy is that had Trayvon Martin simply walked away from Zimmerman, or had walked away even after punching him and knocking him to the ground, he'd probably still be alive today. His decision to jump on Zimmerman and pound him mercilessly while Zimmerman apparently called for help was a fatal decision.
• Imagine that a similar shooting had happened but that the races were reversed. Would the case have gone to trial? Would the media have turned it into a national circus? Would there be rumblings from the DOJ after acquittal to pursue Civil Rights charges against the black man?
• I wonder why the media repeatedly referred to Martin as "Trayvon" and to Zimmerman as "George Zimmerman."
• I wonder, too, whether the media, from whom only naifs expect fair, objective reporting, can get away with distorting the facts of the case so baldly and so badly. I refer to CNN's allegation that Zimmerman called Martin a "coon," and the edited NBC tape that made it sound like Zimmerman was suspicious of Martin because he was black. Neither of these narratives were true, both were fabricated. I also refer to the media's insistence upon showing pictures of Martin as he looked when he was about twelve. Why did they do these things? Were they intentionally trying to get Zimmerman hung even before the trial began?
• Why has there been no outrage over the assault of a white grandmother on a California freeway by a black protester? If the races had been reversed the entire nation would be in flames.
• Why does Angela Corey, the execrable Florida prosecutor, still have her job while Mike Nifong doesn't have his? Corey's conduct in withholding evidence from the defense and introducing charges at the last minute, among other unethical abuses of her office, shows her to have been much more concerned with politics than with justice.
• Many have asked why, if Zimmerman is to be described as a "white Hispanic," is Barack Obama not to be described as a "white African American"? What exactly is a "white" Hispanic anyway? Perhaps it's someone who would otherwise enjoy politically correct racial immunity from the judgments of the New York Times so who must be shoe-horned into a different racial category - white - in order to be legitimately subject to the contumely and invective that the left wishes to heap upon him.
• It's amazing that anyone actually invites Al Sharpton to give his opinion on anything after his odious behavior in the Tawana Brawley case. That alone, aside from the damage his rhetoric has inflicted on life and property over the years, should have discredited him for a lifetime.

Exit Question: How many of those who are critical of the verdict would, if they were flat on their back with their head being smashed against the concrete, their face being punched repeatedly, their nose broken and in fear of their life, refrain from doing what Zimmerman did if they had the chance to save themselves thereby?

The Secular Society

At The New York Times David Brooks takes on the formidable task of summarizing Charles Taylor's dense 800 page tome titled A Secular Age. He begins his essay where Taylor begins his book, with this question:

“Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?

This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.

Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.

It's conventional to think that science shed the "illusions of faith," but I'm not so sure. None of the alleged illusions that are usually imputed to believers are critical dogmas of religious faith, at least not Christian faith. Science disabused us of a belief in a geocentric universe and has given us reason to doubt that the universe is relatively young, but neither of these beliefs is central to any of the world's major religions. There are adherents to the young earth view among Christians, to be sure, but there are many devout, scientifically-literate Christians who accept that the universe is on the order of billions of years old, so I don't know what illusions Brooks is referring to that have been undermined by science.

Science has, if anything, made belief in God more difficult to avoid, not less. Nor has it done nothing to undermine the traditional accounts of the Deity, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's true that to the extent one embraces materialism or naturalism one will certainly reject all of these doctrines of Christian faith, but materialism and naturalism are alternative metaphysical postures, they're not science.

One can, and many do, labor in the field of science while embracing all the major elements of the Christian religion. Some of the greatest names in the history of science - Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Boyle, Agassiz, just to mention a few - were devout Christians. Their science did nothing to diminish their faith. If anything it enhanced it.

Brooks adds this:

These achievements [of a secular age] did make it possible to construct a purely humanistic account of the meaningful life. It became possible for people to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge.

Brooks fails to explain what he means by the term "meaningful lives." The quotidian activities of life can of course have temporary, proximal meaning. One has a job to go to in the morning which gives him a reason to get out of bed, for instance, but it's hard to see how anything we do can have ultimate meaning unless it's somehow lasting. If all is ephemeral and if death is the end, then we're in somewhat the same position as a condemned man who insists on weeding his garden before being taken off to the gallows. The activity may occupy the mind and seem purposeful, but it's really rather pointless.

Brooks goes on:

But, Taylor continues, these achievements also led to more morally demanding lives for everybody, believer and nonbeliever. Instead of just fitting docilely into a place in the cosmos, the good person in secular society is called upon to construct a life in the universe. She’s called on to exercise all her strength. People are called to greater activism, to engage in more reform.

This is a very peculiar statement, I think. "Called upon" by whom? In a Godless world who, exactly, calls upon us to "construct a life in the universe" and to "exercise all our strength" in doing so, and by what authority do they call upon us to do this?

Moreover, the idea that in a secular world we're called upon to greater activism is a non-sequitur. What reason is there for reforming anything? The word "reform" implies that there's something wrong with the way things are, but if there is no objective moral arbiter of right and wrong, what's wrong with, say, the institution of slavery? Why should not the strong exploit the weak? Why is it wrong for those with the power using it for their own benefit? What's wrong with being selfish or cruel? What light can science shed on the matter for us? The answer is "none."

Taylor can be extremely critical of our society, but he is grateful and upbeat. We are not moving to a spiritually dead wasteland as, say, the fundamentalists imagine. Most people, he observes, are incapable of being indifferent to the transcendent realm. “The yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as,” Taylor writes.

It's doubtless true that most people yearn for something more than the nihilism and emptiness to which materialism leads. Most people want more than to be told that their lives are pointless and absurd, but, on materialism, why should they want this? If we're just a swirl of atoms, the product of eons of accidental mutations and selection pressure that fit us to the environment we're in, why should we yearn for a fulfillment or satisfaction that doesn't exist? Why would we not have evolved to be content with the world as it is?

Secularism does offer one undoubted potential benefit. In some of it's political manifestations it keeps adherents of competing metaphysical views from killing each other, but to the extent that it attempts to answer ultimate questions, neither it nor the naturalism that often underwrites it have anything to offer that anyone would want, except, perhaps, a license for hedonism.

T-Cells and Cancer Cures

The U.K. Independent has a story that may soon become international news.

It seems that researchers have developed a means of treating cancer that uses the body's own immune system to kill tumor cells. This is revolutionary because whereas current treatments have a lot of undesirable side-effects, this treatment has none.

It works by employing cells called T-cells, the most effective killers in the immune system, to destroy cancer cells. The difficulty that had to be overcome was that though T-cells are very good at recognizing foreign invaders like bacteria, they're not good at recognizing cancer cells.

The solution, developed by a small lab in England, is to use an intermediate protein called ImmTAC, which can be engineered to recognize tumor cells and at the same time bind with T-cells so that the T-cell is brought into contact with the cancer and thereby destroy it.

Here's a schematic from the article that illustrates how it works.

One amazing aspect of the work of this lab is that the ImmTAC can be designed to recognize many kinds of tumor cells so that it can be used against breast, prostate, and brain tumors.

The researchers believe that this treatment will not just put cancers into remission, like other treatments which often don't kill every tumor cell, but that this treatment will actually rid the body completely of cancer.

It's a wonderful development and you can read more about it at the link.

Colors and Patterns

An article at Phys.org recounts some amazing results of research that was done into why bird feathers take on the colors and patterns that they do.

It turns out that there are cells in the feather follicles that act like the ink jets in a printer. These cells inject colored pigments into the feather as it emerges from the follicle.

This is astonishing. What turns these cells on and off? What determines which colored pigments will be produced, when, and in what sequence? And how did a biological ink jet color printer ever evolve as a result of purely unintelligent, unguided processes?

The fundamental question each of us must answer, it seems to me, is this: Assuming that we don't know a priori whether a transcendent, intelligent artist exists or doesn't exist, and given what's now known about the production of the peacock feather in the above photo, does it seem more reasonable to think it's the result of intentional design or mindless chance?

Will There Be Blood?

It seems that a lot of people, including a lot of African Americans are fearful that should George Zimmerman be acquitted there'll be riots, death, and destruction.

Why? Why is it assumed that blacks will riot? Would the same assumption be made about whites or Asians or Hispanics? I doubt it, so one wonders if lurking in the hearts of many of those who expect riots is the further unspoken assumption that blacks just can't be held to the same standard as others, that they can't be expected to behave as well as others.

I don't see how this cannot be what is tacitly behind all the talk of race riots in the event that George Zimmerman is found not guilty of murder or manslaughter in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, so that raises a question: Is it racist for these people to fear that blacks will do what no other racial community would be expected to do? In other words, is it racist to think that blacks do not hold themselves to the same standards of civilized behavior as do others?

The answer seems obviously to be yes, given the contemporary understanding of what racism is, but if so then there are a considerable number of black leaders who are racists, who hold their own people to rather low expectations. That seems very odd.

It leaves us with a perplexing pair of alternatives. Either racism - i.e. thinking large segments of one race are in some way inferior - is justified or there's something very wrong with our contemporary understanding and use of the word racism.

UPDATE: CNN is reporting that the jury has found Zimmerman not guilty. I guess now we'll find out whether the assumption of violence in the black community is justified or not.

How Not to Review a Book

Gareth Cook at the New Yorker does his best to discredit Darwin's Doubt and its author Stephen Meyer, but his best isn't very good. Maybe his heart wasn't in it. Maybe he realized that he had no real case to make but felt he had to go through the motions anyway. He sprinkles in enough innuendo to make the reader think that maybe there really is something disreputable about Meyer's effort, but Cook's allegations suffer from a dearth of factual support and often completely ignore the arguments that Meyer makes. Cook's review will only convince those who either haven't read the book or who simply don't want to believe its message.

The message of Darwin's Doubt in a nutshell is that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, the conjecture that all of life can be explained in terms of purely mechanistic, unguided processes like natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, is a failed hypothesis. It's staggering around academia like a drunk looking for a place to lie down and pass out.

David Klinghoffer has a fine response to most of Cook's review here, but there are a couple of things that Cook says at the end of his piece to which I'd like to offer a reply. For example, he says this:

Most absurd of all is the book’s stance on knowledge: if something cannot be fully explained by today’s science—and there is plenty about the Cambrian, and the universe, that cannot—then we should assume it is fundamentally beyond explanation, and therefore the work of a supreme deity.

Meyer, however, says no such thing. He does not say that the Cambrian fossils are beyond explanation and must therefore be the work of a supreme deity. He says, in fact, that the Cambrian fossils are evidence that the explanation for them is ultimately intelligent and purposeful, not random and purely physical. In other words, intelligent mind is an explanation and it's the best explanation for the appearance of the kind of information that must be present to create all the phyla of animals, especially suddenly and in a relatively brief period of time.

"But do not underestimate Darwin’s Doubt,” Cook adds, "it is a masterwork of pseudoscience."

Pseudoscience? What Meyer has done is essentially compile a very thorough search of the literature on several of the main problems afflicting Neo-Darwinian explanations of phylogenesis, and he concludes from the statements made by people working in the field, most of whom are themselves Darwinians, that there simple is no plausible, non-purposive explanation for the phenomena they're trying to explain. How is that pseudoscience? Cook never tells us, of course. It's easier to just throw the word out there and leave people with the impression that it fits.

The most dismaying statement he makes, though, comes close to the end of his essay:

The book’s best, most honest moments come in the concluding chapter, in which Meyer travels to see the famous Burgess Shale in person. His son goes ahead on the trail but then suddenly freezes, stricken with vertigo after peering down the mountainside. Meyer likens his son’s paralysis to modernity’s despair at materialism, its shock at the prospect that the universe is utterly indifferent. Meyer writes frankly, saying that his quest is to give people back their sense of meaning and purpose. Here, at last, Meyer is not pretending to be a scientist. (My emphasis)

Clearly the impression Cook wishes to leave with his reader is that Meyer has been dishonest in what he has written, that he has distorted or fabricated facts, but such a charge demands support, otherwise it's a sleazy cheapshot. Cook, however, offers none. He indulges, rather, in what might be called "refutation by smear." He suggests to the reader that Meyer has been dishonest and thereby discredits his book in the reader's mind.

Resort to this tactic is vile, but it has the advantage of sparing the one who employs it the burden of having to actually construct a logical refutation when there's none to be had.

Moreover, his suggestion that Meyer has been "pretending to be a scientist" is asinine. It suggests that Cook only read snippets of the book before he wrote his review. Either that or he naively thinks that unless one is actually performing experiments one is not a scientist. Darwin's Doubt is a multidisciplinary look at the Cambrian fossils. Meyer's background as an historian and philosopher of science as well as his ability to report on current research makes him very well-qualified for the task he undertakes.

In a way, the sorts of insults Cook deploys are actually a compliment. They're an admission that the reviewer has no substantive brief against the book, that he can't find any significant fault with it, and can only hope to diminish its impact by somehow casting aspersions on the integrity of the author. It's a loathsome practice in the eyes of people who value truth and honesty, but it's common enough among those desperate to resuscitate a paradigm that seems to no longer offer answers and which demands an incredible degree of blind faith to believe.

Homosexuality

Having written several times in the past on reasons why same-sex marriage is a very bad idea, I thought I'd try the social equivalent of wandering back and forth across a busy freeway and share some thoughts on homosexuality itself.

Those who adopt the traditional view, myself included, believe that homosexuality is an abnormal predisposition, a gender or sexual disorder. Whether it's a consequence of nature or nurture is not particularly relevant since there are numerous disorders to which we are genetically or environmentally inclined but which are still regarded as derangements of the norm.

There are some, of course, who will immediately upon reading this, ask, perhaps with an excess of pique and asperity in their tone, if I'm asserting that there's something "wrong" with the homosexual person.

The frank answer is, yes, I am, but then I believe there's something or other wrong with all of us. We're all beset with flaws of some sort. Anger, lust, addiction, mean-spiritedness, selfishness, lack of compassion, a critical spirit, etc. are all disorders (I'm using the word "disorder" here to mean functioning in a way that's either harmful or in some way incompatible with the way humans are designed to function or should function).

Homosexuality is a disorder, in my opinion, in much the same way these others are disorders, but of those afflictions that visit themselves upon human beings, homosexuality may be far from the worst. It can be very harmful, of course, to the person who finds himself experiencing same-sex attraction, particularly if it's compounded with promiscuity, but each of the disorders mentioned above can also be harmful to ourselves and others and can often be much more detrimental than homosexuality.

A young man of my acquaintance has recently had a PFA issued to him on behalf of his wife and children. He's a good guy, but he can't control his anger and it has cost him his family. His disorder, I would suggest, is far worse than that of a homosexual who is no threat to anyone.

Another person I know had a womanizing problem that eventually cost him his family. Another had a problem with alcohol that nearly caused the death of his child in a car crash. I'd argue that these disorders are much worse than that of many non-promiscuous homosexuals.

Homosexuality, whether male or female, is not normal in any sense of the word - not statistically nor anatomically, nor psychologically - and it's a mistake, in my view, for society to seek to normalize it, just as it's a mistake to normalize any of the above-mentioned disorders. But neither should we treat the person who is struggling to reconcile himself with his or her homosexuality any less lovingly than we ourselves would want to be treated as we struggle with our own faults and flaws.

Nor should we think, just because someone can function normally in society, under most circumstances, that their disorder is not a disorder. People can function in society, as the young PFA recipient does, as many womanizers and alcoholics do, and still have a part of him that's not healthy.

So, in my view we have a moral duty to treat homosexuals with love while recognizing that there's an element of their being that's not functioning properly. If, however, homosexuals want more from us than that, if they want us to acknowledge that that element of their being which we find problematic is integral to who they are and should thus be affirmed and celebrated as in some sense normal, then they're asking more than that to which they are entitled.

Moreover, if it be demanded of us that we agree with them that homosexuality is not morally problematic or else shut up about it then those who make this demand are seeking to impose upon us their own moral beliefs and are demanding what no one has a right to demand. We are all entitled, to the extent we don't harm others, to be treated with dignity, respect and kindness as persons, but we are not entitled to have our predilections and behaviors given society's stamp of approval, even if only tacitly.

If a homosexual, or an advocate on behalf of homosexuals, wishes to argue, contra what I said above, that homosexuality is not a disorder, and that the claim that it is is therefore insulting, I am certainly open to their argument, but they will have to bring more to the table than just shibboleths and the "some of my best friends are gay" argument. I'm willing to be persuaded, but I think the challenge of demonstrating that homosexuality is indeed compatible with the way we are designed to function as human beings is a pretty daunting task.

Barney Fife Award

Those of a certain vintage will remember that Sheriff Andy of Mayberry had a deputy named Barney Fife who was so incompetent that Andy only let him have one bullet for his gun lest he do serious harm to himself or others. I thought of old Barney when I read an article about how the Washington D.C. City Council has shot themselves in the foot, pushing some 900 jobs out of the District of Columbia by trying to force Wal-Mart to pay its employees more than the D.C. minimum wage requires:

Wal-Mart is pulling out of two, possibly three, D.C. sites where it planned to build stores, citing the D.C. Council's impending adoption of a bill mandating large retailers pay a "living wage" to employees. The bill, which passed on its first vote last month, will be put to a final tally Wednesday during the Council's final meeting of the current legislative session.

Representatives from Wal-Mart say the company will no longer build its planned stores at Skyland Town Center and Capitol Gateway, retail sites in Ward 7. "They're not bluffing me," Councilmember Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) says, having just left a meeting with the world's largest retailer. "We worked for many years to get this commitment. I really didn't think it would get to this point."

The Large Retailer Accountability Act requires companies that take in at least $1 billion in revenue annually to pay their employees at least $12.50 an hour, well above the District's minimum wage of $8.25. The bill also only applies to stores that are at least 75,000 square feet, thus exempting companies like Apple and Starbucks.

In addition to the two Ward 7 stores, Alexander's chief of staff, Ed Fisher, also says Wal-Mart's move imperils a store planned for New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road NE. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who represents that area, was one of eight "yes" votes on the bill's first reading.

"That was without knowing Wal-Mart was going to pull out," says Jeannette Mobley, McDuffie's chief of staff. Mobley says her boss is "going to give this some thought" before tomorrow's Council session.

Fisher says each planned Wal-mart was going to have at least 300 full- and part-time employees, as well as enhance food shopping options in Ward 7, where there are only four full-service supermarkets. "We're going to have fewer options for groceries and commercial retail," Fisher says. "At least 900 people won't have an opportunity whether it's full-time or part-time. Whether it's a student in high school or a senior or a job someone can use as a stepping stone."

This is a marvelous lesson in the law of unintended consequences, a law to which liberals for some reason think they're immune. Now rather than have 900 people with jobs, some of which are minimum wage, they'll have 900 people with no job living off the dole. Now, rather than have three more low cost food stores in the District, where people often complain of "food deserts," there'll still be only those food stores that are already there.

Good move, fellas. If there were a Barney Fife award for people whose confidence in their own cleverness is as unshakeable as it is unwarranted you all would surely qualify.

Secular Humanism and Charity

Joe Klein at Time magazine's Swampland blog cogitates on why secular humanists are not prominent in charitable work and religious organizations are. Klein is at pains to clarify that he himself is a secular humanist, but unlike many of his fellow secularists, he claims not to be an atheist, a claim about which he's mistaken, as I'll explain below.

Klein's not fond of religious organizations, but he feels he must give them their due. Here's the crux of his piece:

Well, there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle about my observation in this week’s cover story, that you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals in disaster relief areas like Moore, Oklahoma, after the tornados. Let me explain....

There was a time when secular service organizations had a greater sway in this country and, no doubt, a greater presence when disaster struck. But that’s not true now–although, it is certainly true, as my critics point out, that secular humanists, including atheists, can be incredibly generous. I never meant to imply they weren’t. But they are not organized. The effects of this post-modern atomization is something I’ve been trying to puzzle through for most of my career.

That’s why I find the groups featured in my cover story about public service this week so inspiring. I believe that they sustain an essential part of citizenship that the rest of us have lost track of, the importance of being an active part of something larger than yourself.

I’m going to be spending the next nine months on book leave, trying to drill down into this area.

It's not a mystery why a secular society does not produce the charitable organizations that religious societies do, and I'm a bit surprised that Klein doesn't seem to understand this. Religious people - in the U.S. they're primarily Christians - believe they're commanded by God to help their fellow man, that people in need are manifestations of Christ Himself, that when we help others we are manifesting Christ to them, and that, despite our human inclination toward selfishness, our gratitude to God for all he has done for us compels us and obligates us to love those whom He loves.

Those who see the world through a secular lens, however, have no such incentive. At bottom, if one believes there is no God then selfishness is no vice and charity is no virtue. There's no duty to help one's fellow man, indeed, an arrant secularism would see the world in terms of a Darwinian struggle in which the weak and unfortunate simply must give way to those whose survival chances are better.

In other words, the answer to Klein's puzzlement is that if there is no personal, transcendent moral authority there's simply no reason why anyone should feel an obligation to help anyone else. An atheist may wish to help others, but doing so is neither a moral virtue nor a moral duty. It's simply an emotional preference, a personality trait which some have and some don't, and which, like other traits (e.g. eye color), is neither good nor bad.

If atheism imposes any moral duty at all it is, as Ayn Rand so powerfully illustrates in her life and works, a duty to maximize one's own well-being. There can be, on atheism, no imperative to help others.

Is Klein, despite his demurrals, an atheist? He says this:

First of all, I consider myself a secular humanist. It seems, somewhat to my surprise, that some people equate that term with atheism. You can certainly be a secular humanist and an atheist; but you can also be, as I am, a secular humanist for whom the jury is out on the question of the divine providence.

To my mind, secular humanists are those who lack the scientific certitude of atheists, and also lack the spiritual certitude of the religious. It makes perfect sense to me: Can atheists be absolutely sure that there’s nothing after this? Can believers be sure that there is?

Klein is assuming that atheism is the denial of the existence of God, but though those who deny God's existence are atheists, not all atheists explicitly deny God's existence. Atheism is not the denial of God's existence but rather the lack of belief in God's existence. These are not equivalent. One can lack a belief in God without denying that there is such a being, just as one can lack a belief in extraterrestrial aliens without denying that such creatures may exist. Klein admits to lacking such a belief in God, ergo he's an atheist.

Those who deny that there is a God we might call "hard" atheists. Those, like Klein, who don't make this strong claim, who are willing to allow for the possibility that God exists, but who nevertheless lack any affirmative belief that He does, are "soft" atheists. Some call such unbelievers agnostics, but agnosticism is really a weaker form of atheism.

At any rate, we can expect that as our culture becomes more and more secularized and less and less influenced by the Christian worldview, the incentive to do charitable works will ineluctably decline. A secular society can exhort people to care about their fellow man, but it can give them no reason to. Perhaps as Klein "drills down into this area" he'll come to realize this and write about it in a future article.

Darwin's Doubt

Stephen Meyer is a historian and philosopher of science. Several years ago he wrote Signature in the Cell (SIC), a book that shook the materialist assumptions of biological science because it raised the challenge of how the original information that programs the development of living things could have ever arisen through purposeless, mechanistic processes. The arguments he raised have yet to be satisfactorily refuted, and even as the Darwinian establishment is reeling from that blow Meyer has launched another roundhouse punch in a book titled Darwin's Doubt (DD).

Whereas SIC was a critique of mechanistic explanations of the origin of life DD is an examination of the problem of how living things, once they have appeared, could have diversified to produce the tremendous variety we see today.

The book is organized into three parts. The first section recounts the problem raised by the relatively sudden appearance of most of the animal phyla some 530 million years ago in the period known to scientists as the Cambrian era. Meyer includes in this section the fascinating story of the discovery of perhaps the most amazing fossils of the Cambrian, a formation called the Burgess Shale high in the Canadian Rockies.

The difficulty for any purely materialistic evolutionary explanation posed by these fossils cannot be overstated. Almost all the major animal body plans appear suddenly, in evolutionary terms, in the fossil record with no precursors in older strata. It's as if in the space of a few million years single-celled organisms suddenly proliferated into all the basic forms of multicellular animal life and left no trace of how they did it. Meyer considers all the current theoretical explanations of this phenomenon and explains why evolutionary scientists themselves find these accounts all inadequate.

In the second section he delves into the biology of the genome and the amazing hierarchy of information that exists in the cell. We all learned in high school that our DNA programs us to be what we are, but this is not quite true. DNA programs the production of proteins, but there's a higher level of information, the epigenome, which regulates the DNA. It tells the DNA when to produce a protein and when to remain quiescent. The epigenome is as complicated and complex as a circuit diagram in a computer and defies explanation in terms of the traditional neo-Darwinian mechanisms of mutation and natural selection.

The DNA produces proteins, but the real problem is in elucidating what it is that tells those proteins where to go, how to get there, and what sort of tissues to form. This information appears to be encoded somehow in the very spatial and temporal architecture of the cell. It's a layer of information that not only cannot be explained in terms of the traditional neo-Darwinian mechanisms, but neither, Meyer makes clear, can it be explained by any of the more recent hypotheses that scientists have come up with to try to salvage their theory.

The third portion of the book is an argument that almost all of the difficulties raised by the Cambrian fossils and the cellular information hierarchy can be explained in terms of intelligent agency. Meyer addresses questions like whether such a hypothesis is science, whether it can be tested, whether it makes predictions, what mechanisms such an agent might have used, and other objections that are frequently raised against it. He also explains how the intelligent design hypothesis differs from both creationism and theistic evolution.

In my opinion, general readers would benefit greatly from the first and third parts of DD but may struggle, depending on their grasp of cell biology, with the second part. Even so, it's a book that, like its sister volume SIC, is destined to deeply affect the debate between Darwinian materialists and Intelligent Design advocates.

Those who are deeply committed to Darwinian materialism will not be persuaded, of course, because they hold an a priori conviction that there simply cannot be anything non-physical, non-material, or non-natural operating in the universe. Thus these individuals would be convinced that a book that makes the case that there actually is such an influence at work in the cosmos simply must be wrong even if the individual cannot say why it's wrong.

Those who are not so dogmatic, however, will find themselves challenged by Meyer's book to consider seriously the possibility that behind the physical aspects that comprise the world in which we live there is intelligent purpose. Darwin's Doubt will compel many readers to consider that there's powerful evidence, and excellent reason to believe, that beyond the material world perceived by our senses there is a transcendent Mind.

Bad Example

It will be, or at least should be, astonishing if President Obama escapes the appellation of future historians as the most lawless president in this nation's history.

Any law he doesn't like he simply disregards and somehow he gets away with it. I can't imagine any other president, certainly no Republican president, flouting the law like Mr. Obama does without the media hounding him out of office.

His latest foray into rule by executive fiat is his decision to suspend anti-fraud measures built into the Affordable Care Act:

President Barack Obama’s health care requires that applicants applying for tax subsidies for health insurance prove that their income was somewhere between 100 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. The bill also requires that applicants prove that they weren’t receiving employer-provided insurance.

But HHS decided last week to suspend these anti-fraud measures.

The administration will now “rely on self-reported data,” the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes.

“You read that correctly. A man who earns $50,000 per year and gets insurance through his employer could log on to the new government website and say he earns $20,000 and gets no insurance through his employer, and the government would not even attempt to confirm that the information is accurate before forking over generous taxpayer subsidies,” Klein adds.

If you thought Medicare and Medicaid fraud was bad, wait until Obamacare goes into full effect sans its anti-fraud provisions.

True, as the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekharand explain, anyone caught defrauding Obamacare could be fined up to $25,000 and be forced to “repay any excess subsidies they received.” But how are you going to catch them?

“With this news coming after the employer mandate delay announcement, the Obama administration has now openly conceded that it is in way over its head when it comes to implementing this unworkable law,” Klein notes.

The Affordable Care Act is the law, as regrettable as that may be, and we are, or should be, a nation of laws. Disregarding ACA's provisions is a violation of the presidential oath of office in which the president vows to uphold the Constitution and, by implication, the laws of the land. It would be as if Congress passed the Clean Air Act or the Civil Rights Act and a Republican president simply refused to enforce it.

In the wake of the president's announcement that he will suspend the employer mandate in Obamacare and now the announcement that he will suspend the requirement that income must be verified before subsidies are granted, how can any Republican member of Congress be expected to vote for any legislation advanced by the Democrat party given that no one knows whether any provisions in that legislation would ever be enforced by the executive? It seems to me that unless democrats win the House in 2014 no legislation will go anywhere in Congress for the next three years and that the only way Mr. Obama is going to get anything done is by executive dictat, just as is done in third-world banana republics.

Mr. Obama is setting a terrible example for American citizens by encouraging disrespect and disdain for the law. How many citizens will be tempted to rationalize to themselves that if the president can decide which laws to honor so can they, and commence their foray into lawlessness by lying about their income in order to receive insurance subsidies or by cheating on their taxes? If the president is seen as contemptuous of both the democratic process and the rule of law why should the average citizen feel any differently?

Pants on Fire

I'm currently reading a book on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and the picture it paints of the man is far from flattering. According to the author, Lawrence Wright, Hubbard was a compulsive, pathological liar. He embodied a number of other vices as well, but his lies were prodigious. He made up his life's story as he went along and lied to anyone about anything.

I thought of Hubbard's reflexive mendacities as I read a news story the other day that revealed that the State Department had been lying to us about Secretary John Kerry's whereabouts on the day that Egyptian armed forces were defenestrating the Muslim Brotherhood thug Mohammed Morsi.

Just in case there were one or two holdouts, like Japanese soldiers clinging to some Pacific atoll years after the war was over, who still believe that this administration can be trusted to tell the truth about anything here's the background:

CBS reported that on the day Mohammed Morsi was being ushered out of his office Secretary of State John Kerry was seen aboard his yacht in Nantucket.

On the surface, this seemed an inappropriate place for the Secretary of State to be reposing with matters of such moment unfolding in the Middle East, in fact it's reminiscent of President Obama's mysterious absence on the night of the Benghazi horror. So, the media asked the State Department spokeswomen, Jen Psaki, for a clarification of the Secretary's whereabouts on that historic day.

Ms Psaki was adamant that Secretary Kerry was definitely not aboard a boat on Wednesday and had spent the day working the phones on the Egyptian crisis:

“Since his plane touched down in Washington at 4 a.m., Secretary Kerry was working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “He participated in the White House meeting with the president by secure phone and was and is in non-stop contact with foreign leaders, and his senior team in Washington and Cairo. Any report or tweet that he was on a boat is completely inaccurate.”

Unfortunately for Ms Psaki, the CBS people had photographic evidence of Mr. Kerry's nautical preoccupations which forced the State Department to quickly undertake some awkward backing and filling:

As regime change was unfolding in Egypt, Secretary of State John Kerry spent time on his boat Wednesday afternoon in Nantucket Sound, the State Department acknowledged to CBS News on Friday, after repeatedly denying that Kerry was aboard any boat.

“While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the President’s meeting with his national security council,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, naming a series of Egyptian and international officials Kerry had spoken with on Wednesday.

Psaki’s acknowledgment marked a stark reversal from previous denials that Kerry was on any boat whatsoever.

A “CBS This Morning” producer spotted Kerry on his boat Wednesday afternoon on Nantucket, where Kerry has a vacation home. When “CBS This Morning” senior producer Mosheh Oinounou tweeted about the sighting, Psaki issued a denial, calling the tweet “completely inaccurate” and said Kerry has been “working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt.”

I suppose Secretary Kerry could well have been monitoring developments in Cairo from his yacht. Where he was isn't really the point. The point is that his representative, Ms Psaki, chose to lie to us about where he was. It was as if the lie was automatic - ask her a question and, like a gumball machine, she pops out a completely fabricated reply as a matter of course.

Even State's clarification raises questions. If Kerry was on his boat in Nantucket for even part of the day how was he in Washington all day from 4 a.m. on? These people lie so facilely that one wonders if they tell the truth when they're just talking to each other.

If L. Ron Hubbard were alive today he'd be ideally suited for a job in the Obama administration.

Nation of Mutts

David Brooks has written a column on immigration titled A Nation of Mutts. The title refers to the demographic changes that will overtake the U.S. as a result of large-scale Hispanic immigration.

Among the things he foresees is this:

Let’s make some educated guesses about what the New America will look like. It will almost certainly be economically dynamic. Immigration boosts economic dynamism, and more immigration would boost it more. There would also be a lot of upward striving. Immigrant groups tend to work harder than native groups. They save more. They start business at higher rates than natives.

I hope Brooks is right about this, but I'm not so sure. I don't understand how the new wave of immigrants is going to bring economic prosperity rather than its opposite. Historically, immigration was much different than what has been the case over the last thirty years in at least two ways: Previous immigrants were often better educated, especially if they came from Europe, and they did not place a burden on the economic resources of the community.

When my paternal grandparents emigrated here in 1910 from Ireland, for example, there were no welfare benefits awaiting them. They were supported by ethnic associations and churches. We're facing a possibility today, though, in which tens of millions of immigrants will be made eligible for all sorts of taxpayer-funded programs and benefits the cost of which will far outweigh whatever the immigrants contribute.

Brooks adds this:

We could also see more ethnic jostling between groups. The most interesting and problematic flashpoint might be between immigrants and African-Americans. We now have this bogus category, “minority,” in which we lump the supposed rainbow coalition of immigrants and blacks. But, in fact, tensions between “minority” groups could soon be more plainly obvious than any solidarity.

Brooks is doubtless correct that we face a future sharply divided along class/culture lines. Educated, industrious people of all races and ethnicities will mix and adapt and do okay, but they'll live in gated fortresses, sealed off and protected from the teeming masses in the cities whose neighborhoods will become like little Sarajevos, in which a Hobbesian war along ethnic lines of everyone against everyone will make life there an exercise in purgatorial suffering. Then, too, there'll be the constant threat of social upheaval in which the underclass will rise up to seize by whatever means they can that which the elites have and they want.

Since the underclass will far out number the educated and hard-working middle and upper classes they'll be able to use the levers of democracy to strip the haves clean. If that doesn't work, or even if it does, they may well augment political extortion with social violence and take wealth by force.

It may be chauvinistic to say it, and it's certainly not politically correct, but we've become the greatest nation in history because our society was built by people steeped in both protestant Christianity and, to a lesser extent, European traditions and ideas. It has been the dominance of that heritage that has made America unique and special. We're still living on the cultural momentum imparted to us by our forebears, but by all appearances that momentum has been petering out now for several decades.

Large-scale Hispanic immigration will accelerate that process, as Brooks avers. No Hispanic culture has ever achieved what Anglo/European cultures have achieved. They have no ethnic memory of the kinds of rights and values that are enshrined in our founding documents. They have no allegiance to the traditions and history of this nation. They bring with them a third world mindset, a desire for whatever benefits they can garner from our government, and historic resentments against the Yanqui for grievances both real and imagined.

It's not a pretty picture, but that'll be the world our children and grandchildren will be living in unless we adopt a sensible immigration policy and be rid of the notion that millions of people can be amicably absorbed overnight into our way of life just by allowing them to live here.

Silver Linings

One of the benefits of the recent revelations of nefarious doings at the White House, IRS, NSA, EPA, and State Department for which we can actually be thankful is that they've sent many Americans back to classic books like 1984, Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged, and to movies like Lives of Others for their summer reading and viewing.

These are all good choices and any government iniquities that motivate Americans to familiarize themselves with such works are not without their compensations.

For my part I decided to pick up Friedrich A. Hayek's classic work The Road to Serfdom, a title I thought particularly apposite given the worldview of those who are currently directing our national path and given the trajectory they appear to have placed us upon.

Almost every page of this book, written in England in 1944 at the height of the terrible struggle with the totalitarian socialists of Germany and Italy and only a decade after the deliberate starvations of millions of Ukrainians by the totalitarian socialists in the Soviet Union, contains numerous lapidary phrases warning us of the freedom-stifling nature of socialist central planning and the control-freak mindset of its proponents.

Reading Hayek one must keep in mind his immediate context of the war against Hitler, but that aside, one could almost think he's writing about twenty-first century America. The book is written as a warning to the West that the road embarked upon by socialists leads to tyranny and totalitarianism. He uses the term socialism to describe those who seek to eliminate competition and to plan the economy of societies, but in our context he might have as well used the term leftists or progressives. For example, he writes:

It [socialism/progressivism] may mean, and is often used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security which are the ultimate aims of socialism. But it means also the particular means by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only means by which by which they can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.

This is a pretty good description of the thinking of the ideological left in modern America and of many in the Democratic Party. Obamacare is one fruit of that thinking and, should they gain control of the House of Representatives in 2014, there's little doubt in many minds that the energy industry and public education will also be directed to an even greater extent than they are today by Washington bureaucracies.

People who seek the power to micromanage the course of our nation and to organize our corporate life down to the merest detail are an enormous threat to individual liberty. The fact that they wish to diminish our freedom in the name of doing what's best for us or increasing our security makes their ambitions more seductive but no less insidious.

As Benjamin Franklin observed, "A people who would sacrifice freedom in order to gain security deserve neither freedom nor security," and will ultimately wind up with neither. That timeless piece of wisdom could serve as a summary of Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

Good Grief

I don't want to make too much of this and don't want to suggest that this group of women is representative of all pro-choicers, but neither do I want to dismiss it as irrelevant. There's a lesson in it somewhere.

In the Texas statehouse where abortion legislation was being decided a group of pro-life demonstrators joined in singing Amazing Grace. A counter-group of young pro-choice women tried to drown them out by allegedly chanting "Hail Satan."

I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about what that tells us about at least these pro-choicers.

Actually, it's difficult to tell exactly what the pro-choicers are yelling on this video. It sounds to me like they're shouting "God is dead," but a CNN reporter claimed that it was a paean to Satan and the young lady at the end certainly seems to agree:

Very sad.

Independence Day

As we watch the Egyptians celebrate the overthrow of a dictatorial tyranny in Cairo it might be good as we celebrate the day on which we asserted our own freedom from tyranny to consider what freedoms our Founders secured for us that are being jeopardized today.

Over the last five years we've seen several assaults by the Obama administration on the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech and the press (1st amendment); the freedom to bear arms (2nd amendment); the freedom to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects from unreasonable search and seizure, and the freedom to not have our privacy invaded without probable cause (4th amendment).

Moreover, the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed under the 5th amendment continues to be flouted by those who wish to deny that protection to the unborn, and the rights of the states to determine their own destiny as long as it doesn't conflict with the power granted specifically to the federal government (10th amendment) continues to be eroded by an ever-metastasizing federal state.

Mr. Obama has professed that the U.S. takes no side in the Egyptian struggle between the people yearning to be free and a tyrant fighting to keep his boot on their necks. It's odd that he would say this since he had no reluctance to side with the people when they were seeking to depose Hosni Mubarak a couple of years ago.

Our president has also expressed his deep concern that the Egyptian military stepped in to show Mohammed Morsi the door. I wonder if his concern is rooted in a presentiment that Americans, too, might be willing to tolerate only so many amputations of their freedoms, and that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evince a design to reduce them (our rights) under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

This is what we're witnessing in Egypt. Let's pray on this Independence Day that it doesn't come to that here.

Liberal Lynch Mob

Our national media have chosen to make the George Zimmerman trial a national spectacle. There are dozens of interracial shootings every year, but this one has been seized upon to inculcate some sort of lesson about our collective soul. The left, perhaps desperate to demonstrate that white racism is still alive in America, have seized upon the Zimmerman/Martin shooting to press home the point even if they have to fabricate evidence and twist the events of that evening to fit their narrative of evil whites murdering innocent black kids.

To this end the media and others on the left have acted like nothing so much as a lynch mob. Ben Shapiro at breitbart.com provides the litany of transgressions against decency and justice that have been heaped upon Zimmerman from the very beginning of his ordeal:

On Monday, CNN showed George Zimmerman’s Social Security number and other personal information live over the air, including address, date of birth, and phone number. Officer Doris Singleton was testifying when the prosecutors showed a narrative report including Zimmerman’s information.

That immediately launched a round of tweets by Zimmerman haters celebrating knowledge of that information.

This is hardly the first time Zimmerman’s personal information has been distributed by those who oppose him. During the initial coverage of the Zimmerman trial, Spike Lee retweeted the home address of what he thought was Zimmerman’s home address. It turned out to be the wrong address. Roseanne Barr then tweeted Zimmerman’s parents’ home address. “If Zimmerman isn't arrested I'll rt his address again. maybe go 2 his house myself,” Barr tweeted.

This isn't the first element of media bias in the Zimmerman case, either. The Associated Press originally reported that Zimmerman was white. That falsehood was repeated for days by the media, heightening the racial aspect of the case.

The media also broadcast photographs of Zimmerman from a 2005 arrest rather than current photos, and conversely broadcast photographs of Martin as a pre-teen, not the 17-year-old he was at the time of the killing (the media's photographic choices actually impacted witness testimony during the trial).

NBC News manipulated tape of Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem that Zimmerman had targeted Martin because he was black, rather than responding to 911 dispatcher questions. CNN also isolated audio of Zimmerman purportedly calling Martin a racial slur during the call -- an allegation that ended up being completely false.

Both ABC News and NBC News also alleged that Zimmerman's injuries did not exist, releasing badly-pixellated photographs from the night of the incident. As trial testimony has shown, Zimmerman was indeed injured during the incident with Martin.

Shapiro could also have included the bounty that was placed on Zimmerman by the execrable New Black Panthers in Florida, the threats they made against his life, and the fear that his entire family has been living in since the shooting.

I don't know whether Zimmerman was acting in self-defense when he shot Martin or whether he initiated the fight between Martin and himself, but many on the left already have their minds made up. If you're white, or even, as in Zimmerman's case, approximately white, and you harm a young black man then you're ipso facto guilty of racist motivations and therefore deserve to be treated with all the contempt society can summon regardless of what the actual facts of the case might be.

Of course, the reverse is not true because everyone knows that when blacks harm whites, an event which occurs with startling frequency in this country, that's never motivated by racism because blacks can't be racists because racism is something that only whites are afflicted with, and if you disagree with this that's proof that you yourself are a racist, and even if the black aggressor does hate whites it's understandable because blacks' ancestors were slaves two hundred years ago, etc., etc.

And so it goes in the wonderful Wonderland world liberal social thinking has created.

Davis Is No Hero

Kirsten Powers, a liberal commentator who served in the Clinton administration no less, explains in a blistering column at the Daily Beast why there's nothing laudatory in the twelve hour filibuster undertaken by Texas state senator Wendy Davis last week and why the people who should be praised are the Republicans in the legislature. She begins her column with this:

It’s amazing what is considered heroism these days.

A Texas legislator and her pink sneakers have been lionized for an eleventh-hour filibuster against a bill that would have made it illegal for mothers to abort babies past 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of severe fetal abnormalities or to protect the life or health of the mother.

People actually cheered this. When Davis' filibuster was stopped, spectators voiced their anger.

Powers invites us to consider what Ms Davis and her supporters are demanding the legal right to do:

According to the Parents Connect website, if you are in the 25th week of your pregnancy, “Get ready for pat-a-cake! Baby’s hands are now fully developed and he spends most of his awake time groping around in the darkness of your uterus. Brain and nerve endings are developed enough now so that your baby can feel the sensation of touch.” Let’s be clear: Davis has been called a hero for trying to block a bill that would make aborting this baby illegal.

In addition to the limit on late-term abortions, the Texas legislature sought to pass regulations on abortion clinics similar to what was passed in Pennsylvania in 2011 after the Gosnell horror. The New York Times warned that the Texas bill “could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.”

That sounds familiar. In 2011, the Pennsylvania ACLU claimed a post-Gosnell bill “would effectively close most and maybe all of the independent abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.” Last month, a Pennsylvania news site reported that “several” abortion clinics have closed, which isn’t quite the Armageddon the abortion-rights movement predicted.

For the pro-choice extremists there must be absolutely no restrictions placed on the ability of a woman to obtain an abortion. Given this mindset it's no wonder that condemnations of Kermit Gosnell's infanticides were hard to find on the left. For many of these folks there simply is no reason why a woman should balk at killing her child at any time up to the moment of its birth, or even after it has been born for that matter.

Powers adds:

One can assume I am also not the only woman in America who is really tiring of the Wendys of the world claiming to represent “women’s rights” in their quest to mainstream a medical procedure—elective late-term abortion—that most of the civilized world finds barbaric and abhorrent. In many European countries, you can’t get an abortion past 12 weeks, except in narrow circumstances. Gallup reported in January that 80 percent of Americans think abortion should be illegal in the third trimester, and 64 percent think it should be illegal in the second trimester.

If the majority of Americans oppose elective late-term abortion, why do we have Davis complaining to CBS’s Bob Schieffer that the male politicians who are championing the late-term abortion ban are “bullying women”? Maybe it’s she who is bullying the rest of us into supporting a view that is mocked by scientific advancement; namely 3-D sonograms. Maybe we should be thankful for the men and wonder what is wrong with the women who think protecting the right to abort your baby for any reason up to the 26th week is a “human right.”

A question that I think needs to be raised is why do so many women in our society see nothing wrong with killing a late-term baby? Have we so completely bought into the materialists' argument that human beings are just animals, merely a couple of scoopfuls of atoms, that we believe unwanted babies to be no different than unwanted kittens?

The irony of people who claim to champion human rights protesting a law that would extend the most fundamental right, the right to life, to the most powerless among us is not lost on Powers:

Human-rights movements have traditionally existed to help the voiceless and those without agency gain progressively more rights. Yet in the case of abortion, the voiceless have progressively lost rights at the hands of people who claim to be human-rights crusaders. Abortion-rights leaders have turned the world upside down. They want us to believe that a grown woman is voiceless, that she has less agency than the infant in her womb who relies on her for life.

A woman has so little agency, we are told, that she is incapable of getting an abortion before the fifth month of her pregnancy. To suggest she should do so is a “war on women.” It’s an insult to women dressed up as “women’s rights.”

I can think of no better way to conclude this post than with Powers' own conclusion to her column:

On ABC’s This Week, Peggy Noonan responded to the chants of “I stand with Wendy” by noting, “What she is ... standing for is something we would recognize as infanticide, late-term abortion, the taking of a little child’s life.” Standing for that is not heroic, and it is not something to be cheered.

Weaker and Meeker

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets in cities across the country the last few days to protest the fascist government of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohammad Morsi.

The Obama administration has come in for some serious criticism as well, as the pics at Twitchywill show. Here's one:

Mr. Obama gave us to believe in 2008 that the reason the Arab world didn't like us was because of George Bush and his bullying ways. We were assured that a more deferential, conciliatory America, one led by a president eager to bow to Arab leaders and to help tyrants like Morsi tighten his grip over the Egyptian people, would be loved and appreciated in the Arab world.

Before the confetti had been swept up from his first Inaugural Ball Mr. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having said many deferential and conciliatory things. The world swooned. Peace was at hand. That was yesterday, before Libya, before Syria, before Iran, before Morsi. Now the Arab world disdains us, or at least our president, and the Europeans, in the wake of the NSA spying revelations, are growing distinctly chilly. The world chortles as the Russians, the Chinese, and the Ecuadorans each in turn thumb their noses at our president as he implores them to remit Edward Snowden into our custody.

We've managed to offend our friends and have failed to instill respect in our enemies. The Middle East is coming undone. We're promising to send military aid to the rebels in Syria, the very people who are beheading; Christian priests.

Meanwhile, we are dismantling our own military and are eager to dismantle our nuclear deterrent as well. Our enemies are growing in strength, belligerency and boldness while we deliberately make ourselves weaker and meeker.

Is this the "smart power" we were promised that an Obama administration would bring to bear on foreign affairs?

Memoir on Pauperism

Everything you need to know about poverty and why public welfare does little to alleviate it and often makes it worse all in 36 pages written 178 years ago by one of the most insightful observers in the history of the world - Alexis de Tocqueville.

If you're concerned about truly helping the poor you really should read Tocqueville's essay, the full title of which is Memoir on Pauperism: Does Public Charity Produce an Idle and Dependent Class of Society? He writes it after studying poverty in England, the most affluent nation in the world at the time.

Here are a couple of quotes. Talking about how poverty is a relative condition he writes that:

"...in the [medieval period] the number of those not totally absorbed in self-preservation was extremely small. Their life was brilliant, ostentatious, but not comfortable. One ate with one's fingers on silver or engraved steel plates, clothes were lined with ermine or gold, and linen was unknown; the walls of their dwellings dripped with moisture, and they sat in richly sculptured wooden chairs before immense hearths where entire trees were consumed without diffusing sufficient heat around them.

I am convinced that there is not a provincial town today whose more fortunate inhabitants do not have more true comforts of life in their homes and do not find it easier to satisfy the thousand needs created by civilization than the proudest medieval baron."

That is orders of magnitude more true today of the people we call poor than it was in Tocqueville's day. Poor people today, at least in the western world, have every physical need met and have access to comforts and luxuries that would have been the envy of the richest aristocrats in Tocqueville's world. He also observes that,

"There are two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve the condition of life. Experience has proven that the majority of men can be sufficiently motivated to work only by the first of these incentives. The second is effective only with a small minority."

Finally, in explaining the difference between private and public charity and why the former is far better than the latter he says:

"Individual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he may have had no hope of getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between the two classes....

This is not the case with legal charity (i.e. public welfare). The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man feels no gratitude for a benefit which no one can refuse him and that cannot satisfy him in any case."

Every one of the Memoir's thirty six pages is laden with Tocqueville's wisdom borne of careful observation and is as relevant for our times as it was for his. I urge readers to give it a look if they're interested in an excellent primer on why public welfare does more harm than good. The sooner we end it, at least as it is currently practiced, the better everyone will be.

Debasing the Discourse

The other day Texas Democrats, led by a senator named Wendy Davis, filibustered the state senate in order to prevent a vote on a bill that would have put several restrictions on a mother's right to kill her unborn child. The restrictions were uncontroversial except one that would have prevented late term abortions when the child is able to experience pain. Senator Davis evidently felt that it's an injustice to prohibit women from relieving themselves of an unwanted child, even if the child is able to feel itself being ripped apart.

Anyway, Governor Rick Perry had this to say about Senator Davis:

Who are we to say that children born in the worst of circumstances can’t grow to live successful lives? In fact, even the woman who filibustered the senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.

I don't know about you, but as I read those words they sounded more to me like a gracious compliment bestowed upon a political opponent than some horrid insult. But that's not how some progressives have interpreted his statement which seems to have induced an acute case of the vapors among a number of pro-choice lefties. NRO's David French cites some examples:

“Perry Launches Vicious Attack On Texas Lawmaker” — so declares the Huffington Post on its front page. The story itself claims Texas Governor Rick Perry jabbed new feminist hero Wendy Davis “for being a teen mom.”

Davis herself reacted with outrage, declaring in a statement: "Rick Perry’s statement is without dignity and tarnishes the high office he holds,” she said. “They are small words that reflect a dark and negative point of view. Our governor should reflect our Texas values. Sadly, Gov. Perry fails that test.”

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, was similarly upset: "Rick Perry’s remarks are incredibly condescending and insulting to women,” Richards said. “This is exactly why the vast majority of Texans believe that politicians shouldn’t be involved in a woman’s personal health care decisions. Women are perfectly capable of deciding whether to choose adoption, end a pregnancy, or raise a child, and they don’t need Rick Perry’s help making that decision."

Daily Kos writer Joan McCarter: "Texas Gov. Rick Perry is digging his hole deeper with women, and decent people, with his War on Women, and he’s making it really ugly, and really personal about his new nemesis, Sen. Wendy Davis."

"Vicious attack"? "dark and negative"? "condescending and insulting"? "war on women"? "ugly"?

It's hard to believe that any of these ladies to the time to read what Rick Perry actually said. If they did, and this is how they understood him, then perhaps we need to question their reading comprehension skills. If they did read his words, and comprehended them but responded in this fashion for political advantage, then they're dishonest and mean-spirited. If they didn't read him but just said these unflattering things about him because they consider him an ideological enemy, then they are both mean-spirited and simple-minded. In any case, there's no charitable way to interpret what these women write.

This, though, is what we've too often seen from contemporary liberalism. The tactic is to avoid engaging one's opponent in a spirit of mutual respect, but rather to attack, distort, smear and destroy. We've recently seen this employed even on the Supreme Court. In the majority decision handed down in the Windsor case which overturned at least part of the Defense of Marriage Act last week, Justice Kennedy, rather than make an erudite argument based on the Constitution, chose instead the path of personal invective by labeling anyone who disagrees with him on the issue of gay marriage as deserving of contempt. This, despite the fact that DOMA was voted for by most congressional Democrats, signed by Bill Clinton, and supported, as one commentator put it, until the day before yesterday by Barack Obama.

Nevertheless, the defenders of traditional marriage, the august Justice Kennedy sniffed, are motivated by nothing more than a “bare ... desire to harm a politically unpopular group” and thus, he concluded, DOMA does not deserve to stand.

His brilliant colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia, offered an incisive riposte to Kennedy's smear in his minority opinion:

To defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement… It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Unfortunately, people like Kennedy and the women who attacked Governor Perry don't seem to care about all that. Their tactic works, after all. It gives them a frisson of moral superiority while crippling their foes and relieves them of the burden of having to construct compelling arguments. The fact that it degrades themselves, their institutions, the political process, and our public discourse is evidently not a matter of much concern to them.

For It Before They Were Against It

There is no class of people, taken as a whole, who are less respected than the political class, and understandably so. Politicians are seen as venal and unprincipled, and they frequently seem eager to confirm that judgment. Take, for example, the recent reaction on Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court's ruling that essentially overturns much of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Politico has a piece on it that begins this way:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act “a great, historic day for equality in America.” He went on: “The idea that allowing two loving, committed people to marry would have a negative impact on anyone else, or on our nation as a whole, has always struck me as absurd.”

Reid claims it always struck him as absurd yet he voted for the act in 1996. Others who were eager to be seen praising the decision were taking a stance 180 degrees at variance from where they stood ten or fifteen years ago. Senators Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Ben Cardin, Patty Murray, Robert Menendez, Steny Hoyer, and Rosa deLauro, Democrats all, are praising this blow to DOMA even though every one of them supported and voted for it in 1996.

Bill Clinton even signed the bill into law and he, too, is rejoicing at it's demise:

“By overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, the Court recognized that discrimination towards any group holds us all back in our efforts to form a more perfect union,” Clinton said in a statement also signed by Hillary Clinton.

President Barack Obama placed a phone call to anti-DOMA activists congratulating them on their victory, but as recently as 18 months ago he was insisting that marriage should be restricted to a union of a man and a woman.

People can certainly "evolve," as president Obama was said to have done, especially if their beliefs are only superficially held in the first place, but it's amazing that so many individuals in one party could evolve so rapidly on a principle that's so fundamental. The rapid change in our elected officials' "convictions" does little to disabuse the average voter of their cynicism about politics and their contempt for leaders who have both eyes perpetually fixed on the political windsock and whose sole principle seems to be to think, say, and do whatever works to keep them in power.

Undergrad Major and IQ

Pamela sent along a link to a graphic she helped design that's quite interesting. It correlates one's college undergraduate major with IQ. In other words, the average IQ of undergraduate biology majors is 121.

It would've been higher, I suppose, but I was a biology major.

Anyway, I'm not sure how we know Darwin's IQ, and I have my doubts about Mr. Obama's, but, nevertheless, you can see if you fall into the range for others in your undergraduate field of study.

Go to the link for a full-sized view of the chart.

Image compliments of Bachelor of Education Degrees

Pot Pourri

Miscellaneous thoughts on sundry topics:

Glen Beck called Senator Marco Rubio "garbage" the other day. He didn't call his immigration reform proposal garbage, a claim which would have been almost an understatement, rather he called Rubio himself garbage, and that is reprehensible.

Glenn, you can dehumanize people with insults or you can assure your audience that you're a Christian, but you can't do both. Please either apologize to Rubio or stop giving Christians a black eye by telling your listeners that you yourself are one.

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The military and our congresspersons are aghast that sexual assaults and other rudenesses are occurring in the military services. Why is anyone surprised? We hypersexualize our culture, marinate our young men in a pornographic view of women from the time they're in kindergarten, raise them in families without fathers, take them at an age when they're in hormonal overdrive and throw them together with women in close quarters in the military, putting some in positions of authority over women, and then we're shocked that they don't respect women. What did we expect would happen when we decided a) that fathers are unnecessary, b) that a sexualized culture is healthy and cool, and c) that it'd be a great idea to integrate women into the armed forces?

Heck, when the Commander in Chief (President Clinton) can abuse, molest, and even rape women, and his entire party, most of the mainstream media, and half the country is eager to give him a sly wink and a pass why should we be shocked that the same thing happens in the ranks?

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The Boy Scouts of America have decided to admit openly gay young men into their organization. Other than opening the door to one day having gay scout leaders and one day unifying the boy scouts and girl scouts and thereby destroying what has heretofore been a great pair of organizations I don't have too much of a problem with the BSA's move, but I do have a question. Part of the Boy Scout oath is that the young man swears to be "morally straight." Has the morality of homosexuality been settled, and I didn't hear about it? If it hasn't been settled then isn't there a bit of a problem with boys whose sexual morality is still problematic promising to be morally straight? Just wondering.

I also wonder what the substantive difference is between allowing post-pubescent boys who are sexually attracted to other boys to join the scouts and allowing sexually maturing boys who are attracted to girls into the Girl Scouts.

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George Zimmerman is on trial for being a racist. The formal charge is 2nd degree murder but the reason his case is national news when hundreds of interracial crimes are committed every month in this country without every popping up on the national radar is that Zimmerman is (relatively) white and he killed a black kid named Trayvon Martin. Usually in these interracial affairs it's the other way around so the novelty of this case leads some to the conclusion that Zimmerman must be a racist otherwise why would he have shot a defenseless black kid. Black kids shoot each other, or they shoot whites, but whites don't shoot blacks unless they're racists.

Turns out though that Trayvon told his friend on the phone shortly before being shot that he was being watched by a "cracker." The term "cracker" may sound innocuous to you and me, but it is, in fact, a racially derogatory term used by blacks to describe whites. So, it sounds like maybe young Trayvon had some racial hangups himself, and may consequently have been motivated to do exactly what Zimmerman alleges he did, which is beat the bejabbers out of Zimmerman until the "cracker" managed to employ his gun to save his life.

Speaking of racial hangups among blacks read the tweets here and ask yourself in which racial community in this society most of the racism resides.

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And since I'm on the topic of race what's up with this Paula Deen story? Why does she feel the need to grovel in pursuit of expiation by society's arbiters of correct thinking for having used a racially insensitive expression? Why not just say you're sorry and that people should just get over it instead of making an embarrassing spectacle of yourself?

It's a strange world in which we live. Congressman Anthony Weiner can tweet pics of his private parts to underage girls, say he's full of regrets, and then run for mayor of our largest city and secure a commanding lead in the race, but if he'd tweeted a racial epithet he'd be the subject of our daily three minutes hate and would never, ever get a single vote from anyone in New York.

Well, maybe not, now that I think of it, since Weiner's a Democrat and Democrats are allowed to do pretty much anything they want. Deen, on the other hand, must not be a Democrat or her public abasement would have been over long ago, if indeed it had ever gotten started.

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Is Edward Snowden a hero or traitor? I don't know what I think about what he did, but he sure is providing us with a vivid illustration of the maxim that no one respects weakness. The Obama administration, determined to appease just about everybody and offend nobody except our closest allies, requests cooperation in extraditing Snowden first from China, then Russia, and now Ecuador and all three tell Mr. Obama and his Secretary of State to please be so kind as to take their request and stick it where only a colonoscopy will find it. They've done their assessments of Mr. Obama, evidently, and concluded that he's an inconsequential lightweight.

Mr. Obama, for his part, has assured everyone that he's not going to "scramble jets" over the Snowden affair and there's every reason to believe him when he says it. After all, if he wasn't willing to scramble jets during the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans we can certainly believe he's not going to scramble them over Snowden.

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When pro-choice Democrats resorted to mob rule and filibuster on Wednesday to prevent passage of a bill in the Texas state legislature that would impose some sensible restrictions on abortion President Obama sent a tweet that essentially gave the mob a big attaboy. Here's what the Texas bill would have done:

1. Increase abortion facility safety standards to the level of ambulatory surgical centers to shut down Gosnell-like abortion providers in Texas,
2. Require the 18,000 RU-486 abortions performed each year be done according to FDA safety standards,
3. Require physicians who perform abortions to be qualified to treat life-threatening complications after botched abortions and have privileges at a local hospital, and
4. Ban abortions on unborn children beginning at 20 weeks after fertilization, when scientific evidence clearly shows babies can feel pain.

The Democrats, including the president, evidently think that it's just hunky-dory to have abortions performed in Gosnell-level sanitary conditions and after the child has reached the stage when it can feel pain. Anything that gets the deed done is good enough for Democrats who ironically tout themselves as the party that cares for the weak and underprotected.

Imagine the media reaction had this been a pro-life mob and the filibuster were conducted by, say, Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin. But, since they were pro-choice Democrats acting like barbarians to bring the legislative process to a halt, and since it was a Democrat president egging them on, hardly a ripple of concern was expressed by our supine media.

It's easy to fall into the fear that we're living in the twilight of representative, democratic government and every day is darker than the day before.

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Nice But Not Wise

Mona Charen writing in the Washington Examiner offers us a few examples of how Mr. Obama has done exactly the sorts of things for which he was highly critical of Mr. Bush. There's a word that describes someone like this, but at the moment I can't think of it.

Anyway, Charen opens her piece by saying that she'd like to write a complimentary column on the president praising him for his efforts in the war on terror, etc., but there are three obstacles standing in the way:

One is the memory of the casual smears candidate Obama directed at President Bush. The second is the rank abuse of power his administration has demonstrated, which undermines one's trust that the trove of information the government is sifting will be used only to disrupt possible terror attacks. The third is the administration's pattern of lying -- which undermines any reassurances the president proffers that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

The remainder of her column fills in the details. For instance:

Candidate Obama did more than dissent from President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. He asserted that the decision itself was dishonest -- based "not on principle but on politics." He said the war was a "cynical attempt by arm-chair warriors to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats." What that agenda might have been (is removing terror-sponsoring aggressors an "ideology"?), candidate Obama didn't say.

Regarding the larger war on terror, Obama denounced Bush for advancing a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." His administration, he pledged, would provide law enforcement the tools to deal with terrorists "without undermining our Constitution and our freedom." He denounced "illegal wiretapping of American citizens," "tracking citizens who do nothing more that protest a misguided war" and "ignoring the law when it is inconvenient."

"That is not who we are," he scolded.

There are, sadly, even more presidential prevarications in Charen's column. She concludes with this:

The president assures us that "no one is listening to our phone calls," and that may be true. But this administration also assured us that no sweeping data collection on American citizens was going on, that the IRS was not unfairly singling out conservatives, that the Justice Department had not attempted to prosecute journalists, and that the Benghazi attack was the response to a video.

It would be nice to trust the president, but it wouldn't be wise.

This, I surmise, is why Americans are so troubled by the NSA eavesdropping. It's not so much the infringement on our privacy, although there is that, but even more it's that the president has squandered away the trust of the people. An administration which uses the power of the IRS and the Department of Justice to punish political enemies is not the sort of administration that can be trusted not to use the NSA for the same purpose.