The Camel's Nose

One of the major problems in philosophy, particularly for those of a materialist disposition, is what is called the "hard problem" of consciousness, i.e. how do the material structures of the brain translate physical stimuli into an immaterial sensation (a quale). What, in fact, is a "sensation" anyway? How, for example, does the experience we call "sweet" arise from the interaction of sugar molecules with sensory neurons?

The materialist assumption has been that since the brain is a physical structure, and since everything that happens in the brain can be explained in terms of chemistry, conscious experience must be ultimately explicable in terms of chemical reactions in the cells of the brain. Unfortunately, for materialism this assumption just doesn't seem to be supported by the science.

In a lengthy review of a pair of books on the subject, neuroscientist Raymond Tallis explains why. Here's an appetizer for those who may be interested in the subject:

The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between human life in the library or the operating theatre and animal life in the jungle or the savannah are more apparent than real: at the most, matters of degree rather than kind.

These beliefs are based on elementary errors. Just because neural activity is a necessary condition of consciousness, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of consciousness, still less that it is identical with it. And Darwinising human life confuses the organism Homo sapiens with the human person, biological roots with cultural leaves. Nevertheless, the coupling of neuromania and Darwinitis has given birth to emerging disciplines based on neuro-evolutionary approaches to human psychology, economics, social science, literary criticism, aesthetics, theology and the law.

These pseudo-disciplines are flourishing in academe and are covered extensively in the popular press, in articles usually accompanied by a brain scan (described by the writer Matt Crawford as a "fast-acting solvent of critical faculties"). Only last month, David Brooks asserted in the New Yorker that "brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy".

If one is wedded to the belief that the physical is all there is then, of course, the phenomena we associate with consciousness just have to be ultimately reducible to chemical processes, but what if they're not? That would imply that there's more to reality than just material "stuff", and that would be very unsettling to those who have invested their entire professional careers in trying to provide justification for a materialist or naturalistic worldview.

If there really are immaterial entities like minds which somehow interact with brains in producing the effects of consciousness then what else might there be lurking about "out there"? Immaterial mind is the nose of the supernatural camel pushing its way into the tent of naturalism. It's a very unwelcome camel, and it'll do a lot of damage to the furniture once it gets in.

Surprising Numbers

George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center summarizes a recent report from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research which has published their annual "Status of Global Mission". The report, says Weigel, is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative:

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines "martyrs" as "believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility." The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every twenty-four hours over the past decade, such that "the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately one million." Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33% of world population -- a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7%), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5%). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attenders, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or "worship centers," up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

Compared to the world's 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: as of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every twenty-four hours.

This is indeed interesting. We're often led to believe that atheism is growing, and perhaps it is in America and Europe, but, on the other hand, perhaps those reports of an ascendent atheism are overblown. I wouldn't be surprised. Atheism offers its adherents little more than a hopeless, empty life with no ultimate explanation for the universe, no ground for moral conviction, and no basis for human worth, dignity, or rights. Nothing but the prospect of meaningless life followed by eternal annihilation. Little wonder their numbers are declining.

We're also sometimes given to believe that Islam is burgeoning and will swamp the world in terms of sheer numbers before too long, but if this report is accurate Islam is actually losing ground vis a vis Christianity.

Weigel offers much more detail at the link and readers interested in this report should check it out. He closes with this:

The Big Lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain's famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in western Europe, but it's on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism -- displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict's September 2010 visit to Great Britain -- may have something to do with the shrewder atheists' fear that they're losing, and the clock is running.

All this may be true on a global scale, but it's hard to escape the feeling that here in the United States the trends are less hopeful. Much of the growth of Christianity, at least a Christianity more muscular than the nominal nebulosity of much mainstream religion in America, is occurring in the third world. Perhaps we'll soon be receiving their missionaries here, coming to convert the heathen. Wouldn't that be ironic?

Live Ammo in Madison

Law enforcement authorities discovered dozens of rounds of live ammunition outside the Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin this morning:

Dane County deputies found 11 rounds near the State street entrance Thursday morning, said UW-Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling. Twenty-nine rounds were found near the King Street entrance, and one round was found near the North Hamilton Street entrance, Riseling said.

Well, of course. Wasn't there a group of tea-partiers there a week or so ago? Who else would be bringing firearms to a political protest? Surely not the gentle folks of SEIU or any of the other leftist groups who populated the grounds throughout the last two weeks. Progressives, as we all know, abhor guns and violence.

Snyder v. Phelps

Not being familiar with the relevant case law I'm loath to comment on the Supreme Court's ruling in Snyder v. Phelps. I certainly sympathize with Mr. Snyder who, while grieving a son killed in Iraq, had the young man's funeral service disrupted by the truly execrable people from Westboro Baptist church led by Mr. Fred Phelps.

Mr. Snyder sued Phelps and his church and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court which just ruled on Wednesday in favor (8-1) in favor of Phelps. The majority decided that the First Amendment gives people the right to engage in disgusting behavior and to make complete asses of themselves.

The majority may be right, for all I know, but Samuel Alito's dissent was very compelling, and, in my untutored opinion, superior to the argument of the majority. Here's a summary of the heart of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts. I've omitted the legalese to make it easier reading, but the complete ruling can be read here:

Whether the First Amendment prohibits holding Westboro liable for its speech in this case turns largely on whether that speech is of public or private concern, as determined by all the circumstances of the case. [S]peech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values and is entitled to special protection.

Although the boundaries of what constitutes speech on matters of public concern are not well defined, this Court has said that speech is of public concern when it can be fairly considered as relating to any matter of political, social, or other concern to the community, or when it is a subject of general interest and of value and concern to the public.

A statement’s arguably inappropriate or controversial character . . . is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.

To determine whether speech is of public or private concern, this Court must independently examine the content, form, and context, of the speech as revealed by the whole record. In considering content, form, and context, no factor is dispositive, and it is necessary to evaluate all aspects of the speech.

The “content” of Westboro’s signs plainly relates to public, rather than private, matters. The placards highlighted issues of public import—the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of the Nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving the Catholic clergy—and Westboro conveyed its views on those issues in a manner designed to reach as broad a public audience as possible. Even if a few of the signs were viewed as containing messages related to a particular individual, that would not change the fact that the dominant theme of Westboro’s demonstration spoke to broader public issues.

The “context” of the speech—its connection with Matthew Snyder’s funeral—cannot by itself transform the nature of Westboro’s speech. The signs reflected Westboro’s condemnation of much in modern society, and it cannot be argued that Westboro’s use of speech on public issues was in any way contrived to insulate a personal attack on Snyder from liability.

Westboro had been actively engaged in speaking on the subjects addressed in its picketing long before it became aware of Matthew Snyder, and there can be no serious claim that the picketing did not represent Westboro’s honestly held beliefs on public issues. Westboro may have chosen the picket location to increase publicity for its views, and its speech may have been particularly hurtful to Snyder. That does not mean that its speech should be afforded less than full First Amendment protection under the circumstances of this case.

Alito opens his dissent with this:

Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case.

Petitioner Albert Snyder is not a public figure. He is simply a parent whose son, Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, was killed in Iraq. Mr. Snyder wanted what is surely the right of any parent who experiences such an incalculable loss: to bury his son in peace. But respondents, members of the Westboro Baptist Church, deprived him of that elementary right. They first issued a press release and thus turned Matthew’s funeral into a tumultuous media event. They then appeared at the church,approached as closely as they could without trespassing,and launched a malevolent verbal attack on Matthew and his family at a time of acute emotional vulnerability.

As a result, Albert Snyder suffered severe and lasting emotional injury. The Court now holds that the First Amendment protected respondents’ right to brutalize Mr. Snyder. I cannot agree.

Read the rest of his reasoning at the link. Whose side the law is on I can't say, but I'm pretty sure that the hearts of 99.5% of Americans are in agreement with Justice Alito and Mr. Snyder.

Anyone who would do what these Westboro Baptists did, people who call themselves Christians but who behave in the most unChristlike fashion imaginable, don't deserve the victory they won yesterday.

Intervening in Libya

Libyan rebels are calling for America to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and to attack from the air the camps of murderous African mercenaries. This would, of course, be an act of war against Libya. Moreover, we would be intervening in a civil war. Why would we want to do this? What's the upside?

The humanitarian concerns are certainly compelling, but it was humanitarian concerns that led us into Somalia, and that didn't work out so well. If there was genocide being committed in Libya, if the oil fields were at risk, or if Libya was harboring active terrorists there'd be a strong case for intervention, but I don't know that any of these obtain, at least not yet.

If, however, conditions change and we find that citizens are indeed being slaughtered or that Ghadafi's forces are torching the oil fields, and the Obama administration opts for intervention they should do so only if the following are met:

• Other Arab and NATO nations participate in military operations.
• We have United Nations approval.
• We have ultimate authority for how operations are conducted (to avoid another Somalia which was a disaster because we were under a timid U.N. authority).
• Arab states pay the cost.
• We get Ghadafi, if he survives, to put on trial for the murder of the passengers on Pan Am 103.  

We've spent trillions of dollars and a ton of blood liberating Kuwait, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq from tyranny and have largely gotten nothing but contempt from the Muslim world for our sacrifice. The imperative to rescue those who are being tyrannized is strong, but it's time for the rest of the Arab world, which is awash in cash, to both finance and to contribute materially to the cause. If we can reduce the long-term bloodshed we should, but the world can no longer expect us to both supply the firepower and manpower and foot the bill as well.

Especially when the Arab world is sitting on trillions of our petrodollars.

Admiring the Unadmirable

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey informs us that Judicial Watch has finally been able to obtain from the FBI unredacted files on the late Senator Ted Kennedy. They're not pretty. Add to what's in these files the Senator's chronic cheating while in college, his deplorable conduct at Chappaquiddick, and what he's widely believed to have done with former senator Chris Dodd and a waitress at the La Brassierie restaurant in D.C., and one can only be deeply disappointed that so many liberals consider this man to be something of a political hero.

The irony is that Kennedy is an icon in the liberal pantheon while Richard Nixon, whose offenses were no worse, and perhaps much less so, is a villain.

What is the standard by which we judge the quality and character of our leaders? Is it simply their ideological allegiance? We ought to be much more fair-minded, more objective, more honest than that. Otherwise, how credible is our opinion?

Perhaps we should ask ourselves, when we read about how any particular leader on our side of the political spectrum has acted, what we would think if we read the same thing about someone on the other side. Would we give that person a pass? If not, we shouldn't extend one to the guy on our own side either.

I find myself wondering about this with respect to my fellow conservatives almost anytime I hear Sean Hannity's radio show. What would his conservative admirers think if some liberal talk show host was as rude, arrogant and just plain dumb as Hannity often is (I'd add pompous, but compared to Bill O'Reilly, Hannity's pomposity fades almost to zero)? I think they'd be outraged, as they often are by Chris Matthews and other hosts at MSNBC, but Matthews is just a liberal mirror image of Sean Hannity.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King let's measure people by the content of their character and not by the color of their ideology or the political party to which they belong. Let's judge them by the same standard by which we judge the people on our own side and vice versa.

One More Story

I didn't want to do any more posts on this topic for a while, but when I read this I thought I should share it. So here's one last story from a reader about how broken our welfare system is:

I also work in the medical field posting payments and am blown away at the number of people on government based insurances. With that said, I am not saying it is right or wrong, but I feel that the government needs to crack down more on this issue. I have a Unison [state insurance benefit for children] for my oldest daughter right now as a third insurance because last year she was placed into an eating disorder hospital that I later found out was out of my network (for her father's and my insurance) so I was recommended by the hospital to try to apply for Medical Assistance. After much reservation I did it only as a last resort. I do have to say in my situation, it was a good decision because I have been able to qualify for intense one on one and family therapy that I could only receive through Medical Assistance.

I received my renewal notice from the government at the beginning of the year and I filled the paperwork out completely. I have a very dear friend (that receives help from the government) read over my paperwork to make sure I had all of my information correct and included and some of the things I included she told me, "Don't include that, it's none of their business how far you go to work or how much you get in child support". I told her that I needed to include all of that because they have a right to know if they are helping me out.

The very dear friend that I am talking about lives in Section 8 housing, is raising 3 kids alone (the fathers are either in jail or give no support), working full time and goes to school part time. She receives food stamps, repair bills on her car (they reimburse a certain amount of money every 6 months depending on the extent of work that needs done, regular maintenance is not included however), and other benefits. I don't have an issue with the benefits she receives because she is working and taking care of her kids. What bothers me is that her kids always have new Nike shoes, new clothes (from stores such as Aeropostale), and she also buys herself fancy purses. I know that everyone should be entitled to buy things, but if she is receiving all of this assistance, how is that fair to people that are barely making it without the assistance?

I have one last thought on the system and people taking advantage. Most of the women in my husband's family are on public assistance and disability. Some of them have children that are disabled, some of them have disability on themself. This bothers me because all of his female relatives except one are perfectly healthy and ok to get a job, they just choose not to because it's easier to sit at home and collect their money. The majority of their reasoning is they are obese and can't work. I have an issue with that because there are a lot of people that are obese that are working every week. The family member that has the children with disabilities, I have major issues with because the kids are taken care of, but she's out playing Bingo every week, bought a big screen TV, and is always blowing money. She is also unemployed and needs to get a job, but doesn't want to. I guess I just want to know, when is the government going to step in and do something about the people that take advantage of the system?

In closing, I might sound like a hypocrite because I have a government insurance, but that is the only government assistance I receive. I did not apply for food stamps or anything else because I feel that I can afford groceries and such on my own and there may be someone else out there more deserving than me.

I think it can be said that our country has sacrificed justice to an ersatz compassion. It's a travesty that taxpayers, sometimes working two or three jobs in order to support their families and to achieve a piece of the American dream, are required by our government to also subsidize people like this reader's relatives.

The Gentleman from Wisconsin

Jim Wallis of Sojourners has called for a more civil political discourse, but I haven't heard much from him on the topic recently. Perhaps that's because almost all of the most egregious examples of incivility are being tendered by his progressive friends. Here, for example, is a story out of Wisconsin that recounts the ungentle, and ungentlemanly, behavior of one Democrat assemblyman toward a female conservative colleague:

"You're f****** dead". Nice. The guy probably lacked the courage to threaten another male this way so he showed off his manliness by threatening a woman. Pretty gutless, but of course I'm speculating.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

I know I say this all the time, but I can't help it. Just imagine the tempest there'd be in the media if a tea-partier had said this to a Democrat, especially a Democrat woman. It'd be on every news talk show, Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell would be apoplectic at MSNBC, and the New York Times, in righteous dudgeon, would be publishing scathing editorials on the awful rhetoric emanting from the right. Women's groups would be outraged at the misogynistic, abusive language directed against a woman.

But, it was a Democrat who was spewing the vulgar, violent, misogynistic hate, so the media just yawn and women's groups look the other way. Maybe they have a different standard for Democrats. Do you think?

Socialist Justice

Among the groups seeking to exploit the protest demonstrations against Republican governor Scott Walker in Madison, Wisconsin is the International Socialist Union. This video introduces the viewer to a young spokesman for the group and also takes the viewer to a seminar in which the socialist vision for the future is made clear. The future to which they aspire is not pretty, and neither is some of their language, so be advised.

The whole video is revealing, but perhaps the best part is at about 3:30 where the young socialist complains about the unimaginable working conditions at the restaurant which employs him. Take a look:

Let's understand what the Left envisions for our future. It's pretty much Cairo-like chaos for decades until they've managed to kill the golden goose of capitalism. Imagine if the spoiled brat to whom we're introduced in this video has his way. The owner of the restaurant who employs him and who has invested a lifetime building his business will have it all taken away by a bunch of minimum wage employees who have invested nothing because the oppressor owner actually dictates what they must cook and when they must show up for work.

Perhaps we should read a little about the owner of this restaurant so we can better appreciate the justice of what the socialist left wants to do to people like him:

Aaron Kennedy, the founder of Noodles, grew up on a farm with few to no connections to money. Like my friend Rob [the fellow in the video], Kennedy also studied at the University of Wisconsin. At 29, while eating at a Chinese restaurant, Kennedy had an idea, and scribbled his business plan on a napkin.

Scraping some money together from his friends and family and maxing out eight credit cards, Kennedy opened the first Noodles in his basement, and then put together a team with whom he’d build and operate 100 Noodles branches all on their own. It is now a $75 million franchise with 240 locations in 18 different states, providing jobs to over 3,000 employees just like Rob. This is what the American Dream looks like.

Under Lewis’ vision, however everything Kennedy has worked for would be taken away from him. The status he has earned for himself through his achievements would be reduced to that of one filling out an application for the very business he built from the ground up. Perhaps my imagination is limited, but at the moment I cannot imagine a greater humiliation. This is what socialism looks like.

The fellow who made this video, Christian Hartsock, offers more thoughts on it here. He's put together an important piece of journalism.

Parenthetically, I couldn't help, when reading about Aaron Kennedy and watching Rob express his outrage at Kennedy for telling him how to prepare the food in his restaurant, of why Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged has struck such a resonant chord with so many readers.

Only If Compared to the Nazis

I've recently been rereading Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong, a history of relations between Islam and the West. Lewis, now 94, is still highly regarded as one of the Western world's top authorities on the history of the Muslim Middle East and his book is an excellent account of how Arab Muslims, once the cultural leaders of the world, went into a long decline pretty much simultaneous with Europe's rise during the Enlightenment.

With Lewis' work on my mind I was thus drawn to a news story in the Daily Caller in which Lewis takes exception to much of the chatter in Washington about the benign intentions and peaceful aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood. Lewis observes that the Muslim Brotherhood is benign only if one is comparing it to the Nazis:

Historian Bernard Lewis, 94, discussed the ongoing wave of anti-government protests across the Middle East in an interview published Friday in the Jerusalem Post.

Lewis expressed skepticism of the emergence of secular democracy in Egypt, and said that Western political systems may lead to disaster in Arab countries that have long been ruled by autocrats.

“I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party,” Lewis said.

“In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster,” Lewis said of Egypt.

Throughout its history the Muslim world has been ruled by autocrats. It adopted the trappings of Western style democracy in the 19th century because it concluded that the ascendency of the West was due to its democratic forms of government, and the Islamic world felt that it had to follow that example if it was going to avoid complete extinction, but the Muslim heart has never really been in the effort.

The reason, perhaps, for this vacillation is that there is another strain of thought in the Muslim world, represented today by the Muslim Brotherhood, that holds that Muslim decline can only be reversed by getting rid of secularization and returning to rule by Islamic law. The thinking here is that God is punishing the Muslim world for having abandoned the true path, but as Lewis notes in his book, this is a bit of a hard sell when the beneficiaries of Muslim decline are the Western infidels.

At any rate, I'm no expert on the Arab world, but I would be very surprised if what emerges from the turmoil there are genuine democracies where the people are free in the sense that we in the West understand the word.

I will not be surprised if we find one autocrat replacing another, as happened in Iran in the late 70s, and the people just as tyrannized, if not moreso, as they were under the old regime.

Moreover, if this happens, I would be surprised if the new regimes were friendly to the West. In most revolutions the most ruthless and well-organized people eventually ascend to power. In Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere that would be Brotherhood-type hard-liners, more favorable to organizations like al Qaeda (which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), more hostile to Israel, and more inclined to use oil to compel compliance in the West.

I would not be surprised, as the fundamentalists consolidate their power, to see access to the Suez canal restricted, particularly for military vessels, nor would I be surprised to see a return to 70s era gas lines, coziness with China, a rapprochement with Iran, more terror attacks in Europe and the U.S., and more war against Israel.

Meanwhile, instead of seeking to make us less reliant on Middle East oil, and thus more detached from the conflicts raging there, the Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to make our involvement more necessary by preventing American oil companies from drilling in American waters.

It's one of the mysteries of this very mysterious administration.

Teachers and Farmers

I've said several times in the last week that there was something unpleasant about watching teachers in Madison last week insisting that the quality of education Wisconsin's children receive will suffer if the legislators there restrict teachers' right to collective bargaining. There's also something distasteful, I think, about demanding that the people who subsidize one's livelihood guarantee salary and benefits in excess of what they themselves enjoy.

Victor Davis Hanson, who has worked in both the private and public sector, places the issue in perspective in an article at NRO.

He begins with these ruminations:

So far the angry teachers of Wisconsin have not yet won over the public. They have not convinced the majority that, in an age of staggering budget deficits, they — or, indeed, public employees in general — must as a veritable birthright enjoy salary, benefits, and pensions on average far more generous than those of their private-sector counterparts, who make up the majority of taxpayers.

Teachers are right that the crisis transcends compensation. Yet why, others might ask, would teachers’ unions oppose merit pay? Why should someone who did not join the union still have to pay its dues? Why should the state have to collect the dues from employee paychecks on behalf of the union? Moreover, when these questions are posed amid a landscape of teachers skipping classes to protest, urging students to join them, and soliciting fraudulent doctors’ notes to cover their cancellations of classes — while their supporters in the legislature hide out to prevent a quorum and thereby subvert the democratic process reaffirmed last November — the public becomes further estranged from their cause.

All of this evoked my own memories of a teaching life juxtaposed with farming in the private sector. After receiving a Ph.D. in 1980 I returned home to work the trees and vines for five years in hopes of helping to restore a run-down farm. I then was employed first as a part-time teacher and then as a professor at California State University, Fresno, for 21 years (1984–2004). Some of that time I continued to farm on weekends and in the summers.

The experience was schizophrenic. In farming, almost everyone I met was constantly hustling — welders, independent truckers, contractors. There was no guaranteed income, no pension other than Social Security, and no health benefits of any kind. I bought a Farm Bureau–sponsored private health plan with a $1,000 deductible — catastrophic coverage that I never found occasion to use — and paid cash for doctor’s office visits. My first two children’s deliveries maxed out my Visa card.

There was no sick leave for the self-employed. A day with the flu meant the amount of work to do the next day doubled.

Personally, I agree with the NEA that merit pay is unworkable in a public school, but aside from that quibble I think Hanson makes some very important comparisons between a teacher's lot and that of the people paying his salary. It's a good read.

That Was Then

Inasmuch as neither Mr. Obama nor his comfy shoes have shown up in Madison, Wisconsin, I guess we can place this promise in the bulging "empty rhetoric" file:

Of course, security concerns make it impossible for the President to actually walk in the demonstrations, but nothing prevents him from flying out to Madison to appear in a secure venue and show solidarity with his union chums. The fact that he hasn't done so makes me wonder if private polling hasn't shown that the majority of Wisconsin voters support Governor Scott's position on cutting state spending and restricting public employees' unions right to engage in collective bargaining. President Obama can ill-afford to further alienate these voters since Wisconsin is a state he'll certainly need if he's to get re-elected in 2012.

Anecdotally, when I started teaching in Pennsylvania in 1969 annual salary for a full-time first year teacher was $6300. Taxpayers back then had a lot of respect and sympathy for the plight of teachers, but things have changed. Today the average starting salary in PA is $35,000 for 187 days of work. Throw in great medical and retirement benefits plus job security, and a lot of taxpayers are wondering why people whose salaries they pay should be better off than they are. Why, for that matter should any state employees live better than the people paying them?

Wisconsin voters decided last November that they've heretofore been very poorly represented in negotiations with the state employees' unions, so they voted to elect people who would strengthen their bargaining position. Now the unions are crying foul, but isn't that how the system is supposed to work? Whoever has the strongest bargaining position gets to impose his will on the other side. This is what public employee unions have done for half a century, but when the other side does it they talk as if this is a great national catastrophe.

If union members have a complaint it's not with the governor of Wisconsin or the state Republicans. It's with the people of the state who said last November that they've awarded their employees enough for their service, and that it's now time to stop.

Blame Game

The liberal media insists on perpetrating the myth that conservatives are racist rednecks prone to ugly rhetoric and violent behavior. This is a slander with little or no basis in fact, but that doesn't prevent some people from repeating it or the uninformed from believing it. One wonders if, when they indulge in these attempts to discredit conservatives, the left-leaning media isn't engaging in a little projection, i.e. imputing to their opponents the very behavior they observe among their friends.

After all, left-wing protests in this country, from the recent shenanigans in Madison all the way back to the Vietnam era, have been consistently vulgar and riddled with hateful messages. Some of them, the 1968 riots in Chicago and the protests of the WTO meetings come to mind, have been marked by violence and vandalism. I've never heard of a group of conservatives, even when they mass in the hundreds of thousands, as they have in pro-life rallies and the like, doing any damage to property or any violence to anyone. When the Left masses the police turn out in riot gear. When conservatives mass the police don't have to even show up. When the Left rallies it takes days to clean up the mess. When conservatives rally the place is cleaner when they leave than when they arrived.

More seriously, almost every presidential assassin or would-be assassin was a person of the Left. Almost every terrorist prior to the rise of Islamic terrorism was a person of the Left. Most home-grown terrorists today are left-wing environmentalists. This is not to say that there's no one on the right who could be violent - I guess it could be argued that Timothy McVeigh was on the right (although I think that's debatable). It's just that the ones who are from the right are the exception, not the norm.

Michelle Malkin analyzes the liberals' penchant for assuming that violent political crimes are perpetrated by conservatives or people influenced by conservatives until the perpetrator is caught and almost always turns out to be either mentally deranged, a leftist, or a Muslim extremist (Muslim extremists are often leftists). Here's her condensed history for those too young to remember or whose memories are short:

In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski's homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces" (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).

That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent and undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the "huge anti-immigrant backlash in this country" -- never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.

In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration's report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the tea party, talk radio and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. State Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak singled out tea party activists and blamed "people opposed to health care" for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democratic candidate.

In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict "Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts" in an online magazine post titled "No Suicide," which decried the "Kentucky lynching." Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed "anti-government" bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, "conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress." So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.

In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville, and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to tea party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church and airlines.

In May 2010, liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on "someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something." The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.

In August 2010, Democratic supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a "firebombing" at the congressman's St. Louis office on tea party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, who was enraged over a paycheck dispute.

Andrew Klavan gives us his own humorous take on this same subject in this video:

For more of Malkin on this topic go here.

Debt Clock

A reader named James calls our attention to a graphic that illustrates pretty dramatically just how rapidly our national debt is rising. It also shows the growth of a number of other interesting parameters such as debt per citizen and debt per taxpayer. It also offers similar information for each state. For example, did you know that roughly one out of every 12 of Pennsylvania's 12,700,000 citizens receives food stamps?

There's lots of useful information at the site. Check it out here.

Conservatism vs. Liberalism and Libertarianism

Matt Lewis makes a case for the superiority of conservatism vis a vis liberalism and libertarianism in a piece at Politics Daily. He draws the following distinctions:

Liberals tend to set up equality as the highest good. Equality is the end goal of most liberal policy. The conservative asks, "Why does that idea become valued over all others?" Equality is certainly good, but as a highest end and goal, it can lead to devastating consequences.

Likewise, the pure libertarian (as opposed to those of us who have some libertarian leanings) sets up liberty as the highest good. Liberty is the end goal of all policy. The conservative looks to the libertarian and asks, "Why does that idea become valued over all others?" Liberty is obviously a great good, but as the highest end goal, it can also lead to devastating consequences.

The conservative argues that the greatest instructor on what laws should exist in a civil society is human experience. So, it would seem libertarianism hits its own walls when it ventures out of its world of make-believe theories and steps into the world of reality.

Alternatively, traditional conservatives believe the rise and success of Western society was not merely a lucky accident or the result of a couple Enlightenment period thunderbolts, but rather the product of diligent work, trial and error, and human experience -- and in may ways the result of Christian civilization.

As such, [conservatives] argue that preserving a strong moral order -- an order that took shape over millennia -- is vitally important to a functioning society (including a functioning economic system).

There's more at the link.

Dealing with Piracy

In the wake of the tragic murders of two American couples aboard their hijacked yacht at the hands of Somali pirates an article at Strategy Page caught my eye. The piece describes some of the quiet measures shipping companies are taking to protect their vessels and crews from these predators:

As Somali pirates move farther from the coast (using stolen fishing vessels as mother ships), most shipping in the Indian Ocean is at risk of attack. In response, more ships are putting armed guards on board, even though this practice risks running into laws barring firearms on merchant ships entering their ports or territorial waters. Recently, the ICS (International Chamber of Shipping), a trade organization representing 80 percent of all shipping companies, urged its members to put armed guards on ships moving through pirate infested waters. This now includes most of the Indian Ocean between India and Africa. There are problems with this, beyond gun restrictions. Some countries forbid ships flying their flag from carrying armed guards.

None of this has stopped several private security companies from offering armed guards for ships. The security companies operate from countries that allow them (sometimes after payment of bribes) to have military grade weapons. The security teams sometimes travel unarmed to a port where they can pick up their weapons, and board the ship they are guarding. That works because some shipping companies are carrying rifles and machine-guns on board, but keeping them hidden from port and cargo inspectors.

Large merchant ships have lots of places to hide things like a dozen rifles and pistols and a few thousands rounds of ammo. Other security companies will send out a small ship with the armed men on board, and transfer them to the merchant ship in international waters. In short, no one wants to talk openly about how this security business operates. But there's a growing demand, and no shortage of security companies willing to fill the need.

This makes lawyers for shipping companies nervous, because of the risk of innocent fishermen getting shot if they approach a guarded ship in a way that makes the merchant crew nervous....But the shipping companies have reached the point where they would rather handle these lawsuits than more ransom negotiations with pirates.

Piracy in the region has been largely risk-free for the perpetrators for a decade or so. Now the shipping companies are raising the stakes for the pirates. Perhaps this will drive all but the most audacious off of their boats and back to their huts.

Illustrating Political Correctness

Dennis Prager has a very good column on the nature of "political correctness" in our society. Here's his lede:

The most common left-wing objection to the right is that it wants to control others' lives. But, both in America and elsewhere, the threat to personal liberty has emanated far more from the left. In the past generation, the left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controls are now assumed to be a normal part of life.

Through the use of public opprobrium, laws and lawsuits, Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).

Public opprobrium is known as political correctness, and it has suppressed saying anything -- no matter how true and no matter how innocent -- that offends left-wing sensibilities.

This is followed in the column with a dozen or so examples of how this suppression plays out in the culture. It's pretty good and worth a read.

More on Single Parenthood

The post titled "Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister" continues to attract thoughtful comment. Here's an example from a reader named Mike:

I am a Christian, and therefore hold to the traditional idea that sex and child rearing are intended exclusively for marriage. I have been married for almost 15 years, and my wife and I have five children. In our experience, the traditional Christian conviction of sex and parenthood only within marriage has shown itself to be true on a number of different points. One of the most important has been the well-being of our children.

All of my four school-age children attend public schools. The oldest is twelve and has recently become aware of, and been troubled by, the very unstable family lives of his friends. Some are in single-parent homes. Some have moms and dads living with boyfriends and girlfriends. Some have parents who are in the process of getting divorced. If I had not understood before I was married why marriage is so important for bringing up children, I certainly do now.

In such a churning sea of dysfunction and relational uncertainty, it is an anchor of assurance and stability to my children that they know their parents are committed to each other, for better or for worse, in sickness and health, for good times and bad, as husband and wife, till death do us part. Commitment necessarily means the elimination of certain options. Marriage commitment should mean that divorce is not an option (thus "'till death do you part"). The fact that my wife are committed to each other in this way is communicated to my children by the fact that we are married.

I have never understood a legitimate reason why a couple who is logistically and financially able to get married would choose not to. It has always seemed to me that making the choice to live together and even to have children without being married is for each person in the relationship to communicate the following to the other:

"I have strong feelings for you, and enjoy your company. I'm sexually attracted to you and want us to be sexually involved with each other. My feelings are so strong for you that I would even like for us to have a child together. But ultimately my commitment to you is based on how you make me feel. Though I don't necessarily want it to happen, I realize there may come a time in the future when my feelings for you will fluctuate, and because those feelings are the basis of our relationship, it would be good if we are able to part ways at that time without too many strings attached. So let's not make trouble for ourselves in the future by becoming husband and wife now and taking on all the potential legal burdens. I do love you, but ultimately you're not worth banking my entire future on."

I'm not saying that this is what's in the minds of all unwed parent/couples, but I do have a hard time seeing anything but this, or something like it, at work in the decision making of couples who intentionally choose not to get married. What am I missing?

Thoughts? Is Mike missing anything?

The Rape of Lara Logan

Andrew McCarthy writes at NRO that the rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan by a mob of several hundred Egyptians in Cairo is not surprising given the teaching of Islamic clerics on the subject. He cites several Muslim authorities who teach that women who fail to dress in Muslim garb are "asking for it":

Sheikh Qaradawi contends that women bring sexual abuse on themselves if they fail to conform to Islamist conventions of modest dress. Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped, an admonition echoed by Sheikh Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia.

McCarthy closes with this:

The Koran pronounces that “Allah has made men superior to women” (Sura 4:34). As documented in “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a study published by the Center for the Study of Political Islam, Mohammed declared that women are inferior to men in both intelligence and religious devotion (Bukhari hadith 1.6.301), and that women will make up most of those condemned to Hell. (Bukahri 7.62.132). Sexual abuse is encouraged not only by hadith but — as I related in discussing the recent case of a teenager flogged to death in Bangladesh — by sharia standards that make rape practically impossible to prove and subject women to a death sentence for adultery or fornication if they come forward with an accusation but cannot prove it.

Islamic scriptures endorse wife-beating (Koran 4:34 again). Female genital mutilation is rampant in the Muslim world and scripturally based.

As Caroline Glick notes, the World Health Organization reports that 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have been subjected to this form of barbarism.

This despicable treatment is fortified by standards that treat women’s testimony as inferior to men’s, permit men to marry up to four women, and deny women the right to hold many public offices — particularly those that involve the construction of Islamic law and issuance of fatwas.

The unmistakable message at the core of sharia is that women, like non-Muslims, are less than fully human.

There is a fundamental chasm between the Western worldview and that of the Muslim world. It's a difference that cannot be bridged simply by dialogue. Indeed, it's a difference that probably can't be bridged at all inasmuch as Muslims demand that the West compromise its values and adopt theirs, and that until such a capitulation occurs there'll never be peace between the two worlds. In other words, there'll be jihad until the whole world is Islamic and living under a law that looks the other way when Muslim men rape women whose dress is insufficiently decorous.

The Western world, stumbling along on the rapidly diminishing capital of its Christian heritage, still nevertheless places a premium on the values of love, forgiveness, and compassion. The Islamic world, on the other hand, values, or at least too often appears to value, hate, vengeance, and cruel punishment. It's unfortunate but it's hard to imagine how these twain could ever meet.

On a somewhat related note a representative of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) took the occasion of a recent town hall meeting to challenge newly-elected GOP congressman Allan West (an Iraq war vet) to show where it says in the Koran that Muslims should kill Americans - a claim that West had allegedly made.

The man was posing a specious challenge, obviously, and West made light work of the fellow's pretension, to the great delight of the crowd at the meeting:

It seems that the November 10th election has ushered into political office an entirely new class of politicians, a group of men and women who are not inclined to be deferential to "aggrieved" minorities and who know how to exert leadership.

What's Wrong with Public Employee Unions?

David Brooks has a pretty good piece at the New York Times on the battle going on in Wisconsin between the GOP and the public employees' unions. Brooks notes that public employees and private employees are two disparate species, and their unions are different as well. Brooks writes:

[P]ublic sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.

As a result of these imbalanced incentive structures, states with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises. They tend to have workplaces where personnel decisions are made on the basis of seniority, not merit. There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury.

In other words, when public employee unions negotiate with state legislators and governors they're often bargaining with people who owe their careers to the very people sitting across the table. In such an environment the taxpayer doesn't stand a chance. The public employees' unions bankroll the campaigns of Democrats with their contributions and get them elected through their votes. What are the chances that the Democrats are going to care more about the well-being of the taxpayer than of the union to which they owe their livelihood?

The problem is compounded by the fact that the benefits politicians award the unions in return for their support are often long-term goodies like pensions, etc. which won't come due until long after the politicians have retired.

The whole system is a scam on the people who pay taxes, and the ruckus in Wisconsin and elsewhere is due to the fact that Republicans are refusing to play the game any longer. The unions recognize that Wisconsin is simply the nose of the camel, that if they lose their ability to engage in collective bargaining over pensions and working conditions they'll no longer have the power to extort even more benefits from the hapless taxpayer by threatening to withhold services.

This is the problem with a public employee union (I belonged to one myself for a number of years). It's unjust to hold taxpayers hostage to the demands of the union. It's unjust for teachers to hold the education of children hostage. It's unjust for police and fire personnel to hold the safety of citizens hostage, and it's unjust for state workers to hold the checks of the elderly and poor hostage. Workers should have the right to strike against a private corporation, they should not have the right to strike against the taxpayer. Nor should they have the right to negotiate with the very people they elevate to office over how much of the taxpayer's money they're going to be given.

Some in the media are accusing the Wisconsin Republicans of trying to break the union, but if that's what ultimately happens the union bosses will have only their own greed to blame.