Is China Crazy?

This report is big...

A report suggests that the Chinese government is pushing the general public into buying gold and silver bullion, which could have a dramatic effect on the markets.

This is an absolutely fascinating report. Just yesterday I was making the case that our government mistakenly believes we can spend our way back from bankruptcy to prosperity. Now here's a government, China no less, not only advocating that the people save, but that their savings be gold and silver.

A several observations may be made about this report:

• China is recommending physical gold and silver bullion as appropriate investment and savings vehicles, not stocks, ETFs, futures, options, etc. Why do you suppose that is? Answer: because the bullion is safer than the paper. A mine can be nationalized effectively sending the value of its shares to zero. Similarly, other paper investment vehicles are only promises to pay and subject to force major and can be defaulted. These risks are very real and that's why they tend to have a higher return than the bullion. The bullion is safe, and therefore, smart.
• China wouldn't dare make such recommendations if they didn't have confidence that gold and silver would be profitable as well as be a safe store of their wealth. Note that the Chinese people buying gold and silver will probably make the recommendation something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• China wants to become an economic super power. One of their tactics to accomplish this is to steadily swap their enormous dollar holding for raw materials thus turning worthless dollars into real assets. But they know a nation can hardly achieve such a goal if the majority of its people live in poverty. China knows the fast track to wealth for its citizens is through gold and silver, especially in the years ahead as the Western economies inflate their currencies into oblivion and crash and burn.
• This offers at least one explanation for why China continues to purchase our US Treasuries or at least hasn't dumped them yet - they are, in effect, supporting the dollar which in turn suppresses the price of gold making it relatively affordable for many Chinese. After, they start buying en masse though, the price will become prohibitively expensive if any of the metal is even available at all.

Now we have to wonder, why doesn't our government encourage us accordingly?

The Company We Keep

The Obama administration has populated itself with some of the most radical extremists ever to step onto the stage of our political life. We've talked on previous occasions about the worrisome views of men like John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel, and David Blumenthal (see here and here)

The latest to come to light is a communist by the name of Van Jones who is President Obama's "Green Jobs" czar. Jones may be the most radical of the bunch.

Here's an audio clip that reveals something of the kind of man Van Jones is and what his ambitions for this country are. The short of it is that he seems to want to turn America into Cuba:

Jones also believes that the Bush administration was actually behind the 9/11 attack or at least knew it was coming and deliberately chose not to prevent it.

When conservatives fretted that Barack Obama was too cozy with people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright the media pooh-poohed their concerns. Now Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with people just like Ayers and Wright and the pooh-poohers have egg on their faces. You really can judge a man by the company he keeps.

It's deeply disturbing that such a man as Jones would be considered unexceptionable by the administration's vetters. If Jones is allowed to stay in his post after it has now become clear that he's a communist revolutionary and a fringe 9/11 "truther" then we will have learned, or confirmed, something very important, and very troubling, about Barack Obama.

RLC

Junk DNA Evidently Isn't Junk

There's a fascinating report in Science Daily. It seems that researchers have discovered that the difference between chimps and humans is due to the fact that some segments of what is called "junk" DNA, DNA that doesn't code for proteins, were somehow "switched on" in the early history of primates. The resulting proteins coded for by this newly activated DNA were responsible for the emergence of the human species:

Humans and chimpanzees are genetically very similar, yet it is not difficult to identify the many ways in which we are clearly distinct from chimps. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have made a crucial discovery of genes that have evolved in humans after branching off from other primates, opening new possibilities for understanding what makes us uniquely human.

The prevailing wisdom in the field of molecular evolution was that new genes could only evolve from duplicated or rearranged versions of preexisting genes. It seemed highly unlikely that evolutionary processes could produce a functional protein-coding gene from what was once inactive DNA.

However, recent evidence suggests that this phenomenon does in fact occur. Researchers have found genes that arose from non-coding DNA in flies, yeast, and primates. No such genes had been found to be unique to humans until now, and the discovery raises fascinating questions about how these genes might make us different from other primates.

They estimate there may be approximately 18 human-specific genes that have arisen from non-coding DNA during human evolution.

This is quite a revelation since Darwinians had long claimed that junk DNA has no function and Intelligent Design advocates had been predicting thatit would eventually be found to have a function in the cell. That there are 18 human-specific genes in what was previously thought to be genetic clutter is pretty embarrassing to Darwinism.

It's also interesting because the DNA was present in the cell prior to having any function. This is hard to square with Darwinian evolutionary theory since it suggests that the cell produced and carried macromolecules for which it had no use, a phenomenon which Darwinism disallows.

Finally, the finding fits nicely with the idea of front-loaded evolution, i.e. the theory that God laid the groundwork for biological evolution at the time of creation and that subsequent evolutionary change has simply been the unfolding of the genetic potentialities latent in life from the beginning.

Whatever the case, the news that junk DNA is not really junk should disturb those who wish to deny teleology in biology. The discovery that preexisting DNA was activated at a certain point in evolutionary history and subsequently gave rise to the human species certainly seems more compatible with a telic view of life than with the notion that evolution is purposeless and random.

RLC

The Hustle

Well, here we are in the beginning of September, notable for historically being a month in which the price of gold goes up so as we might expect, gold has been pretty perky lately. It was up around $20 per ounce yesterday and as I write this, it's up about $20 again for today. It appears that gold is attempting yet another assault on the $1000 level sometime soon.

One interesting observation is that the fundamental issues that have existed since the beginning of the gold bull market that started in 1999 have not changed and, if anything, they have gotten worse. Gold is the safe haven from geo-political and economic risk and it reflects the degree of concern at any given time.

Our government is particularly troubled about the perception of risk because people putting their money into gold are not putting their money into the economy. Since 70% of our GDP comes from the consumer, it follows they the government wants people to consume, not save. (It's ironic that excessive consumption is largely why we're in the economic mess that we are.) So it is predictable that we will see the government making every effort to instill confidence in the people about the economy. They're even rolling out VP Joe Biden to tell us about how the stimulus played a "significant role" in the recovery (in the past tense).

Yes, it's really all about confidence. Confidence in our politicians, our economy, and the strength of our dollar. The game will go on as long as there is confidence so we could accurately say this is a game of confidence or, a con game. A con game works until it doesn't. From the link:

In a sign of how times really haven't changed all that much from earlier in the decade when, in 2001, Federal Reserve Governor Laurence Meyer prodded Americans to "go out and buy an SUV" to help pull the economy out of the recession, today we have the wildly popular "Cash for Clunkers" program where, after spending like drunken sailors over the last few years leading the world into the current mess, the solution to our current economic woe is to borrow and spend even more.

The gold price reflects the degree of confidence inversely or better, we could say it reflects the lack of confidence. It's an invaluable tool for surviving and winning the con game being run on us.

The Myth of AI

There's a refreshingly contrarian view at New Scientist to all the claims that machines will soon be as intelligent as humans and that humans will eventually be almost indistinguishable, intellectually, from machines.

Noel Sharkey is a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and he's very skeptical that we will ever succeed in creating machines that can think like human beings. Here's part of a recent interview he gave:

What do you mean when you talk about artificial intelligence?

I like AI pioneer Marvin Minsky's definition of AI as the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. However, some very smart human things can be done in dumb ways by machines. Humans have a very limited memory, and so for us, chess is a difficult pattern-recognition problem that requires intelligence. A computer like Deep Blue wins by brute force, searching quickly through the outcomes of millions of moves. It is like arm-wrestling with a mechanical digger. I would rework Minsky's definition as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent.

Are machines capable of intelligence?

If we are talking intelligence in the animal sense, from the developments to date, I would have to say no. For me AI is a field of outstanding engineering achievements that helps us to model living systems but not replace them. It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself.

Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient?

I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

The rest of the interview is at the link.

The danger many people see in the idea of machines having innate intelligence is that it blurs the distinction between human and machine. If humans are not essentially different from machines then humans become de-humanized. When humans lose their uniqueness and are considered to be "just animals" or "just machines" then there's very little reason not to manipulate them and exploit them just as we would animals or computers. Dehumanization always leads to tyranny.

Humans have dignity and worth because they're uniquely created in the image of God. They have intelligence and reason because they were endowed with these gifts by God. To the extent that a machine could be made to think it is only because it was endowed with this ability by an intelligent programmer. As Sharkey says, "It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself."

RLC

The Starry Heavens Above Me

There are some lovely astronomical photos and other shots of the night sky at this site. Here's one:

Looking at the pictures I'm reminded of the words of Immanuel Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and more earnestly I think of them - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Indeed, its hard for me to understand how someone could contemplate either without at least wondering whether God exists.

RLC

Jason and the Socialists

Jason Mattera really is a piece of work. For those who aren't familiar with him, he's a young political conservative who masquerades as a left-winger at various progressive rallies and demonstrations. The results are often hilarious. Here he's "undercover" at a pro-health care reform rally:

For more of Jason's escapades use the search button and type in Jason Mattera in the search field.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Of Course They Work

Anyone who still believes that what the CIA euphemistically calls enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) don't work needs to read this article in the Washington Post.

The anti-EIT absolutists (those who believe that EITs are always wrong and never justified) have pretty much lost the moral argument with the American people. Most of those who think about it would affirm that if their child's life could be saved by applying physical or psychological pain to those who threaten her then by all means have at it. Having failed to convince the American people that they are morally perverse for placing the well-being of their children above the well-being of a murderous thug the absolutists fall back on the argument that EITs don't work anyway and therefore should never be employed.

This argument has always carried with it more than a whiff of implausibility (after all, how do we know they don't work unless we use them?) The WaPo article, however, strongly suggests that they do indeed work. It turns out that Sheik Kalid Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, after having been subjected to milder forms of interrogation to no effect, was then allowed to experience the bracing effects of sleep deprivation and waterboarding after which he pretty much ratted out the entire al Qaeda network in the U.S. Here's one relevant section of the piece:

Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis "to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York." Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad.

"Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of whom we had never heard of before -- that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations," according to the CIA summary.

Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda's strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in "considerable detail the traits and profiles" that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States.

All of this information and more saved countless lives, and it was only obtained because Mohammed's interrogators grew weary of politesse and decided to resort to measures calculated to more compellingly concentrate the minds of the terrorists. Of course, this won't matter to the absolutists who are apparently willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of innocents on the altar of their own narrow-minded, dogmatic concept of inviolable human rights.

RLC

Miscarriage of Justice

Why, opponents of capital punishment sometimes ask, can we not be satisfied with putting criminals in prison for life? Why must we execute them? One reason, perhaps, can be found in the case of Phillip Garrido, the man arrested for the kidnapping, imprisonment, and rape of 11 year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago.

It turns out that on the day of the abduction, Phillip Garrido was on parole. He had been convicted of federal and Nevada state charges in connection with a Nov. 22, 1976, incident when he was 25 and kidnapped a woman, drove her to a warehouse in Reno and sexually assaulted her. Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison and five years to life in Nevada prisons. But, after stints in federal prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Lompoc, as well as a Nevada state prison, he was released on lifetime parole in 1988.

Having served less than twelve years of a minimum 50 year sentence, Mr. Garrido was released to inflict more horror on a girl and her family whose lives have been ruined by this man and by a system which seems indifferent to the people who must live with such monsters among them.

Whoever was responsible for this man's release, a judge or parole board or whoever, should be held liable for his crimes. If you or I, through an exercise of poor judgment, were to be responsible for harm befalling another person we would be liable and would probably lose all we have in lawsuits brought against us. Just so it should be possible to bring suit against those whose poor judgment results in crimes against others. The best way to stop early release of criminals from prison is to hold those who make those judgments financially accountable for their decisions.

RLC

Subsidizing Abortion

We've seen that the Democrats' health care proposals, despite insistent denials, would indeed cover care for illegal aliens and would also have government bureaucrats making decisions about who gets what treatment, especially at the end of life.

Now it turns out that supporters of the Democrat plan are acknowledging that yet another serious concern about the plan is well-founded. The plan currently before Congress would, as opponents have alleged, pay for abortions.

Pro-lifer Jim Wallis, an Obama booster, claimed on CNN's Lou Dobbs show that the Congressional plan would indeed cover abortions. However, he goes on to say, incorrectly, that the President doesn't want his plan to do that. In fact, contrary to what Wallis believes, the President has made it clear that he definitely does want abortion to be covered:

One of the reasons so many people are so mistrustful of our political leadership, especially on the issues being advanced by this administration, is that it seems the claims made by supporters of the President are too frequently out of phase with the President's own words. Indeed, it's not uncommon for the President himself to contradict things he had said on previous occasions. There may be reasons for this, it may not be deliberate dishonesty, but if the President is going to regain the confidence of the people he needs to be consistent in what he says. Otherwise, confidence in his word will continue to fade among the American electorate.

RLC

Lycan on Materialism and Dualism

William Lycan is a materialist philosopher, i.e. he rejects the dualist view that there are two fundamental essences to reality - matter and mind. He believes that matter is all there is and that mind is just a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain.

Nevertheless, in an upcoming paper he acknowledges that, though it pains him to say it, materialism is little more than a prejudice. The arguments for materialism, he notes, are no better than the arguments for dualism:

I mean to have shown here that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. Nor have we seen any good argument for materialism. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism.

Yet, I am inclined to believe, the charge of implausibility is not irrational or arational either, and I would not want this paper to turn anyone dualist. Have a nice day.

In the paper Lycan observes that the strongest argument against dualism is the incomprehensibility of two fundamentally disparate substances, mind and matter, interacting in the brain to produce mental phenomena. It's hard to imagine how an immaterial substance like mind could act causally on matter. Lycan doesn't think that this is much of an objection because we scarcely understand causality in the first place.

Another problem that the materialist has if he's going to cite "interactionism" as an objection to dualism is that materialists have long believed themselves that disparate entities could interact even though their interaction was incomprehensible. How, for example, does space generate quantum particles? Indeed, how does matter bend space? Whatever one's conception of space it's very difficult to conceive how such things happen. If a materialist, nevertheless, believes they do, as everyone since Einstein does, then it seems a case of special pleading to exclude mind/brain interaction on the grounds that we have no theory to explain how it could occur.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Teen Employment at Record Low

In a development which was thoroughly predictable by anyone who has thought about it fewer youth were employed in July than in any July since 1948:

The Labor Department said 4.4 million youths were unemployed in July 2009, or about 1 million more than in July 2008, putting the youth jobless rate at 18.5 percent, about double the overall national percentage. Fewer young people were even trying to be part of the labor force this year than in recent years, perhaps choosing summer school, odd jobs around the house or idleness instead.

Two factors are surely responsible for this: The first is the tight economy and the second is the recent increase in the minimum wage. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air focuses on the latter:

Since 2007, Democrats have led the charge to increase the minimum wage in the US, claiming that the poor hadn't gotten a fair shake from employers. Nancy Pelosi and the late Ted Kennedy pushed hardest for mandating increases in wages despite warnings that the net effect would be to lower employment for teens and entry-level workers while creating inflationary pressures on prices, negating the gains through loss of buying power. For the second year in a row, those predictions have come true.

It is a simple matter of common sense that if employers are required to pay their workers more money they'll try to get by with fewer workers, especially in a recession. Those lucky enough to find a job will perhaps benefit from the higher wage but millions of others will get left out. Moreover, the higher wage rate usually results in higher prices which reduces everyone's real income.

Raising the minimum wage is a lousy idea, as it increases both unemployment and inflation, but Democrats push it because it makes them popular with people who don't really think about, or care about, the hidden consequences of such measures.

RLC

Whitaker Chambers, We Need You

The Obama State Department is moving toward cutting off all aid to the country of Honduras because, they say, the Honduran military has executed a coup and deposed the elected president. This is nonsense. The Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that Manuel Zelaya should be removed from office, the legislature concurred and the military was employed to carry out the will of these two civilian branches of the Honduran government.

Zelaya had violated the constitution by calling for a referendum on whether he should be allowed to remain president when his term expired. The law calls for the immediate removal from office of a president who did what Zelaya had done and the Supreme Court ruled that the law should be carried out.

Zelaya was an anti-American leftist disciple of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and as such the American reaction to his ouster is very unsettling. Rather than looking for reasons to punish the Honduran government and the poverty-stricken Honduran people by cutting off aid, one would think that the State Department would be bending over backwards to find reasons to affirm what Honduras did.

Exit questions: Would the Obama administration cut off aid to a Latin American country which deposed a right-wing president who was seeking to secure himself in office indefinitely and aggrandize his power? Would the State Department be demanding that the right-winger be returned to office? Take as much time as you like to formulate your answers.

RLC

Thought for a Sunday

This article at www.mises.org is well worth reading.

Every variety of tyranny rests upon the belief that some persons have a right - or even a duty - to impose their wills upon other people. Tyranny may be fastened upon others by the mere whim of one man, such as a king or dictator under various names. Or tyranny may be imposed upon a minority "for their own good" by a democratically elected majority. But in any case, tyranny is always a denial - or a misunderstanding - of the mandates of an authority or law higher than man himself.

Liberty rests upon the belief that all proper authority for man's relationships with his fellow men comes from a source higher than man - from the Creator. Liberty decrees that all men - subject and ruler alike - are bound by this higher authority which is above and beyond man-made law; that each person has a relation to his Maker with which no other person, not even the ruler, has any right to interfere. In order to make these conceptions effective for liberty, they must be deeply ingrained in the fundamental values of a people. That is to say, they must be part of the popular religion. There was one people of antiquity for whom this was true, the people who gave us our Old Testament. It was among the ancient Israelites that the conviction took hold and emerged into practice that there was a God of righteousness whose judgments applied even to rulers.

...

An experiment based on those principles was launched on these shores less than two centuries ago. It was the result of a conscious effort to forge an instrumentality of government in conformity with the higher law, based on the widely held conviction that God is the author of liberty.

Our political liberties were not born in a vacuum, but among a people who had a sense of their unique destiny under God. Our religious foundation has been alluded to in a Supreme Court decision (1892, 143 U.S. 457):

This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.

Surely there was a unity of the people in their religious beliefs at the time or some other basis would have been used as the foundation for Liberty in this country. Those that espouse Diversity as being good and necessary for the health of our country are dangerous indeed. They mistakenly use the "melting pot" concept of the early immigrations to this country by Europeans to demonstrate the supposed positive effects of Diversity. The fact of the matter is these diverse groups assimilated into the culture of the U.S. within a generation. Their children were strongly encouraged by their parents to speak English to facilitate their acculturation. Their children were not hyphenated Americans (German-American, Italian-American, etc.), they were "Americans" and proud of it. Diversity is divisiveness - and it's a classic strategy employed by the Liberals to fragment our society and generate discord. Run when you hear the Liberals spewing their toxic venom of "diversity" for the Liberal is truly the axe at the Roots of our Liberty today.

Dean Tells the Truth

DNC chairman Howard Dean gives an honest answer to a question at a town hall meeting and it doesn't make his fellow Democrats look good. In fact, it amounts to calling them cowards:

The gentleman who raised the original question is absolutely correct. Calling any legislation that ignores malpractice a "comprehensive reform" is like calling prisons institutions for behavioral reform.

The Democrats don't want to offend a major contributor - The Trial Lawyers Association - so instead they try to reduce the cost of health care by demonizing insurance companies and instituting policies that are almost guaranteed to raise costs, ration care, and result in fewer people wanting to go into the medical profession. And then they want us to believe that they're doing this to benefit the American people. No wonder people are angry.

RLC

<i>1984</i> in 2009

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the pages of George Orwell's 1984 and sees a lot that reminds him of 2009. For instance, in 1984:

Perceived enemies are everywhere - supposedly plotting to undo the benevolent egalitarianism of Big Brother. Citizens assemble each morning to scream hatred for two minutes at pictures of the supposed public traitor Emmanuel Goldstein. The "Ministry of Truth" swears that the former official Goldstein is responsible for everything that goes wrong in Oceania.

Former president George W. Bush - our new Emmanuel Goldstein - remains a daily target of criticism. Diplomats continue to discuss the need to hit a "reset" button that will erase the past. Last week, the president said those in the past administration caused our present problems - and so should keep quiet and get out of his way. Bush is somehow culpable for the newly projected $2 trillion annual deficits. Bush caused the new unemployment levels to soar to nearly 10 percent. Bush's war on terrorism failed. Bush is responsible for the most recent trouble abroad with Iran, the Middle East, North Korea, and Russia.

Doublethink is common. Presidential sermons on fiscal responsibility tip us off that deficits will soar. Borrowing an additional trillion dollars to manage health care is sold as a cost-saving measure. Racial transcendence translates into more racial-identity politics, reflected both in rhetoric and in presidential appointments.

Despite the absence of another 9/11-like attack, we are still told by the new terrorism czar, John Brennan, that the old war was largely a Bush failure. Administration officials keep inventing euphemisms. Some have dubbed the war on terror "an overseas contingency operation." [And acts of terrorism are labelled "man-caused disasters"].

We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush's assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists.

Not now. These policies are no longer criticized - even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year.

If you've read Orwell's 1984 you'll enjoy Hanson's application of its themes to what we see happening in our current politics.

Thanks to Sarah for passing along the link.

RLC

Do Illegals Qualify?

President Obama has been very much put out by what he calls the distortions and myths perpetrated and perpetuated by critics of his health care reform proposals (or at least those of the House Democrats). One such set of "misrepresentations" devolves around whether illegal immigrants would be eligible for tax-payer funded health care. Defenders of the Democrats' plan insist that of course, they wouldn't, but as this piece by Mark Krikorian at NRO explains, the correct answer is that, indeed, they would. The following is taken from a press release by Rep. Lamar Smith whom Krikorian cites:

HR 3200 contains no provisions preventing illegal immigrants from participating in the Health Insurance Exchange that is to be created, including the government-run "public plan" that will be available through the federally-run and federally-subsidized Exchange.

According to CRS [Congressional Research Service]: "Under H.R. 3200, a 'Health Insurance Exchange' would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option...H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens-whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently-participating in the Exchange."

Democrats point to language in the House bill that says illegal immigrants cannot get benefits. While that may be technically accurate, it is far from the truth.

The fact is that the statement is meaningless because the bill contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants do not receive benefits. Democrats defeated amendments in two congressional committees to close this loophole, including amendments that would use the very same verification mechanism that already exists in statute for other federal programs. Why not include the same verification mechanisms in this bill as already exist for other federal benefits programs? Without the requirement that there be a verification mechanism, or a specific verification mechanism provided in statute, the Commissioner could determine that the eligibility requirements could be met either without verification or with as little as a signed attestation.

Moreover, as Smith's release goes on to explain, if one member of a family is eligible for benefits the entire family is eligible. There are millions of illegals in this country whose children or spouses are citizens and who would thus be eligible for tax-payer subsidized health care even though they are here illegally.

The piece is pretty informative. Check it out.

RLC

Evil and Open Theism

Open Theism (OT) is the view that God does not know in advance what people will freely choose to do in the future. One of the reasons some find OT attractive is that it offers a potential solution to the problem of why, if God knew the evil that this world would contain, He didn't create some other world instead that had less evil. That is, there must be an indefinite number of possible worlds God could have created, some of which would contain less evil than this one. If God knows everything that will transpire in any world He creates and if He is perfectly good then He would be expected to create the least evil world it would be possible for Him to have created, so either this world is the least evil world possible, which seems hard to believe, or God is not perfectly good, or God does not know in advance the free choices that people will make.

OT has been advanced by some philosophers as the least objectionable way out of the problem (See here for more discussion on Open Theism).

Alexander Pruss, however, doesn't buy it and offers an objection to OT at Prosblogion. Here's his criticism:

It seems to me that some folks--perhaps not philosophers--think that Open Theism (OT) somehow significantly helps with the Problem of Evil. But I do not think it does. The natural reason to think OT helps is to say that if an omnipotent God foreknows that George will freely do some evil E, then God can prevent George from doing E, and OT means that God can't foreknow it, so we can't blame God for failing to prevent E. But this is confused. For it would be impossible for God to both foreknow--or even forebelieve--E and prevent E. Foreknowledge does let God put plans for an event into effect before the event happens, but for actual prevention of foreknown evils, what would be needed is Middle Knowledge, not foreknowledge.

Pruss is arguing, I think, that God knows the choices we will make but cannot prevent them because if He does then God wouldn't know that we would make that choice because, in fact, we wouldn't make it. I don't think Pruss is right about this, though. Under most views of omniscience God knows all of the choices which would be made in every possible world, but He, presumably, creates only one. Thus, by creating only one, He prevents a myriad of choices from being made. So, under the traditional view, God both foreknows the choices made in possible worlds He doesn't create and prevents those choices by not creating those worlds.

In other words, God could have foreknowledge of the evil that would exist in this world and prevent it by not creating this world. So why did He create this world when He could have created another in which people were free to choose but more often, or even always, chose to do right? The open theist argues that in fact, the traditional view of omniscience is wrong. God doesn't know what choices free beings would make in whatever world God placed them in, and therefore, He didn't know that man would sin in this world. He knew it was possible, He knew what His response would be if man did sin, but He didn't, the open theist claims, know that it would actually come to pass that man would fall.

God created, in this view, the best possible world He could create for Man and placed Man in it with the freedom to requite God's love or reject it. When Adam underwent the temptation in the Garden all of heaven held its breath because the outcome was uncertain and when Adam succumbed all of heaven and earth was devastated by his failure. In this view, the world's evil is entirely Man's responsibility. God could have prevented it only by either not creating a world or not creating mankind with libertarian freedom. Both alternatives would have defeated the whole purpose of creating Man in the first place which was to have beings with which He could live in a significant love relationship.

At any rate, OT is not without its problems, but I don't think Pruss's concern is one of them.

RLC

Government-Run Maternity Care

If you're a young woman planning on having a family in the next ten years and you're not sure what to make of the debate swirling around nationalized health care you may find this article from the British Daily Mail Online helpful:

Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds.

The lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk as births in locations ranging from lifts to toilets - even a caravan - went up 15 per cent last year to almost 4,000.

Health chiefs admit a lack of maternity beds is partly to blame for the crisis, with hundreds of women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they are full.

It shows the incredible waste that has taken place that mothers are getting this sort of sub-standard treatment despite Gordon Brown's tripling of spending on the NHS. Labour have let down mothers by cutting the number of maternity beds and by shutting down maternity units.

The NHS employs the equivalent of around 25,000 full-time midwives in England, but the Government has promised to recruit 3,400 more. However, the Royal College of Midwives estimates at least 5,000 more are needed to provide the quality of service pledged in the Government's blueprint for maternity services, Maternity Matters.

At the same time almost half of all midwives are set to retire in the next decade.

There are more details at the link. When government controls the health care system women give birth on toilets. What a metaphor.

RLC

Somali Pirates

We haven't heard as much about piracy off the coast of Somalia lately. Part of that may be due to the fact that three pirates were killed by U.S. Navy SEALS when they took an American ship captain hostage, and some of it is due to measures that merchant crews are taking to thwart piracy. Strategy Page fills us in:

Off Somalia, 136 ships have been attacked so far this year, and 28 (21 percent) have been taken. Last year, the pirate success rate was 40 percent. Moreover, 80 percent of the attacks defeated do not involve the foreign warships now patrolling the coast. The merchant sailors, and the ship owners, have adopted defensive measures that have become remarkably successful in defeating pirate attacks. For the captain himself, the best defense is knowing what speeds and maneuvers his ship can use to keep the pirates away. Larger ships can create dangerous wakes for the pursuing speedboats, by zig zagging. Captains also have to learn how fast their ship can accelerate to escape oncoming speed boats. Normally, captains are more skilled at moving their ships at slower speeds. Putting the pedal to the metal and hot roding around the high seas is not normally part of their skill set. But that's how you avoid getting hijacked by pirates. Captains are learning, and so are their crews.

Ship captains are organizing and drilling their crews on things that can be done to keep the pirates from getting aboard. This ranges from stringing barbed wire around likely boarding points, to practicing the use of fire hoses and other tools (like long poles) to keep the ladders or grappling hooks from enabling the pirates to get aboard. These drills build confidence in the ability of the crew to defend their ship.

The sailors also now keep track of where the nearest warships are, and prepare a "safe room" (an area of the ship the crew can barricade themselves in, until help arrives.) This includes providing emergency communications in the safe room. All this takes advantage of the fact that the pirates cannot take control of the ship unless they have the crew. Usually this comes down to barricading the crew in the engine compartment. If the crew prepares for that eventuality (having a radio available to contact the warships, along with water, food and medical supplies there), just getting everyone into the engine room when it appears that the pirates are going to get on board, means that the pirates will be caught between the crew they cannot reach, and the approaching warship that can certainly reach the pirates.

This is all good as far as it goes, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to just let it be known that there are teams of armed guards on board these ships. Whether there are or not, it would certainly deter the dilletantes among the brigands and at least give pause to the more resolute careerists.

RLC