Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama

Washington Post columnist George Will fillets politicians with the deftness and virtuousity of a benihana chef. His latest subject is President Obama whose lawlessness and disregard for constitutional restraints Will subjects to a slicing and dicing which almost forces the reader to the conclusion that the extra-legality of Barack Obama is in fact worse and more brazen than that of Richard Nixon. Here's part of it:

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.

Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy. He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”

When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.

Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.

Will vents much more of his displeasure with the manner in which Mr. Obama has conducted himself in office at the link. It causes me to wonder were Mr. Obama not the first black president, or were he a white Republican, whether he'd have been impeached by now. Is it unfair and/or unreasonable to think that his administration has been at least as incompetent and feckless as Jimmy Carter's, and at least as arrogant and corrupt as Richard Nixon's? Am I wrong in thinking that no president, absent a major war, has polarized the nation as much as has Mr. Obama, especially racially but also ideologically, and that no president since FDR has presided over such a weak economy with such high unemployment for so long a period of time? Am I wrong in asserting that no modern president been beset by so many scandals of so much magnitude, nor spent so much of the taxpayer's money on his own personal recreation and that of his family, a fact which is especially galling given the unprecedented number of people struggling to make ends meet?

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps if I knew more of the facts I wouldn't have arrived at these judgments, but until those facts are forthcoming I don't see how anyone who tries to look objectively at the current state of things can draw any other conclusion. Given that the Democrats hailed Mr. Obama's ascendency to the Oval Office as almost a secular second coming it's all very disappointing.

Defining the Class of 2017

The Beloit College Mindset List describes the class of 2017 as the "sharing generation." Here's why:

They share information: it's a generation that has grown up with the electronic cut and paste and forward.

They share themselves: it’s a generation that is constantly “chatting,” which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily talking, even on the phone, much less face to face. They text all day; they text all night. They wake up and text before their feet hit the floor.

They share transportation: they tend to flock to big cities for employment, where it’s more expensive to keep a car, but in fact they seem less interested in owning their own autos than previous generations have been, and they take public transport.

They share our national identity: it’s a generation that is not sold on the idea that there is a single national identity. They’ve grown up in a multi-ethnic society. One survey suggested that in the future they wouldn’t follow a political party that could only attract whites, even if they are themselves white.

They share knowledge: it’s a generation that has not grown up with the lecturer (in educational terms, “the sage on the stage”) but with the facilitator (“guide on the side”). They’ve absorbed educational methods that involve small-group collaborative learning rather than more passive listen-and-take-notes.

Finally, they share spiritual values: it’s a generation that is interested in spiritual ideas—such as meditation and service—but it’s not a sectarian generation. It has a more ecumenical approach. It’s spiritual but not religious in the sectarian sense.

I'm not sure what it all means or even how accurate it all is, but there you have it. Do you think it's a correct description of young people today? If it is, how significant is it?

Why Should He Care?

Atheist blogger P.Z. Myers says he's been handed a hand grenade with a pulled pin. A major figure in the atheist community has been accused of repeated sexual misconduct and Myers debates with himself the right way to handle the information:

So I’ve been given this rather…explosive…information. It’s a direct report of unethical behavior by a big name in the skeptical community (yeah, like that hasn’t been happening a lot lately), and it’s straight from the victim’s mouth. And it’s bad. Really bad.

She’s torn up about it. It’s been a few years, so no law agency is going to do anything about it now; she reported it to an organization at the time, and it was dismissed. Swept under the rug. Ignored. I can imagine her sense of futility. She’s also afraid that the person who assaulted her before could try to hurt her again.

But at the same time, she doesn’t want this to happen to anyone else, so she’d like to get the word out there. So she hands the information to me. Oh, thanks.

Now I’ve been sitting here trying to resolve my dilemma — to reveal it or not — and ... what’s dominating my head isn’t the consequences, but the question of what is the right thing to do. Do I stand up for the one who has no recourse, no way out, no other option to help others, or do I shelter the powerful big name guy from an accusation I can’t personally vouch for, except to say that I know the author, and that she’s not trying to acquire notoriety (she wants her name kept out of it)?

You'll have to go to the link to learn the identity of the alleged cad, and no it's not someone named Filner, Spitzer, Weiner, Clinton, Kennedy, Gore, or Menendez (Quick quiz: What do the aforementioned all have in common?). It is, however, someone who's very well known for his advocacy of atheism.

What interests me about this, though, is Myers' moral wrestling match with his conscience. If the allegations of sexual misconduct are true, and they're certainly well-corroborated, what's the problem? Why should atheists be in a moral swivet about what the gentleman did, or, for that matter, whether to make it public. Given atheism, there's no morally right or wrong action, only actions that people don't like. Morally speaking what this prominent atheist did has no more moral significance than might be assigned to bad manners and neither does Myers' decision to publicize the behavior.

To assert that X is morally wrong is to assume that there's some standard of moral behavior that we have a duty to obey, but where does that standard come from and what imposes the duty to obey it? On atheism, there's no moral authority qualified to impose such a standard and no authority which can impose such a duty. Only a personal, transcendent moral authority could establish a non-subjective standard and obligate us to adhere to it. Since atheists deny the existence of such a being, the last thing an atheist can do is make a moral judgment of someone else's behavior.

This is a serious problem with atheism, of course. Most atheists simply can't live consistently with their conviction that there's nothing more to reality than atoms and energy. They know that atoms and energy can't confer moral value, but they insist on living as if they can.

Put another way, when a Christian behaves as this prominent atheist author is accused of behaving the Christian has betrayed his calling, violated an objective moral standard, and deeply disappointed his God. When an atheist behaves like this he has betrayed nothing, violated nothing more than society's arbitrary norms, and disappointed no one except other human beings.

Why should he care about any of that?

Back from Panama

I've just returned from a week spent trekking through the forests and meadows of Panama in pursuit of tropical species of birds. Panama has a rich avifauna and some of the birds there are almost unimaginably beautiful. Here are a couple of photos culled from the internet of just a few of the species I was able to see:

The bird above is a Golden-hooded tanager. It's found in garden type environments and along forest edges.

It's hard to capture in a photo the beauty of the Blue dachnis. The blue is electric. It's an amazing fact about birds that there's no blue pigment in their feathers. The color is structural. That is, it results from the way light is reflected and refracted off the feathers.

This was my favorite bird of the trip. It's a very large member of the vulture group called the King vulture. This was my eighth trip to Central America, and I had futilely searched the skies for this bird on every previous trip. Finally, on this one I saw it. In fact, I managed to see three of them, all of which were soaring at just about the height of the bird in the photo.

Notice

Dick Cleary is out of the country for the week of August 12 and may not have access to the internet. If that's the case, there won't be new posts to Viewpoint until next week.

Bill

Why He Uses a Teleprompter

The Blaze has a link to a video of some of the President's more memorable moments where his mind, or his education, simply failed him.

Anyone can make such mistakes, of course, but the media absolutely killed Dan Quayle for misspelling potato, ridiculed George H.W. Bush for remarking on supermarket laser scanners, crucified George W. Bush almost every time he opened his mouth, and yukked it up over an apocryphal story about Sarah Palin having claimed to be able to see Russia from her home. Yet Mr. Obama repeatedly makes statements one might associate with an uneducated dolt and the media scarcely blinks.

Consider just a few of the bloopers the President, whom we're told possesses a towering intellect, has produced over the last few years:

• At a military service he pronounced corpsman as corpse man.
• When speaking in Hawaii he referred to the island state in which he spent much of his youth as being in Asia.
• When trying to make the case for government-run health care he said that UPS and FedEx, two private enterprises, are doing just fine, but the Post Office, which is subject to government oversight, is "always having problems" thus undercutting his own argument.
• In a Memorial Day speech he said, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong."
• He also once claimed that a Kansas tornado which took twelve lives had actually killed ten thousand people: "In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed."
• Most recently he declared Charleston, Norfolk and Savannah to be Gulf Coast ports.

There are many more examples. The point is not to make fun of Mr. Obama, he is the president after all, but rather to poke a little fun at those of his worshipers who have apotheosized him and especially at the liberal media who would have collapsed in spasms of hilarity had a Republican president committed just one of these blunders, but which politely averts its eyes from the accumulating pile of howlers delivered by this Democratic president.

Rush Limbaugh, from whose site the video was borrowed, put it this way:

“[President Obama] has committed far more gaffes than George Bush and Sarah Palin combined....Folks, you let that be George W. Bush, you let that be Ronald Reagan, and the stories today are, ‘Is Alzheimer’s setting in? Do we have dementia?’ I’m not kidding. They would have psychiatrists and psychologists on TV, and they would be analyzing this, and they’d be looking for any indication that a declining mental capacity is taking place.”

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a similar montage of the wit and wisdom of our Vice-President. It should be even more entertaining.

Politicians Say the Darnedest Things

Kirstin Powers at the Daily Beast illustrates for us the fact that so many pro-choicers base their advocacy for the right to terminate the life of an unborn child not upon any rational argument but rather upon simple emotion. Some of them apparently have a very tenuous grasp of the facts surrounding the issue of abortion, particularly late-term abortion.

Powers cites as exhibit A of her indictment the Texas state senator, Wendy Davis, who fought to prevent the Texas legislature from effectively banning Kermit Gosnell-type abortion clinics from operating in Texas:

The Democratic star du jour [Davis] was asked this week to explain the difference between the late-term abortions she fought to keep legal in Texas and the illegal killings by Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” she told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who cornered her after her National Press Club speech on Monday.

This is incredible. After all, Davis is the state senator who held an 11-hour filibuster to fight legislation drafted in response to the abuses at Gosnell’s clinic. A passing knowledge of the case seems like basic due diligence.

She went on: “But I do know that [Gosnell] happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.” It takes real skill to pack so many falsehoods into so few words.

As Powers explains, Gosnell's crimes were conducted in a clinic that Pennsylvania's Department of Health failed to hold to the standards of an ambulatory surgical facility. Since then, the state has passed a law, over the objections of Democrats and Planned Parenthood, that would require that any facility performing abortions be held to the same standards of hygiene as are these facilities.

At one point in his interview, McCormack asked Davis what she made of the fact a majority of women support late-term abortion bans. Davis told him, “I…think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there.”

The small percentage, Powers notes dryly, translates to 18,000 late term abortions a year.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of ignorance and sheer stupidity in Powers' article came, unsurprisingly, from the lips of Nancy Pelosi:

In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.

Pelosi then told an outright lie: “[The 20-week ban] would make it a federal law that there would be no abortion in our country.” No reporter questioned this absurdity, even though they’ve heard pro-abortion rights leaders assert a thousand times that “only” 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. (For those who care, that’s “only” 18,000 late-term abortions each year.)

Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails.

And, Powers might have added, achieved escape velocity from the inconvenient constraints of logic. Only someone with an IQ low enough to freeze nitrogen would utter such an embarrassing non sequitur. Ms Pelosi's reply is a tacit acknowledgement that she had no rational response to give.

For those who might be wondering why people get upset over late-term abortion I recommend Powers' (who, by the way, is a liberal Democrat) last paragraph:

In May this year, former abortion doctor Dr. Anthony Levantino described late-term abortion in congressional testimony before a House subcommittee debating the 20-week abortion ban Pelosi and most Democrats opposed. It is similar to the one Davis opposed in Texas. Levantino told the committee: “The toughest part...is extracting the baby’s head. [Y]ou will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see white gelatinous material coming through the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you.”

A culture, a political party, and politicians who defend such a practice are either ignorant of the facts and/or morally destitute. Either way we have proceeded very far along the road to total cultural degeneration if we allow the thinking of such people as Ms Davis and Ms Pelosi to determine our posture on abortion.

Geographically Challenged

Perhaps Mr. Obama went AWOL from his high school geography classes to go "chooming" with his fellow stoners, but, whatever the reason, our president certainly lacks a basic grasp of the geography of the country over which he presides.

First he informed us that he has campaigned in "all 57 states," a pronouncement that startled the half of the population that realized the implications of the claim, and now he has located three east coast cities on the Gulf coast (relevant part starts at 2:55).

Sure, maybe he actually meant to insert the conjunction "and" in there between "the Gulf" and "places like" (as AP so helpfully did), and maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt on this, just like AP and the rest of the fair-minded liberal media would have given to George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. Or maybe Mr. Obama actually doesn't know how many states there are or the difference between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

That last possibility would at least explain a lot.

Profiled

I walk for exercise and over the last couple of weeks my peregrinations have taken me through neighborhoods other than my own. In some of them houses are sparse and isolated. Others are standard residential communities, but over the previous month or so I've had several interesting experiences.

People have always turned and looked, of course. A strange man walking in a neighborhood in which he's not known draws special attention, but in one case a week ago a fellow drove his pickup truck slowly past me on a country road and gave me a thorough look-over as if trying to assess whether he recognized me. On another occasion a gentleman stopped his car to ask me if I was visiting someone in the neighborhood. On yet another evening a policeman stopped his cruiser and talked briefly with me, ostensibly to ask why I was out walking in the rain (it started raining about ten minutes before).

What should I think about these encounters? Should I be offended that these people were obviously checking to make sure I wasn't up to no good. Perhaps I should have felt uncomfortable with all this scrutiny, but I didn't. I was a strange man in a neighborhood where no one knew me, people were simply being alert, I was being "profiled," and I didn't blame them (except the guy in the pickup was a little weird). I might've done the same thing.

The neighborhoods were mostly white and so am I, so race had nothing to do with how the residents and the police acted, but suppose I had been black. What might I have thought? Obviously, if I were like many blacks who complain about racial profiling I would assume that the attention I was receiving was because I was black. I would relate to my friends how uncomfortable it was to be targeted because of my race, that I was committing the crime of WWB (Walking While Black) and what a terribly offensive thing racial profiling is. I would have assumed that the residents of the neighborhood were red-necked racists, that they had no business giving me the eye, that it was yet another insulting example of whites' irrational fear of blacks, and so on.

My point is that often blacks assume that any insult, any slight, any criticism they receive from a white person is because they're black when in fact that's simply not the case. A stranger walking through a neighborhood is going to elicit attention regardless of his color. It may be that a black man would draw more attention in an all-white neighborhood because he's more obviously a stranger, but to assume he draws the stares because he's black should be the last assumption in the string of possibilities.

We'll never heal our racial divisions in this country as long as we keep viewing everything that happens to us through the lens of race and as long as blacks continue to react to interracial encounters as though it's still 1940.

Who Can They Blame?

The unemployment numbers for July recently came out and - good news! - unemployment dropped to 7.4%, lower than expected (at least until it's quietly revised upward in a few weeks). Unfortunately, the news is not so good after all. Unemployment is down because the number of people looking for work is down. If the labor participation rate were what it was in January of 2009 unemployment would be at 10.7%.

Just as bad is that the vast majority of jobs created were part-time jobs. Erika Johnson has the numbers and analysis at Hot Air.

After five years of progressive governance the economy is still virtually stagnant at 1.7% growth. I guess this doesn't matter much if you're already employed full-time and have some income security, but I feel very sorry for those young people who are graduating from college burdened with a ton of debt and unable to find a job in their field, or any decent job at all.

I suppose someone might say that these students are a core constituency of the folks responsible for our economic malaise, and I guess they are. It could be argued, too, that many other students were too apathetic or too busy to invest in educating themselves about what was at stake in the last two elections and didn't vote. All true. Young people, as a whole, have themselves to blame for their predicament just as much as the derelictions and incompetence of our political leadership.

Even so, I feel very sorry for them. For many of these kids the future, at least until we stop electing liberal progressives to office, is very bleak. Maybe by 2014 and 2016 they'll care about more than who's most "cool" and which candidate has the most charisma. Perhaps they'll be sophisticated enough not to be taken in by silly rhetoric about "green jobs" and "wars on women," and vote instead for the candidate who'll institute policies that'll restore the nation's economic virility. Heaven help us, and especially them, if they don't.

Innis v. Rangel

Congressman Charlie Rangel has no qualms about concocting libelous falsehoods about people he knows nothing about. He recently undertook to smear the Tea Party and anyone else associated with political conservatives. If anyone wants to know why our politics is so fractious and polarized all one need do is read the sorts of things people like Rangel say about those with whom he disagrees:

[The Tea Party] is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police. They didn’t care about how they looked. It was just fierce indifference to human life that caused America to say enough is enough. ‘I don’t want to see it and I am not a part of it.’ What the hell! If you have to bomb little kids and send dogs out against human beings, give me a break.

If a white congressman said something comparable about a black organization he'd be roundly condemned and censured, but Rangel has already been censured by the House for corruption so, perhaps that, plus the fact that he's black and 83 years old and perhaps a little dottery, disinclines people from judging him too harshly.

It may be unkind to suggest that Charlie is non compos mentis, but it's probably the kindest explanation for not only what he said above but also for this:

[House Republicans] have done more damage to American competitiveness than al Qaeda ever could. What is happening is sabotage. Terrorists couldn’t do a better job than the Republicans are doing.

Anyone who would make such a claim before a public audience is either suffering from dementia, incredibly ignorant, or dishonest.

Anyway, a Tea Party strategist and national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality named Niger Innis delivered a deft riposte to the addlepated Mr. Rangel. The Daily Caller reports:

"It is not surprising that lazy, shiftless politicians who have an abysmal record for their community would want to diffuse the issue of what they are doing for their communities by dropping the race card,” Innis, an African American and the chief strategist for TheTeaParty.net, told The Daily Caller in an interview.

According to Innis, Rangel comparing the tea party to segregationists represents the same strategy white Southern Democrats in the South used prior to the civil rights era — back then obscuring the issues by playing what he called the “nigger card.” Rangel is part of a “long tradition of Democrat, racist demagogues” who run to race when they are not able to deliver for their constituents.

“What Charlie Rangel should be talking about is the level of performance of kids in the public schools in his district, what he should be talking about are the lack of jobs and the record high unemployment rate in his district and among black Americans all across his country,” Innis explained.

“What he should be talking about is the black-on-black genocide that is taking place in the urban center,” he added. “But unfortunately leaders like Charlie Rangel and the leaders that have run Detroit for the last 50 years have nothing but a record of failure and want to change the issue.”

It amazes me how much vitriol is directed by the left at the folks who loosely make up what's called the Tea Party. These people stand primarily for smaller, constitutional government, less spending, and more growth. Despite these modest aspirations, the left, including people like Mr. Rangel, disparage them as if they were neo-Nazis.

Their insulting, uncivil rhetoric does nothing to bring people together. All it does is erect walls between groups, divide them along ideological lines, and guarantee that political gridlock will persist.

The Nature of the Threat

Debkafile claims to have information on the nature of the threat that has caused the U.S. to close its embassies throughout the Middle East. If they're correct it truly is frightening. Here's the crucial information:

US officials are beginning to release nuggets of information about the nature of the threat.

According to one high placed US official, concern focuses on the possibility of terrorists carrying explosive devices implanted inside their bodies. debkafile’s counterterrorism sources add that plastic explosives in the body of a would-be suicide bomber without metal components are undetectable by standard screening devices such as those used at most international airports.

It has been suspected for some years that doctors and surgeons in Yemen in the service of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were experimenting with implanting of plastic explosive devices inside the bodies of suicide bombers or even animals. According to Western counterterrorism sources, the surgeon would open the abdominal cavity and implant the explosive device amongst the bomber’s internal organs.

Some US sources are calling the current threat the most serious since 9/11. They are alarmed by the degree of confidence AQIM leaders show in openly using electronic communications to boast about the unstoppable attack they are plotting.

A senior US official described the terrorists as saying the planned attack is “going to be big” and “strategically significant.”

A couple dozen suicide bombers with explosive implants boarding aircraft around the globe is a terrifying prospect. Let's hope TSA is profiling young Middle Eastern males and asking them to raise their shirts to see if they have scars. Let's also hope that they're not wasting their time asking octogenarian ladies to do the same.

IRS Says "No Thanks" to Obamacare

IRS chief Danny Werfel last week testified to congress that IRS employees would rather not switch to Obamacare, thank you. The IRS, mind you, is the organization designated to oversee the implementation of Obamacare for the rest of us. Here's a video of his testimony remixed with some music from LFAO's Rock Party album along with some additional relevant video:

First it was the labor unions that wanted outof the "train wreck," then it was congress itself and their staffs who pleaded that they just couldn't afford it, now it's the very organization that will enforce Obamacare's provisions that they rest of us will have to live by. None of them want it for themselves because they know that, as insurance, it's a much worse deal than what they have.

Congress doesn't want it, even though they've foisted it on the rest of us, because under Obamacare their staff members will have to pay more of the premium which is currently paid by you and me. Congresspersons fear that Obamacare will drive their staffs into the private sector where they can make more money. Well, let them get a real job, say I. Why do we need them?

I remember Democrat proponents of the law piously intoning before it passed as to how they wished for all Americans to have the same quality insurance that they have. Well, now they still have good insurance plans and they've stuck us with with a system that none of them want.

Students of history are welcome to compare and contrast the current situation with the outrages perpetrated on the colonists by the England of King George III and to explain, if they can, how his government was more oppressive than the bunch currently residing in Washington.

Lenin with a Charming Smile

This story from Breitbart should come as no surprise. When the administration in Washington does everything it can to discourage employers from hiring: from raising taxes, to burdensome regulations, to onerous health care benefit requirements, to time-consuming paperwork it's no wonder that there are no jobs available.

Friday's jobs report was disappointing, but it also contained a truly heartbreaking statistic. Black teen unemployment is a shocking 41.6%. In July last year, the unemployment was considerably lower, at 36%. That almost half of black teens who want to work can't find jobs is a stain on Obama's economic policies.

This isn't a numbers trick. This isn't a rate based on the whole black teen population in the country. This is the proportion of the black teen population that is looking for work but can't find a job. Just in March, the number was eight points lower at 33%. The white teen unemployment rate is half the black rate, although still high at 20%.

Nor is it any wonder that black kids are especially hurt since in areas of high black population density there are relatively few businesses in the first place.

If Mr. Obama truly wants to improve the employment prospects of black teens, and everyone else, he simply has to reverse his lethal policies on business and carbon. He has to allow companies to unleash their economic energy without having to fear the next EPA regulation, or the next new tax, or the absurd disincentives under Obamacare to hire the marginal worker.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama appears to be waging economic jihad against the capitalist goose that has laid the golden eggs. He's not going to give up his struggle to cripple the most productive economy in the history of the world, even if it means that almost half of black kids are denied an opportunity to develop skills and a work ethic needed to succeed in the workplace. To paraphrase Lenin, if you want to make a socialist omelet some eggs have to be sacrificed.

Mr. Obama sometimes seems to be Lenin with a charming smile. It's dismaying that so few in the black community are able to see it, or care enough to oppose what he's doing.

The Third Way

A friend has on occasion stated wistfully that he wishes there were a tertium quid or third way between liberalism and conservatism. I understand his desire, I suppose, but I think the two poles he'd like to mediate between are not the two that a third way should mediate between.

In our contemporary situation we're faced with two stark alternatives. On one side beckons a radical individualism, a libertarianism that gives the individual complete moral autonomy and which eliminates, to the extent possible, government interference in one's life.

On the other are those, like our president and his epigones, who seduce us with the allure of cradle-to-grave security courtesy of an ever-expanding collectivist state which intrudes upon, or even controls, almost every aspect of our lives.

If these are the Scylla and Charybdis between which we must thread our way which of the political ideologies on offer is most likely to give us safe passage?

Philosopher Ed Feser, author of The Last Superstition, offers insight into this question in a chapter on ancient Greek philosophy. While discussing the errors of the pre-Socratics Feser delivers this aside:

Liberalism purports to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, what it really gives is a diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism. Conservatism, which sees the family rather than the individual or society as a whole as the fundamental social unit, is the true "third way."

Precisely so. Liberalism is a false hope because so far from navigating between Scylla and Charybdis it actually blends the worst aspects of the two. Conservatism, by holding the family up as the focus of our political allegiance, dampens the allures of individualism while at the same time strengthening the individual to resist the coercions of the statists. As such it is the third way between radical individualism and totalitarian statism.

Readers not familiar with what I mean by the "coercions of the statists" might pick up Mark Levin's book Liberty and Tyranny (just after they finish In the Absence of God) and give it a read. It's a very helpful explanation of exactly what's at stake in the political and ideological struggles in which we are enmeshed, whether we wish to be or not.

Conversation on the Conversation

We see that the Democrats are calling, again, for a national conversation on race. That's understandable given that a conversation on almost any other topic would be an embarrassment for Democrats, but such a call is also futile.

It's futile because there are certain ground rules to these conversations that often cause them to devolve into lectures on what's wrong with white people. The rules require that whites sit by passively while being hectored by their liberal (black or white) mentors. This is as demeaning as it is unhelpful.

If a white interlocutor should have the temerity to violate the protocol and voice an opinion critical of blacks, as did Bill O'Reilly recently, he can expect to be informed at some point in the conversation either that he's a racist or that he has no business voicing such an opinion because he's not black. O'Reilly has had the pleasure, since committing his act of defiance, of being repeatedly indicted on both charges. Here are O'Reilly's comments which, dare I say it, sound completely sensible to me:

To seek to silence this sort of criticism by calling O'Reilly a racist or by invoking the rule that white men haven't the standing to complain about black problems is fatuous and certainly a conversation stopper, but that's the way these conversations on race always seem to go. It's as if white folks' role in such "discussions" is to just shut up and listen to what black folks tell them.

Here's Sherri Shepherd on The View giving us her version of this rule:

Ms. Shepherd's remark is absurd, of course, because it only applies to whites who criticize some aspect of the "black experience." It doesn't apply, apparently, to blacks who talk volubly enough about what's wrong with whites. Blacks evince little discernable hesitation, even though they're not white, to point out the shortcomings of white society. Would Ms Shepherd extend her rule to make such critiques illegitimate? Would she disallow the complaints of black shoppers who resent being carefully scrutinized by white storeowners even though the black shopper has never been a white storeowner? Would she insist that poor people who pay no income tax have no business commenting on government tax policies because they're not taxpayers? Would she maintain that unless one is a combatant in a war an individual has no right to complain about the conduct of the war? Where does Ms Shepherd draw the line? One suspects she draws it in a very tight circle around white criticism of blacks.

Anyway, any conversation on race in this country needs to focus on the fundamental question why it is that in black communities across the country, the needle is in the red on every measure of social dysfunction. Why is it that so few blacks form stable families? Why are black kids much more likely than kids in other groups to be fatherless, to drop out of school, to be in trouble with the law, to be unemployed, to be a burden on society?

Or, since those questions will almost certainly be aborted by howls of racism, as they were when O'Reilly asked them, or by application of what we might call the Shepherd rule which disqualifies any white from asking them because whites aren't black, let me suggest two other questions which should be explored in our "national conversation," but which almost assuredly won't be: What exactly is racism and why, exactly, is racial profiling, which is usually little more than mildly insulting or inconvenient (unless abused by police), so abhorrent?

An airing of these topics won't happen, though, because too many of those calling for a national conversation on race don't really want a conversation at all. If they did they wouldn't have any objection to O'Reilly's disquisition. What they want, actually, is to lecture the rest of us on race, to demand that we defer to their moral authority on the subject, to flagellate submissive whites with the lash of guilt, and they don't want to have to take questions.

Well, if those are the rules, I'm not playing.

Eight Baffling Questions About Your Brain

George Dvorsky at io9 discusses eight things about the brain that we have no idea how to explain. Here are the eight with a sentence or two of elaboration. For more discussion of these perplexing phenomena check out the link.

1. What is consciousness? The nature and origin of consciousness is perhaps the most puzzling problem in all of science and philosophy. How does brain chemistry produce awareness? How do chemical reactions in the brain produce sensations like taste, fragrance, and color? How can sensory stimuli generate a meaning or be about something? Where does meaning come from and how is it produced? It's a deeply perplexing mystery.
2. How much of our personality is determined by our brain? This is the old nature versus nurture debate. Are we a product of our genetic inheritance or of the environmental influences that act on us throughout our lives?
3. Why do we sleep and dream? We spend about a third of our lives asleep, but we’re not entirely sure why we do it.
4. How do we store and access memories? Like a computer’s hard drive, memories are physically recorded in our brains. But we have no idea how our brains do this, nor do we know how this information gets oriented in the brain. What’s more, there isn’t just one kind of memory. We have both short-term and long-term memory. We also can distinguish between memories that are recent and memories that are temporally more distant. How can chemical processes do that?
5. Are all aspects of cognition computational? Computer scientist Alan Turing argued that cognition can be translated into an equivalent computation. This has given rise to the theory that our brains are basically information-processors, but this is hard to credit since there's so much that brains can do that an information processor like a computer cannot. Computers don't doubt, understand, feel guilt, hold a belief, experience sensations, wish, hope, experience boredom, and a host of other things that our brains do all the time.
6. How does perception work? A primary function of the brain is to convert our senses into experiences. Our ability to perceive allows us to organize, identify, and interpret sensory information in way that helps us construct and understand our world. But how, exactly, does our brain transfer this incoming sensory information into such vivid qualitative experiences? And how is perception organized in the brain?
7. Do we have free will? If our decisions are the result of a chain of physical events and physical events are determined by physical laws where is their room for free will? But if we do not in some sense choose our actions in what sense are we responsible for them.
8. How can we move and react so well? We do an incredible job moving our bodies through space and time. But how we so seamlessly coordinate our movement remains a mystery. Think of the dexterity required to thread a needle. Or to play a piano concerto. These accomplishments are all the more incredible when considering how slow, haphazard and unpredictable our motor nerve impulses actually are. Clearly, there’s something very sophisticated going on between our motor cortex and the cerebral cortex that allows for such smooth, efficient actions. But what is it?

It is these sorts of facts about the brain that have led many philosophers and scientists to abandon the materialist view that we are made up solely of material stuff. In light of these profound mysteries, mysteries which seem impervious to scientific scrutiny, the idea that we have an immaterial mind or soul has become much more plausible and much more respectable among philosophers than it had been since the 19th century.

Fourth Trimester Abortion

This would be funny were it not for what it says about how uncritical and thoughtless are some of those who are allegedly among our best and brightest.

The video records how easy it is to get people to sign a petition endorsing infanticide. I know that some of the signers didn't really care or give any thought to what they were doing, but that's the point. These people vote, and one has to wonder how much thought they put into that:

Now that this is all over the internet I wonder if some of the signers are still wondering what they did that's such a big deal.

Real Heroes

It's often lamented that our culture makes heroes out of people who aren't and fails to make heroes out of people who are.

I recently finished a book by a former student who is one of those who really does deserve to be considered a hero. He's certainly a hero to the parents of hundreds of physically and mentally disabled children in south-central Pennsylvania.

His name is Louis Castriota and what he's done for these kids is truly amazing. He recounts his story in a book titled Leg Up: The Courage to Dream. Louie, whose oldest daughter is autistic, was inspired to build a facility for disabled children that would be a refuge not only for the children but for their families as well.

He and his wife Laurie dreamed of a facility that would combine all the services such children need in a single location that would be a godsend for harried mothers and a blessing for special needs kids. The facility he and Laurie envisioned would be a farm where autistic and other developmentally challenged children would develop relationships with animals as a means of therapy.

All Louie and Laurie had at the start was the dream and the desire to make it happen. The book is the story of their struggle to find the means to launch their dream and turn it into a reality. It's a wonderful story (full disclosure: He says some kind things about me in the book, but it's a wonderful story nevertheless), and I urge you to go to their website to see what one man with determination and faith can accomplish.

It really is inspiring.

Another hero is a friend of mine named Andy Stump. Twenty years ago Andy left a comfortable life in suburbia to visit the poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti. He decided to stay and he's still there today, teaching English and music to Haitian children, helping people with their problems and seeing to their medical care.

Andy has foresworn all the advantages of being an American and cast his lot with the poor in order to bring them whatever relief he can and to do whatever he can to help them improve their lives.

It's an astonishing example of selflessness, but Andy will tell you that it's an honor to be given the chance to serve God by serving others.

You can read about his work here. In a world that makes heroes out of celebrities, athletes, and even criminals, Louie and Andy are two stellar examples of the genuine article.

God and Quantum Physics

One of the fascinating developments of the last two decades is how much work in both philosophy and science points to the existence of a transcendent, personal mind. Scholars in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, evolutionary biology, paleontology, cosmology, and quantum physics, have all made significant contributions to furthering the plausibility of the hypothesis that, contrary to the prevailing scientistic paradigm, the ultimate reality is not matter but mind.

One recent addition to the discussion is a piece by physicist Antoine Suarez at Big Questions Online. Suarez's article is a little abstruse, but the gist of it is that quantum mechanics has repeatedly demonstrated that two particles at vast distances from each other are nevertheless "entangled" such that a change in one is correlated with a corresponding change in the other.

The problem is that there's no known physical means by which such correlation could occur. The fact that it does strongly suggests that correlation is coordinated from outside the space-time manifold. In other words, laws of physics such as the law of conservation of energy, are somehow controlled from outside the physical universe.

As Suarez puts it:

To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time [universe].

He also says this:

It is compatible with physics that a mind outside space-time can purposefully control quantum randomness. Quantum experiments help to overcome materialism.

Given what he writes in his essay the above is a conservative claim. Such a mind is not merely compatible with physics but appears, in fact, to be required by the physics. Suarez adds this:

But are we not claiming after all that invisible non-material principles underpin the whole visible world and not only the dynamic of human brains? Does this mean that in addition to the human mind, other minds (the mind of God and other spiritual beings) govern the corporal world? And if any such non-material agency does pervade the whole universe, which behavioral features are distinctively human? These may be interesting questions for the discussion online. Be it as it may, we cannot have nature without non-material (spiritual) agency.[Emphasis mine]

There's an interesting lag effect at work between science/philosophy and culture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the prevailing philosophical view was a kind of atheistic materialism that admitted the existence of nothing but what could be ultimately explained in terms of matter and energy. The vast majority of the culture, however, still lived as if the traditional verities of Judeo-Christian religion were true and binding on their personal lives.

Gradually, however, religious belief gave way to the inexorable influence of materialism on men's minds and the culture in the latter half of the 20th century began to reflect the secular, amoral, implications of a world with no transcendent meaning or moral authority. Ironically, the abandonment of the religious view in favor of the atheistic view was gaining steam in the culture just as materialism was beginning to fracture in science and philosophy.

Now those fractures have developed into an incipient collapse and both science and philosophy are pointing us more and more insistently toward the Divine just as the culture has most deeply bought into the 19th century notion that we're all alone in the cosmos with no God to save us or to demand anything of us.

It's a very awkward situation and would be humorous were it not so tragic.

Mr. Holder's Gun Policy and Other Scandals

Attorney General Eric Holder still refuses to return George Zimmerman's weapon even though Zimmerman has been found innocent of all charges. There seems to be no legal justification for not returning the gun, but the Obama administration has never let details like legal justification deter them. This is the same AG, mind you, whose department funneled thousands of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico which have been used in hundreds, perhaps thousands of murders.

The good folks at DOJ see no contradiction in illegally providing high-powered weaponry to known killers, but refusing to legally return a single handgun to a man judged innocent by the evidence and by a jury of his peers.

It'd be entertaining to listen to Mr. Holder's explanation of how he reconciles these two policies.

Meanwhile in his speech the other day, President Obama blamed our dismal economy in part on the GOP's preoccupation with "phony scandals." He never explained which scandals in his administration are phony, of course, so we're left to wonder on our own. Is it the Fast and Furious operation, in which the Department of Justice illegally sent the above-mentioned weapons to murderers and thugs in Mexico only to have those weapons repeatedly used in the commission of hundreds of murders? Is it the Benghazi debacle in which four Americans died because the State Department refused to grant them the security they requested and while the attack on the consulate was taking place the President was nowhere to be found?

Maybe the President considers the IRS business "phony." Perhaps he thinks it's all faux outrage on the part of American citizens upset that the IRS was used by political partisans, taking orders from a political appointee in the White House, to harass and stifle groups and individuals based on political or religious affiliation. Perhaps he thinks it's "phony" of people to be angry that IRS officials paid millions of our dollars to disport themselves in Las Vegas. Or perhaps the phony scandal the President had in mind was the matter of the NSA illegally snooping on reporters deemed hostile to the administration, and even some who aren't, and which is collecting information on every citizen in the U.S.

I don't know which of these scandals the President thinks are "phony," but I'm pretty sure that were he back in the Senate and any of these events had happened in the Bush years he wouldn't be calling them "phony." He'd be calling for impeachment. There is indeed a lot that's phony in Washington, if I may say it, but it's not the scandals.

UPDATE: A couple of victims of Mr. Obama's "phony" scandals speak out:

Jesus and Mohammed

Pamela Geller notes an interesting example of media religious bias. There's a book out on Jesus, titled Zealot, which is receiving a lot of praise in the leftist media. The book seeks to debunk the traditional beliefs that Christians have held about Jesus' life, death and resurrection. The coverage has been so favorable that the book is at #2 on Amazon, but what a lot of the coverage has omitted to tell us is that the author is a radical Muslim whose book is short on facts and long on speculation.

But that's not the most egregious part. A little more than a year ago Robert Spencer, a scholar on Islam and the author of a dozen books on the subject, published Did Mohammed Exist? which met with either silence or vitriol from the liberal media.

Here's part of Geller's account:

Not so long ago, Robert Spencer, one of the world’s leading scholars on Islam, wrote an extraordinary book entitled “Did Muhammad Exist?” It was a brilliant, original and scholarly work investigating the legitimate questions surrounding the historical value of the early Islamic texts about Muhammad. Spencer pulled together information from ancient documents with linguistic and archaeological data in a remarkable re-evaluation of Islam’s origins.

Robert Spencer is a writer without peer and a nonpareil scholar, the author of 12 books on Islam, jihad and related topics, including two New York Times bestsellers. Yet “Did Muhammad Exist?” was ignored and dismissed by the intelligentsia, the media elite and subversive academia.

Juxtapose that to the recent adulation heaped upon the Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan for his new book. Aslan is an advisory board member of the National Iranian American Council, which has been recently exposed in court as a lobbying group for the Iranian regime. He has smeared and lied about Spencer and me on national television, and responded to Spencer’s reasoned rebuttals with homophobic abuse worthy of a seventh-grader: “I must tell you that I’m flattered but you’re really not my type. … If I send you a picture, will that satisfy your lust for a while?”

You should ask yourself, how did we get here? How can a reasonable, educated and pre-eminent scholar like Robert Spencer be relegated to the very fringe (if that) of the literary world, while jihadist operatives like the vicious Reza Aslan are carried on the shoulders of the media and intelligentsia like a football hero at the end of an impossibly fought game.

Who would have imagined that 12 years after 9/11 the media and academic elite would laud this pro-nuclear Khomeinist? He is funded by who knows who, and he employs vicious trolls who spend their days spreading libel and defamation about Spencer and other freedom fighters, much the way the wicked witch of the west used the flying monkeys – and they, too, are very well paid.

Remember also: Spencer’s book was accurately and forthrightly entitled, “Did Muhammad Exist?” It’s a legitimate question, even though on the BBC recently an interviewer tried to badger Spencer into admitting that there was something wrong, and offensive to Muslims, with even investigating this historical question. Reza Aslan, on the other hand, refers negatively to Jesus in his title as “Zealot.”

Clearly, Robert could have entitled his book “Pedophile,” because we know that Muhammad’s favorite wife was taken at the age of 6 and that their “marriage” was consummated when the Muslim prophet was 54 and she was 9. Spencer could also have called his book “Annihilator,” because we know that Muhammad slaughtered an entire Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza, by beheading. Surely Spencer exercised restraint in not entitling his book “Bloody Warmonger.” Any of these would have been the equivalent of Aslan’s title “Zealot.”

But although Spencer didn’t entitle his book any of those things, and “Did Muhammad Exist?” is a straightforward, dispassionate historical investigation, the media treated it as if it were the one that was designed solely to denigrate and disparage the founder of a religion. That is not true of Spencer’s book, but it is true of Aslan’s screed “Zealot.” Yet the media never comment on the derogatory title of Aslan’s book. It is just fine with the media to speak negatively about Jesus, deny his historicity, deny his importance, denigrate his teachings and more. But any true word that is spoken about Muhammad, whether it be about how he is depicted in Islamic texts or about the historical value of those texts, is viciously attacked.

Liberals, at least the secular variety, are hostile to religion, but they're quite fearful of Islam. They do not fear Christianity because Christians are, in the main, peaceful, forgiving, and tolerant, but they do fear Muslims because they're often just the opposite of these qualities. Thus, a book that derogates Christianity will be praised by secular liberals whether it has any scholarly merit or not, but a book that questions Islam will either be ignored, or the left will express their outrage in a ploy to ingratiate themselves with Muslims so that the more violent among them will leave them alone and even perhaps look favorably upon them.

It's pusillanimous, to be sure, but then we're talking about people who a couple of decades ago boasted of their willingness to die on behalf of the right to say offensive things about religion. That was until it turned out that there was a good chance that they may be called upon to do exactly that. When they realized in the early years of the 21st century that Muslims actually killed people who offended them the left quickly shut up about Islam and focused all of their "bold" and "intrepid" critiques on Christianity for which they knew there'd be no reprisals and no price to pay, only the adulation of their peers who would lavish admiration upon them for their great courage in embarrassing Christianity and making Christians look like simple-minded or deluded fools.

Their bravery is breathtaking.

Liberal Failure Is Republicans' Fault?

For sixty years Detroit has been run by the Democrat party which has governed according to a liberal tax and spend philosophy. The result is the worst case, but not the only case, of urban blight and economic mismanagement in the nation.

For sixty years the city has been doling out big salaries to city employees and generous pensions to city government retirees. When times were good and the auto industry was prospering the city could afford it, but several factors conflated to cause Detroit's finances to plummet. The auto industry, suffering in part from foreign competition found itself struggling to stay afloat. A changing demographic in the city was accompanied by soaring crime rates. Crime, high taxes and a recession all drove people out of the city. The population went from over 1.8 million in 1950 to about 750,000 today and many of the residents who remain consume benefits and services but don't pay taxes.

In short, the city can't pay its bills, can't pay those ample pensions, and can't maintain government services. The man in charge of fixing the problem, Kevyn Orr, tried to get unions and others to whom the city owes money to accept a cut but they refused. The city was left with one option, bankruptcy, which will allow it to renegotiate those contracts, but everybody is going to wind up taking a substantial hit.

One might think that the lesson to be learned here is that enacting high taxes to pay bloated pension benefits coupled with all of the unpleasantness associated with a burgeoning criminal class makes for a very poor quality of life, but amazingly the left is blaming conservative fiscal policies for the Detroit debacle. There hasn't been a conservative office holder in Detroit since Noah boarded the ark, but that doesn't matter. It's conservative policies which are being blamed by some liberals for Detroit's undoing.

The most brazen example of this trope is Ed Schultz who packs more subtle deception and misinformation into a few minutes than Dan Brown managed to squeeze into the entire Da Vinci Code.

What Schultz elides is that the depleted tax base of Detroit has nothing to do with conservative policies but with migration out of the city due to the utter unliveability of the place. He also fails to mention that the reason Detroit is in such a financial bind is they owe millions to public service union retirees that they don't have, can't raise, but are required to pay.

National Review's Rich Lowery offers some statistics about Detroit's crime rate, tax burden and other fruits of liberal utopianism in a fine essay at NRO. Here's part of what he writes:

The city was at the pioneering edge of urban liberalism and discovered that all the social spending in the world doesn’t deliver order, family stability, education, economic dynamism, or effective governance. In the hands of Detroit’s rotten political class, it proved inimical to all of those things.

It was the city’s dysfunction that made it unappealing to the auto companies rather than the diminished state of the auto companies that made the city dysfunctional.

GM had nothing to do with the city council promising benefits to retirees that it couldn’t possibly pay. Chrysler didn’t disgracefully mismanage city agencies. Ford didn’t disastrously degrade the city’s human capital.

[Detroit's] crime rate is five times the national average. Henry Payne notes that 80 percent of the city’s children grow up fatherless, and that of the 50 percent of black men who are high-school dropouts, more than 70 percent don’t have a job, and 60 percent have done time.

It has the highest per capita tax burden in Michigan, despite the low per capita income of its residents. It can’t even collect its taxes well. An Internal Revenue Service audit called its tax system “catastrophic.”

None of this is the product of the “creative destruction” of capitalism; it is the destructive destruction of corrupt statism.

You can watch a couple of other examples of lefties trying to blame conservatism for the collapse wrought by a half-century of liberal Democrat incompetence here and here.

One gets the impression that liberals, seeing the collapse of Detroit coming for a long time, strategized as to how they'd play it when it happened, and decided that, heck, they might as well blame Republicans because most of their base won't know any better and the one's who do will be happy to see the right get pounded for something that they had nothing to do with, anyway.

Either that or people like Ed Schultz are delusional, a possibility that should not be too hastily discounted. Hatred does that to people. Consider the story out of Florida involving a family of four that was involved in an accident a few days ago in which their vehicle overturned. Two men came to their rescue and helped them out of the car, one of whom was, of all people, George Zimmerman.

Immediately left-wingers were making all sorts of accusations, charging Zimmerman supporters with having staged the accident in order to frame Zimmerman as a hero. This is, of course, bizarre. How would average people stage an overturned vehicle, and who in the world would risk their family's lives to pull such a stunt off? One has to be either a moron or blinded by hatred in order to entertain such a theory, but some people on the left would sooner believe this than believe that maybe they had so completely misjudged George Zimmerman in the first place.

The President's Race Speech

David Brooks of the New York Times on Sunday stated that Mr. Obama's speech on race last week was one of the highlights of his presidency. In a presidency bereft of genuine highlights as has been Mr. Obama's I'm not sure how much of a compliment Mr. Brooks is bestowing. At any rate, assuming he meant it as high praise, I wish to register my dissent. I thought the speech was awful, and I shall explain why.

The Washington Post has a transcript. Here are Mr. Obama's main points with my thoughts on them interpolated:

First of all, I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.

What about Mr. Zimmerman's family, Mr. President? Their son has been repeatedly threatened with death as have they. He's in hiding and has to wear a kevlar vest when he ventures out. The parents' address has been made public by Roseanne Barr and Spike Lee, and they receive harassing and threatening calls. I can only imagine what they must they be going through, especially as they watch their son, whom they love, made the object of national hate and vilification. Why isn't the president of all Americans concerned about them? Why doesn't he call on all Americans to stop the hate?

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

Surely Mr. Obama doesn't expect us to believe that he would have been suspended from school several times for fighting, would have been found with a cache of jewelry in his possession that wasn't his, would have emulated the thug lifestyle, would have punched a neighborhood watch volunteer to the ground, jumped on him and pounded him with his fists? What is it about Trayvon Martin, aside from his drug use, that Mr. Obama thinks could have been him?

There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

This sort of demagoguery is simply beneath the dignity of the office the president. He's subtly asserting that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled even though almost everyone associated with the case insists that race had nothing to do with the events of that night. The prosecutors said it had nothing to do with it, Martin's parents said it had nothing to do with it, Rachel Jeantel said that she and Martin concluded, not that Zimmerman was profiling Martin, but that he was a homosexual predator, and no evidence has been adduced to indicate that race was at all a factor, at least in Zimmerman's mind. For Mr. Obama to poison the racial atmosphere surrounding this trial even further with this reckless remark is very disappointing.

But even if he's right, even if people do profile blacks, maybe we should ask why that is? Could the fact, if it is a fact, that there few African-American men who haven't been profiled have anything to do with the fact that there are few African American men who haven't spent time in police custody or jail for one reason or another? Could it be that non-blacks are fearful of African-American men for a reason? The same reason, perhaps, that caused Jesse Jackson to admit that when he hears a group of youths following him he's relieved when he turns and sees that they're white?

Perhaps the reason white people lock their doors when they see young black men approach is in fact the same reason that black people lock their doors when they see young black men approach. Here's a true story: Last March in Brunswick, Georgia a young white mother pushing her 13 month old child in a stroller was accosted by a 17 year-old black thug. Here's what happened:

"A boy approached me and told me he wanted my money, and I told him I didn't have any money. And he said, 'Give me your money or I'm going to kill you and I'm going to shoot your baby and kill your baby,' and I said, 'I don't have any money,' and 'Don't kill my baby.'"

The boy tried to grab her purse and opened fire when she tried to tell him she had no money, West [the young mother] said, with the shot grazing her head. She said the boy then shot her in the leg.

West continued, "And then, all of a sudden, he walked over and he shot my baby in the face."

The baby is dead. I wonder if Mr. Obama might entertain the notion for a moment that stories like that have something to do with why those locks click.

The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Here Mr. Obama seems to be saying that black people don't interpret cases like this based on the evidence. Rather than examine the evidence to see whether it justifies the verdict, he's suggesting, what they do is simply consult the history of racial disparity and conclude that racism is the explanation for any verdict that fails to satisfy their hopes.

This is either a condescending insult to the intelligence of black people or it's true, in which case it belies a fundamental simplemindedness on the part of the African-American community. Is this what the president really wished to imply?

Now, this isn't to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

This is nonsense. Black crime has skyrocketed since the 1970s. Prior to that black communities experienced rates of violence much below what they are today. There is indeed a historical context for black crime, but it's not what the President wants us to believe it is. Violence in the black community has risen in almost direct proportion to black fatherlessness, and black fatherlessness is largely a result of the liberal assault on religion, the family, and the emergence of a welfare system that fosters dependency, renders fathers superfluous, and reduces men to little more than sperm donors.

And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

What does this even mean? Is he saying that Martin was killed because he was black? Is he saying the jury acquitted Zimmerman because those six women were all racially biased in favor of the lightest-skinned of the two parties involved? The media should insist that the President clarify what he means by this.

And that all contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.

I guess this is as close as the president is going to tread to declaring that the jury was racist. How else can we understand the meaning of his words? He's telling us that had the races been reversed it would have been more likely that the shooter would have been found guilty. This is just a roundabout way of asserting that the jury was racially motivated. His words are as insulting to the women who served on that panel as they are disgraceful.

I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through, as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family. But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do.

The Martin family attorney ridiculously compared Trayvon Martin, a wannabe thug, with Emmit Till and Medgar Evers. To the extent that Mr. Obama believes Martin deserves to be honored he's making a similarly absurd comparison. The President seems to imply that Martin was just an innocent bystander in the events of that fateful evening. He's ignoring what all the evidence either showed or didn't refute, that Martin initiated the violence and that Zimmerman was defending his life.

I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government, the criminal code. And law enforcement is traditionally done at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.

What the President here seems to be saying is that, despite all that he's implied about the injustice of the trial, despite his subtle admission that this was in his mind a racially motivated hate crime, there's no evidence to support that judgment and therefore those who are getting their hopes up that Zimmerman will still swing from a tree should realize that there's only so much that can be done when the whole nation is watching and you have to follow the law.

The rest of his speech is a discussion of a couple of proposals that actually have nothing to do with the Zimmerman/Martin case. He calls, for instance, for a reevaluation of stand your ground laws, but misleads his listeners as to what stand your ground laws are.

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I'd just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

The answer is not ambiguous and the President is embarrassing himself in the eyes of everyone who has a particle of intelligence. The stand your ground laws do not grant a person the right to shoot someone who is following them in a car. They instead release a citizen from a duty to flee from an assailant, a freedom which, in the 31 states which have it, acknowledges the law-abiding citizen's right to be where he is and the right essentially to not be a coward. Martin had the right not to flee from Zimmerman, and he had the right to defend himself had Zimmerman assaulted him. He did not have the right to initiate an assault on Zimmerman, which is what he did. To the extent that Mr. Obama keeps obfuscating this point he's behaving like a demagogue.

[W]e need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?

Why is it primarily the task of the country to show that it cares about these kids? They don't need to know that they're cared for by an abstraction like "the country", what they need most of all is to be shown that their fathers care about them. They need to be shown that their fathers love them enough to marry their mothers and to stay married to them, to get a job, even if it's only menial, and to set a positive example for their sons as to what a man should be. That'd be a great start, but Mr. Obama thinks this is the government's job, which is the sort of thinking that has caused the tragic predicament of so many black boys in the first place.

And let me just leave you with a final thought that, as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I seem them interact, they’re better than we are — they’re better than we were — on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

This is the best part of his speech and I'm glad he said it. It's a fact that the left too often ignores or suppresses.

And so we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues. And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.

Precisely so, but heightening divisions is exactly what he did with this speech.

What he apparently doesn't understand is that he had an opportunity, a historic opportunity, to use this tragedy to bring us together, but instead, deliberately or not, by impugning both Zimmerman and the jury, by talking about interracial violence as if it's a "white" problem, he gave the wedge a couple of more whacks with the sledgehammer, drove it deeper, and split us further apart.

I wonder, had the races of Martin and Zimmerman been reversed and the President been white and said these things, whether the media would have praised this speech or whether it would have been seen as at best insensitive and at worst racially incendiary.

Atheism and Nihilism

Randy Boyagoda talks about atheist author David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto) in a recent column at First Things. Here's an excerpt from Boyagoda's post:

Shields writes,

“In the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?”

[Shields] appreciates the stakes of his project, the nullity and nihilism that ultimately characterize a godless existence, and challenges his readers to join him in what he regards as courageous atheism:

“[F]or many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.”

But the person writing the book isn’t done yet, nor are the people reading it, and so what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Shields wants us to seek salvation by putting our otherwise useless faith in ourselves and our reading lists, just as he has done.

“Writing as religion” he commends in a passing koan that he elaborates upon late in the book by recommending some fifty-five works “I swear by,” effectively the works that he positions as a testament to his concluding tenet: “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this—which is what makes it essential.”

So, as I understand Shields, his point is this: There is no God nor conscious existence beyond the grave. Your life is therefore no more meaningful than the life of a protozoan. We're born, we suffer, we die and that's all there is to it. There's nothing we can do about this absurd, empty, pointlessness, except read a couple of books, the best of which simply remind you that you're nothing more than a cosmic hiccup.

Well, I agree with Shields that, given his atheism, life pretty much is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I think he's correct that in a Godless world life has no objective meaning or value. Unless what we do matters forever it doesn't matter at all, and I think too few atheists either recognize or admit the fact that what they're prescribing is utter hopelessness and despair. You'd think it'd be a tough sell.

At some point in our lives we each come to an intersection. We can take the road that leads to atheistic nihilism as Shields has done, or we can take the road that leads to purpose and meaning. This road, however, requires of us that we reject atheism. What fascinates me is that there are so many who eagerly choose the first road, not because they want their lives to be a hiccup, but because they just don't want to believe in God. They're so repelled by the idea that there really is a loving creator who guarantees us life forever that they'd rather accept a depressing belief in our existential worthlessness. Why?

Some people reply that there's just no evidence for God, but this is not only untrue, it's a cop-out. Lack of evidence is not why most unbelievers don't believe. If the two roads were instead two stories, most people who disbelieve do so because they simply don't want the second story to be true. It has nothing to do with evidence.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel probably speaks for many of his fellow atheists when he wrote in his book The Last Word that, "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that."

In the movie Life of Pi an atheistic journalist is interviewing Pi because he's heard that Pi has an amazing story to tell of how he survived an ordeal at sea after the ship he was on sank. Pi tells the journalist that he's going to persuade him that God exists. The journalist encourages him to give it a shot. Pi then relates his story which seems just too fantastic to be true. It's filled with events that just don't seem credible.

He then explains that when he was finally rescued he was taken to a hospital where he was interviewed by agents of the company that insured the ship. They asked him to recount what happened to him, which he does, but they don't believe him. So he gives them another account which has no fantastic elements to it at all. This seems to satisfy them and they leave. Pi then asks the journalist which story he prefers, which one does he wish to be true, and the journalist replies that he likes the first one, the one in which incredible things happened. Pi then says to him, "So it is with God."

After all the arguments and the evidence have been articulated and exhausted we often wind up believing the story we want to be true. If Shields doesn't believe in God, I suspect that, like Nagel, deep down he simply doesn't want there to be a God in the first place. He'd rather live by a story that makes his life nothing more than the fizz on the head of a beer than accept that the universe is the creation of a divine artist. He prefers the story that leads to emptiness and despair rather than the one that leads to beauty, love, and hope.

Sometimes I think that that is just perverse.

Absence of God and Shaw's Two Percent

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that, "Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety five percent of the people would rather die than think."

Whatever the exact percentages may actually be Shaw's probably not far off the mark. Most people have the same aversion to thinking that a cat has to water. Even so, let's acknowledge, though it may be unseemly to do so aloud, that Viewpoint readers are surely in the two percent.

Because I'm so convinced of that I'm urging any of our readers who may be planning on heading to the beach this month or next to consider taking along a copy of In the Absence of God. It makes entertaining beach reading, but most importantly it'll make you think. You'll come off the beach smarter and wiser than you were when you settled under the umbrella.

You can read more about Absence by clicking on the link at the top right of this page. I hope you read it. If you do, I hope you like it, and if you do, I hope you'll tell others about it.

Talking about the Issue

President Obama on Thursday opined on the George Zimmerman trial in a speech that cries out for deconstructive analysis of what it tells us about the president's mindset, but that will have to wait until next week. For now I just want to follow his urging to talk about the relevant racial issues. “I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching,” he said.

Okay, Mr. President, here is some soul-searching. I'm going to focus on one aspect of the incident. I want to talk about what drove this story.

In my opinion (and it's only that. I certainly can't prove it, and I'm open to contrary views, but I believe it's true), this story became a national sensation because of the desire among liberals, both black and white, to find confirmation of their conviction that whites are inherently racist.

The fact that there has been so little substantive evidence of white racism over the last few decades is a perplexing and frustrating challenge to this their most cherished racial dogma, especially since almost every example of racism anyone could point to over that span was exhibited by a liberal, and almost every example of interracial violence that has turned up on the back pages of the newspapers was perpetrated by blacks. These inconvenient truths have made it very difficult to sustain the narrative that racism is endemic to, and pervasive among, whites.

Thus liberals of both races are eager to find an example of white racist violence to which they can point to prove to themselves and others that that's where the evil really lies. And every time they've thought they had their proof it turned out to be fool's gold. The Duke lacrosse team case, the numerous instances of racially hateful graffiti that were eventually discovered to have been scrawled by troubled blacks, the bogus accusations of white assaults on blacks, the many imagined slights and acts of prejudice that have other, more plausible, explanations - all of these have been miserable, embarrassing disappointments. They need something substantive to give impetus to the myth of ubiquitous white racism, but nothing can be found save perhaps the overreactions of a relative few police officers (some of whom are themselves black).

So the Zimmerman story seemed like a godsend to them. They wanted Zimmerman to be guilty, he just had to be guilty. The facts weren't in yet, but, as with the Duke lacrosse players, that didn't matter. It was their truth that Zimmerman was guilty. It was true for them. The narrative had purchase, it resonated in their communities, and they were stunned and outraged when the jury didn't see it the same way.

When the dogma of Zimmerman's culpability began to fall apart the media resorted to lies and innuendo to shore up their faith in the doctrine of white racism, even to the point of maliciously editing audio tapes and giving the Hispanic Zimmerman a new racial identity as a white. All that mattered was the need to reaffirm the narrative, to reinforce the faith, to prove to the doubters that one's worldview is true after all, even if an innocent man must be sacrificed in order to satiate the need for confirmation.

If the prosecutors couldn't make a case for 2nd degree murder then, they pleaded, convict him of manslaughter, child abuse, anything, but convict him of something. He must pay whether he as an individual is guilty or not because he's a synecdoche for the whole oppressive white racial establishment. He's a symbol of white privilege. He's guilty because he's white.

When the jurors did their duty and announced that they could find no reason to declare Zimmerman guilty of anything, liberals were incredulous and aghast. After all, what could they say? The jury was comprised of six women, and no liberal is going to open himself to charges of "waging a war on women" by impugning the integrity of an all-female jury. That war is a war only conservatives are supposed to be fighting.

So blacks poured into the streets, some happily fulfilling the low expectations in which they are held by many non-blacks by forming mobs which randomly beat people and damaged property. The odious Mr. Sharpton made his appearance, as he always does, to stir the pot of racial resentment. Jesse Jackson absurdly declared that Florida is an "apartheid state." An AP reporter moronically tweeted that the verdict means that black children can now be shot with impunity just for being black. Melissa Harris-Perry at MSNBC fretted bizarrely that it "feels very much as though [the jury] is saying it is acceptable, it is ok, to kill an unarmed African-American child who has committed no crime." Her colleague Chris Matthews pompously presumed to apologize to blacks on behalf of the entire white race for the verdict. It seems that the Zimmerman trial has caused liberals to take complete leave of their senses.

Mr. Obama has now weighed in with laments about how black kids, including himself when he was younger, are scrutinized in stores and avoided on the streets as if this is somehow indicative of white hostility to blacks. Perhaps Mr. Obama ought to experience what it feels like to be a shop-owner in a black neighborhood or a white kid walking down the streets in some neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or D.C.

I'm reminded of the observation of one prominent American who once admitted that when he hears a group of young men approaching him from behind he's relieved when he turns and sees that they're white. That was Jesse Jackson who said that.

Nevertheless, anecdotes abound about how black mothers caution their youngsters to be wary of white people as though this is somehow dispositive of white racism rather than black mythology or self-delusion. As Heather McDonald points out in an excellent piece at National Review, given the horrifying statistics on black violence, if black parents are really concerned about their children's safety they should do everything they can to move to a white neighborhood.

Much of the commentary, especially from liberal redoubts like MSNBC and CNN, has been predictably stupid, but the most sickening aspect of the whole awful, tragic episode for me is the lengths to which the media, the prosecutors, some politicians, and the mob have been willing to go to see Zimmerman hung. The complete ease with which they assumed his guilt before there was any evidence of guilt. He was "white" and Martin was black and that was all the evidence that a lot of people needed, and that's as saddening as it is unjust.

So, Mr. President, that's what I think, and I'll bet that a lot of decent, intelligent folks in this country, white and black, think the same way. Too bad none of them are writing your speeches.