Club for Growth Whitepapers

The conservative Club for Growth is publishing thorough assessments of the fiscal record of each of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the office of President in 2012. Thus far they've critiqued Gingrich, Cain, Pawlenty, and Santorum with more to come.

Those who desire to cast an informed vote in the GOP primary elections next year can find the CFG evaluations by going here.

Helping Small Businesses

Everyone agrees that the most pressing economic task before us at the moment is to get people back to work. So it would seem that we should be doing everything we can to make life easier for the primary job producers in this nation - small businesses. The best way to encourage small businesses to hire is to reduce their costs and the best way to do that is to lower their taxes and remove onerous regulations. But there is the rub.

To suggest such a démarche to liberals is like waving garlic in the face of a vampire.

Imposing regulations and higher taxes is what makes life meaningful for liberals and to expect them to adopt conservative remedies, even to save their political careers, is to ask the tide not to come in.

The Obama administration policies seem almost purposely designed to discourage businesses from hiring workers. He has encouraged businesses to "step up" and hire, but his policies make that very imprudent for business. Here are six areas, taken from a Washington Times editorial by Rep. Sam Graves, chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, in which the policies he has embarked us upon are actually going to reduce employment rather than raise it:

Obamacare: Health Care reform will impose a half-trillion dollars in new taxes, threaten a 60 percent increase in premiums and force about 80 percent of small businesses to give up their current coverage. One provision will impose a $2,000 tax per employee on businesses with more than 50 employees that fail to offer health insurance. Reports have shown that these types of employer mandates alone could lead to the elimination of 1.6 million jobs, with 66 percent of those coming from small businesses.
Energy costs: The President continues to block production of American-made energy even though fuel prices are approaching $5 a gallon. These rising prices are leaving many small firms struggling to make ends meet. A recent survey reported that 64 percent of small businesses have incurred revenue decreases as a result of rising fuel costs.
Regulations: Government red tape costs small businesses an estimated $10,585 per employee. The total cost of federal regulations has increased to $1.75 trillion - $445 billion more than five years ago.
Tax complexity: The United States tax code is a complex document estimated to cost taxpayers and small businesses $163 billion and 6 billion hours a year to comply with its tax-filing requirements.
Tax hikes: There's enormous uncertainty in the business community as to where taxes are going in the next few years. Until employers know how much they're going to have to pay to the government they're going to continue to be reluctant to take on new workers.

If the President were serious about reversing the dismal job numbers he would act in each of these areas to mitigate the damage his predilection for progressive, big government solutions is doing to the country.

I hope he does change course, but I don't believe he will. Expensive government programs, high taxes, and burdensome regulations are all he knows. They're what he was weened on and all he heard about throughout his formative years and early professional life. Like Captain Ahab, I expect him to pursue the white whale of socialist utopia until he either destroys the ship of state or until the country mutinies votes him out of office.

The Midnight Ride

By now everyone's heard of Sarah Palin's claim that Paul Revere's ride was in part to warn the British that they were in for trouble from the colonists who would not allow them to confiscate their weapons. This assertion elicited delighted howls of derision from the Palin-obsessed quarters in the media, but it turns out that she was correct.

Here's her statement:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It turns out Ms Palin was right about this, and her critics have egg on their faces. Again. The Boston Herald solicited the opinion of historians on the matter, and here are some of the responses they received:

Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing — she was right about that — and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”

Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.

Cornell law professor William Jacobson, who asserted last week that Palin was correct, linking to Revere quotes on his conservative blog Legalinsurrection.com, said Palin’s critics are the ones in need of a history lesson. “It seems to be a historical fact that this happened,” he said. “A lot of the criticism is unfair and made by people who are themselves ignorant of history.”

The left is so eager to make fun of Palin that they ridicule her even when she's right. They can't help themselves any more than a cat can resist chasing the dot produced by a laser pointer. Like the cat chasing the laser dot, it's really quite entertaining to watch. It's also amusing that Palin would be derided for possibly misconstruing an arcane detail of American history while the liberal media said almost nothing about Mr. Obama's failure to recall something as elementary as the number of states in the union:

The point is not that Mr. Obama is ignorant, necessarily, but that if his mistake can be excused by citing the pressures of the campaign or whatever, why not extend the same benefit of the doubt to Ms Palin? It's pure meanness to make fun of her while giving Mr. Obama a pass, especially since hers is certainly less of a "gaffe" than his was.

Indeed, and I don't mean this to be unkind, I wonder if Mr. Obama would have even known who Paul Revere was. Most Americans learn about Revere, if they learn about him at all, in elementary school as part of basic American history. During his elementary years Mr. Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia which probably didn't have much in their curriculum about Paul Revere's ride, and so it wouldn't surprise me if he had never heard of the episode until he read about Ms Palin's explanation of it.

Too bad no one had the opportunity to ask him what he thought about it at the time.

Angry Liberals

At The Daily Beast a bunch of prominent liberals tell us why they're angry. Put simply their reasons boil down to this: The 50% of Americans who are carrying the other 50% on their backs are unwilling to hand them milkshakes to drink while they're enjoying their ride.

Taxes are too low on the "super rich" (However, even if the super rich were taxed at 100% of their income it wouldn't erase the deficit) and on corporations (our corporate tax rate is the 2nd highest in the world). The poor can't get loans (it was loans to people who couldn't pay them back that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), gas prices are going up (despite vast reserves of petroleum and natural gas accessible to us in our own country), and kids are not getting nutritious food at school (niggardly taxpayers are unwilling to pay for higher quality food for our kids. Of course, there's no reason why their parents couldn't pack their lunches at home.). Moreover, people are not making the connection between storms, floods, and fires to global climate change (could that be because no connection has been empirically demonstrated? Or could it be that if there is a connection we've been told that there's nothing we can do about it anyway?).

None of these people seem concerned about the degradation of the culture, the collapse of the family, the flood of illegal immigration across our borders, the threat to world peace posed by radical Islamists, government policies which make it very difficult for small business to hire and thrive, rising unemployment, the national debt, and a host of other matters far more pressing than school cafeteria food, climate change, and whether the top 1% of American earners should contribute 38% of total tax revenue or whether we should make them contribute 40%.

The fact is that angry liberals are just impatient socialists. Nothing short of government control of our economy in this country will salve their anger and even then I doubt whether they'd be content until the federal government controls not only the economy but every other aspect of our lives as well.

The Climate Controversy

Those readers interested in the climate change issue will find the following two items to be of interest. The first is a chart (Go here for a more readable version) that shows the fluctuations in global temperatures over the last 4500 years:

It appears that temperatures are correlated with solar radiation and volcanic activity and that a decrease in the former coupled with an increase in the latter triggers a cooling period. Contrary to popular belief we're currently in such a cooling period and, when compared to historical trends, our recent warming has been relatively mild, and the current mean temperature of the earth is completely unexceptional. The second link is to a letter written last fall by a prominent physicist named Hal Lewis explaining his reasons for resigning from the American Physical Society. Lewis wrote:

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists....

....the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

Lewis goes on to support his allegation that money and politics have had a corrupting effect on climate change research.

So, is the data represented by the above chart wrong? Is Lewis just a malcontent? Or are we for political reasons being led to believe that there's a catastrophe imminent when in fact there is not? If we are being misled then why? Who benefits? We can be sure it won't be the average guy like you and me.

Thanks to Joel for the link to Prof. Lewis' resignation letter.

Faith and Blind Faith

Atheistic biologist Jerry Coyne is disappointed that one of the top molecular geneticists in the world shows "a chronic and debilitating sympathy for religion."

The scientist is George Church and here's Coyne's description of his credentials:

George Church is a well known molecular geneticist who helped design the first “direct” method of DNA sequencing, and played an important role in initiating the Human Genome Project. He has an appointment at Harvard University and consults for several companies. His latest endeavor is the Personal Genome Project, designed to get DNA sequences from many individuals with the aim of curing genetic maladies.

Pretty impressive. He certainly doesn't appear to be professionally "debilitated", so what's Coyne's gripe? Well, evidently Church actually believes things that Coyne thinks no scientist should believe. On his blog Church wrote this:

Some people feel that science and faith have nothing in common. But a considerable amount of faith drives everyday science — and frequently religion addresses scientific topics .... The overlap is vast and fertile. As we learn more about nature, for many of us, this greatly strengthens rather than lessens our awe.

Coyne calls this "sad", the sort of thing, apparently, which debilitates one's performance as a scientist.

Coyne thinks there's a big difference between the sort of faith exercised by a scientist and the sort of faith exhibited by the religious believer and that the two should not be commingled in the same person. I think his distinction is problematic, but I'll leave it to the reader to check it out.

For my part, I don't think there's really any difference between the faith exercised in science and the faith exercised by a well-educated religious believer. For both, faith is believing something to be true despite the lack of proof that it's true.

Both the scientist and the religious person commit themselves to the truth of some hypothesis without having proof that the hypothesis really is true. What each does have, though, is evidence that their belief is true.

Some might acknowledge that this is so but reply that the scientist requires a higher standard of evidence than does the religious believer, but I'm not sure that that's the case.

Blind faith is believing something despite a lack, or paucity, of evidence, and a naturalistic scientist like Coyne is at least as likely to exhibit blind faith as is the religious believer and may even be more inclined to do so. Indeed, the naturalist believes many things for which he has no evidence at all.

For example, a naturalist (one who believes that nature is all there is) believes that living things were generated from inert matter, that information can be coded into DNA apart from a mind, that electrochemical reactions in the brain can generate meaning and sensations (qualia), and that naturalism itself is true. He may also believe that there are other universes (a multiverse) besides our own, that moral duties can exist independent of a transcendent moral authority, and that his life has an overall purpose. There's no empirical evidence for any of these beliefs, however. To the extent that Prof. Coyne or any naturalist believes any of them he's indulging in sheer blind faith and is thus hardly in a position to credibly criticize the religious believer for his beliefs.

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip.

Pain and Regrets

Kathyrn Lopez at National Review Online has a story about the emotional pain many young women experience after they've had an abortion. She begins with the story of Aerosmith's Steve Tyler and his erstwhile girlfriend:

In his new autobiography, Tyler recalls a then-16-year-old girl from his past. He has talked emotionally about the abortion she had: “It was a big crisis. It’s a major thing when you’re growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives. . . . You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done?”

This unveiling story became a duet when that girl, now the mother of six other children, married, and a practicing Catholic, told her side of the story, which differs from Tyler’s. She writes: “He has talked of me as a sex object without any human dignity. I have made a point over these long years never to speak of him, yet he has repeatedly humiliated me in print with distortions of our time together. I do not understand why he has done this. It has been very painful.”

All of the details of their testimonies do not match. She says the pregnancy wasn’t entirely unplanned, that Tyler had thrown her birth-control pills away. She says that he pushed her to have the abortion.

Kevin Burke, who wrote a piece for National Review Online highlighting Tyler’s abortion comments, wonders if the soft-porn treatment of his relationship with Holcomb in his autobiography is his “way to avoid the pain and reality of his role in the abortion.”

This much we know: There was an abortion, and there are pain and regrets.

The rest of Lopez's column elaborates on the pain and regret that many women suffer after they've had their baby killed. Whether abortion should be legal or illegal, one thing it will not be, apparently, is consequence-free.

Read Lopez's piece and then, for a contrasting view, read the declaration of Janette Barber, Rosie O'Donnell's producer, who recently said this on Rosie's show:

I think if you want an abortion, you get an abortion. If you don't want to get an abortion, I would never force anyone to get an abortion, but I'd fight to the freakin' death for somebody's right to have an abortion. When I was a kid, I thought, 'If we lose this right, I'm leaving this country.'

I had plans [in the event of pregnancy]...I'm gonna wear a tent dress while I don't eat so I can get big and I can go in the woods, have it, kill it, and bury it, 'cause I didn't know how else I would get rid of it if I lost that right. I was pretty young when I had that plan, and I got over it.

Presumably, it never occurred to Ms Barber when she "was a kid" that if she didn't have sex she wouldn't have to fantasize about such hideous solutions to her predicament.

I know. It's unrealistic to expect kids not to have sex. It's much more enlightened to give them the means of canceling unintended consequences by just making it easy for them to snuff out the life inside them, and surely we live in enlightened times.

On a related matter, Byron forwards a report from America's most trustworthy news source, The Onion, which informs us of the grand opening of an $8 billion Abortionplex in Topeka. It sounds like a great facility:

"All women should feel like they have a home at the Abortionplex," Richards continued. "Whether she's a high school junior who doesn't want to go to prom pregnant, a go-getter professional who can't be bothered with the time commitment of raising a child, or a prostitute who knows getting an abortion is the easiest form of birth control—all are welcome."

Nineteen-year-old Marcy Kolrath, one of the Abortionplex's first clients, told reporters that despite her initial hesitancy, she was quickly put at ease by staff members who reassured her that she could have abortions over and over for the next decade before finally committing to motherhood. Kolrath also said she was "wowed" by the facility's many attractions.

"I was kind of on the fence in the beginning," she said. "But after a couple of margaritas and a ride down the lazy river they've got circling the place, I got caught up in the vibe. By the time it was over, I almost wished I could've aborted twins and gotten to stay a little longer."

"I told my boyfriend we had to have sex again that very night," Kolrath added. "I really want to come back over Labor Day."

Thanks to Jason for the link to the Lopez column.

He Asked For It

Breaking news! God uses atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss to prove that He exists! In a dramatic display of divine power God responded to the challenge issued by Professor Krauss and thereby offered compelling evidence that He does, indeed, exist. Watch for yourself:

Well, if I had any doubts before, they're certainly gone now. How about you?

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Thinking in Herds

William Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and one of a tribe that's come to be known as global warming skeptics. He gives us an explanation for his skepticism in an essay at First Things which I commend to everyone interested in the issue, whichever side of it one is on.

Happer examines the mix of scandals, politics, money and science that attach to the issue of global warming, and what he says, to the extent that it's accurate, is very helpful in understanding what's really going on amid all the confusing claims and counterclaims.

Here are a few paragraphs to serve as an appetizer:

Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet.

The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius during that time. Therefore the warming is due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. Roosters crow every morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for Sunday dinner.

Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas and other things being equal, adding the gas to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration, from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere—about 2 ppm per year—it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling. The combination of a slightly warmer earth and more CO2 will greatly increase the production of food, wood, fiber, and other products by green plants, so the increase will be good for the planet, and will easily outweigh any negative effects. Supposed calamities like the accelerated rise of sea level, ocean acidification, more extreme climate, tropical diseases near the poles, and so on are greatly exaggerated.

It is worth recalling now a quotation from the preface of the second edition of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Between these graphs is a lot of very helpful information on how some of the climate change folks have suppressed dissenting views and manipulated data to get the results they want. It's not pretty, but it's important. It would be an historic blunder if fear of a calamity that's not really pending were to cause us to needlessly and severely diminish our standard of living by disdaining the use of fossil fuels.

Restoring Educational Excellence

There's a fine article by Justin Paulette at The Daily Caller in which he contemplates the decline of America's educational system and what can be done to reverse it. The descent into educational mediocrity began in the 60s, Paulette argues, when public education fell under the control of progressive theorists and ideologues:

This trend of scholastic failure has a precise beginning which was preceded by a long history of educational prosperity. In the radicalism of the 1960s, the American left came to dominate a newly emergent education bureaucracy (culminating in the Department of Education), leveraged teachers as collective-bargaining-chips (forming the nation’s largest labor union) and commenced upon a nationwide social-engineering experiment (intent on redefining human nature). This consolidation of progressive authority over education precipitated an immediate and disastrous decline in America’s academic competitiveness.

He might have added that it was in the early 70s that the idea of a school being in loco parentis, a substitute parent, as it were, was dropped and student rights became a major cause celebre of the progressive left. When that happened the authority and ability of schools to maintain discipline began a long, slow collapse. It also precipitated a long, slow increase in the cost that taxpayers would have to bear for schools that became increasingly dysfunctional.

Paulette continues:

Naturally, not every rural American school adopted wholesale the progressive lesson-plan. But the pseudo-social-psychologists constituting state and federal education bureaucracies ensured that all public schools were influenced through federal guidelines, textbook revisions and a leftward lurch in scholastic literature, evaluation standards and political climate. The liberal coup of university faculties and the rise of quasi-substantive degrees in “education” further ensured that all future teachers would be subjected to the crucible of progressive indoctrination.

This centralized education bureaucracy and its misguided reform policies resulted in a gradual replacement of traditional educational values — such as discipline, competition and ethics — with a creed of self-esteem, diversity and relativism. Gifted programs have been abandoned as “elitist,” whereas (in an academic version of blaming the victim) one out of every eight students is now labeled “disabled” and remanded to “special education.” SAT scores had declined so sharply by the mid-1990s that examiners were forced to “re-center” the grading scale by adding 100 points to test scores in order to maintain the 800-point average.

Another aspect of the decline of authority has been the decline of moral authority. With the secularization of schools it has become increasingly difficult for schools to maintain high standards of dress, language or behavior. Any such standards are seen as an unwarranted and needless imposition of an arbitrary standard unrelated to educational performance.

The feeling one gets from reflecting on the miserable state of many public schools today is that the first step in reforming them needs to be to reclaim them from the grasp of the progressive theorists and leftist unions which have dominated American education for the past fifty years.

Paulette goes on to argue that the solution to our nation's educational malaise is privatization and the marketplace and he makes an impressive case. He concludes with an apposite quote from English philosopher John Stuart Mill who wrote in On Liberty (1859) that:

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments.

Paulette's column should be read by anyone concerned about America's fall from academic preeminence and might well be followed by a viewing of the film Waiting for Superman.

Reducing Crime

The Wall Street Journal has a piece by sociologist James Wilson in which he contemplates the declining crime rates across the country and possible reasons for the phenomenon.

Since the 1960s it's been conventional wisdom that high crime rates, particularly among African Americans, were directly correlated to joblessness and poverty. Thus it was expected that when we entered tough economic times crime would once again increase. Wilson argues that this view simply doesn't fit the data - crime is actually decreasing, even during the current recession.

Some of the reasons will not be welcome among liberals, others will make conservatives uncomfortable, but they're all compelling. They include higher and longer incarceration rates, better policing (including emphasis on maintaining a presence in high crime areas), better self-protection measures available to citizens, a decrease in the popularity of hard drug use, lower lead levels in the environment, and abortion.

For an explanation of how each of these has helped to reduce criminal behavior read the full article. It's pretty interesting.

Ugly Ducklings Make Beautiful Swans

Were you something of an outcast in high school? Did you find yourself shunned by the "popular" crowd? If so, you can take heart from this article in the LA Times:

In seven years of reporting from American middle and high schools, I've seen repeatedly that the differences that cause a student to be excluded in high school are often the same traits or skills that will serve him or her well after graduation.

Examples abound: Taylor Swift's classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music. Last year, the Grammy winner was the nation's top-selling recording artist.

Students mocked Tim Gunn's love of making things; now he is a fashion icon with the recognizable catchphrase "Make it work."

J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has described herself as a bullied child "who lived mostly in books and daydreams." It's no wonder she went on to write books populated with kids she describes as "outcasts and comfortable with being so."

For many, says Sacred Heart University psychology professor Kathryn LaFontana, high school is the "first foray into the adult world where [kids] have to think about their own status." And for teenagers, says LaFontana, who studies adolescent peer relationships and social status, "the worst thing in the world is to be different from other people; that's what makes someone unpopular."

In the rabidly conformist school environment, the qualities that make people different make them targets. In adulthood, however, the qualities that make people different make them compelling.

If you've always felt like a social misfit in school you should know that the people who make you feel that way are often going nowhere once high school ends and that people like you time and again turn out to be the world's heroes.

Read the rest of the article to find out why.

The Single-Payer Omelet

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not nobody. She's the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a congresswoman from Florida. So when she's asked whether the Democrats have a plan to save Medicare, a plan that consists of something more substantive than just demagoguing the Republican plan, her answer is implicitly "No":

Set aside Ms. Wasserman Schultz's last line where she inadvertently reveals her inner nanny possessed by almost all liberals (What's wrong, exactly, with allowing mature adults to "figure it out" for themselves?). Consider instead that doing nothing means that the system goes bankrupt in a decade, and doing nothing is what the Democrats evidently plan to do.

Grandfathering everyone over 55 into the present system and then giving future retirees a voucher that enables them to buy their own insurance, which is the GOP/Paul Ryan plan, may not be the best idea, I don't know, but at least the elderly will have something. If the Democrats don't soon present a viable alternative the elderly are certain to have nothing.

I suspect, but can't prove, that Democrat opposition to the Ryan plan stems from the fact that if people are given public money to buy insurance, insurance companies will benefit. President Obama has as much as said that he wants to put insurance companies out of business in order to create a single-payer (government-run) system (see below). Thus, he and his fellow lefties will oppose anything that empowers the private market and diminishes the power of government.

The elderly are merely the eggs that have to be broken to cook this socialist omelet.

Above the Law

President Obama, with the connivance of both Democrats and Republicans, is traducing the rule of law by not abiding by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. So says George Will and so say I. Here's Will:

Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president “certifies” in writing an “unavoidable military necessity” respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war, which began more than 70 days ago.

The President has attempted to avoid the WPR's constraints by saying that our involvement in Libya is to provide a "supporting role". Will correctly labels this both ludicrous and meretricious. He goes on to add that:

Liberals are situational ethicists regarding presidential warmaking: Imagine their comportment if Obama’s predecessor — who got congressional authorization for his uses of force — had behaved as Obama is doing regarding Libya. Most conservatives, who preen about their commitment to keeping government on a short leash, seem anesthetized by the administration’s sophistries.

I suppose "situational ethicists" is accurate, but I think "hypocrites" is moreso. For an example of the absurdity of GOP spokespersons on the issue he turns to Senator John McCain who said that, “No president has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and neither do I. So I don’t feel bound by any deadline.”

This is frankly startling. It's the sort of thinking that occurs in the early stages of tyranny. When our President considers himself not constrained by any law he finds inconvenient he's arrogating to himself the powers of a despot. It's the sort of behavior we see in people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Mr. Obama has evinced such inclinations in the past, and no one is really surprised that he regards himself as unaccountable to Congress. It's a bit surprising, though, and disconcerting, to see McCain agree with him.

Meanwhile, our "watchdog" media are all aflutter, not over Mr. Obama's disdain for the rule of law, but over Sarah Palin's bus tour. Go figure.

Honoring Vets

Memorial Day seems a fitting time to show this trailer for a coming documentary on the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight. Honor Flight is a project to fly as many WWII vets to Washington as possible so that they can see the WWII Memorial before they die:

Hot Air has more details on the Honor Flight film project here.

Singer's Evolving Ethics

There's a simple and compelling argument that goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no moral duties.
2. There are moral duties.
3. Therefore there is a God.

Of course, both premises need to be defended, but I don't think it's hard to defend 1. (though 1. is precisely the assertion Sam Harris wishes to deny in his book The Moral Landscape) and denying 2. leads the denier ineluctably to moral nihilism. So, it seems that if 1. can be defended one either has to believe there is a God or be a nihilist.

Few non-believers are prepared to embrace moral nihilism so they're in an awkward position. Unwilling to accept belief in God they're also unwilling to accept the logical conclusion of their atheism.

This appears to be the predicament in which Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has come to find himself. The Guardian's Mark Vernon explains why. Here's the key graph:

[Singer] described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects [David] Hume's view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true.

At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people's preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on ... utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he "regrets" not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.

Or to put it differently, Singer seems to be recognizing that unless there exists a transcendent moral authority, an omniscient and perfectly good God, there's no non-arbitrary reason for being a utilitarian rather than an egoist. In a world without such a moral authority nothing one does can be morally wrong, and it'd certainly not be wrong to simply live for oneself or adopt a might-makes-right ethic. However we choose to live, if there is no God, is purely a matter of taste and to say that one should be a utilitarian is nonsense. The word "should" implies a moral duty and if there is no God there are no moral duties.

The only surprise in Singer's last sentence above is that it has taken someone of his intellectual stature so long to see it.

Cyber Warriors

An operation like the one which took the life of Osama bin Laden requires tough, hard, highly disciplined warriors, but much of modern warfare is being waged not by men such as these but by guys who considered themselves geeks and nerds when they were in high school.

Take, for example, what's going on in the cold war between Israel and Iran. Strategy Page explains:

Israel makes no secret of what it thinks about its Cyber War capabilities. Over the last year, Israel has revealed that its cryptography operation (Unit 8200) has added computer hacking to its skill set. Last year, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence said that he believed Israel had become the leading practitioner of Cyber War. This came in the wake of suspicions that Israel had created the Stuxnet worm, that got into Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment equipment, and destroyed a lot of it.

Recently, Iran complanied that another worm, called Star, was causing them trouble. Usually, intelligence organizations keep quiet about their capabilities, but in this case, the Israelis apparently felt it was more useful to scare the Iranians, with the threat of more stuff like Stuxnet. But the Iranians have turned around and tried to attack Israel, and are apparently determined to keep at it for as long as it takes.

This struggle between Israel and Iran is nothing new. Seven years ago, Israel announced that Unit 8200 had cracked an Iranian communications code, an operation that allowed Israel to read messages concerning Iranian efforts to keep its nuclear weapons program going (with Pakistani help), despite Iranian promises to UN weapons inspectors that the program was being shut down.

It's .... unusual for a code-cracking organization to admit to deciphering someone's code. Perhaps the Iranians stopped using the code in question, or perhaps the Israelis just wanted to scare the Iranians. Israel is very concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons, mainly because the Islamic conservatives that control Iran have as one of their primary goals the destruction of Israel.

In response to these Iranian threats, Israel has said that it will do whatever it takes to stop Iran from getting nukes. This apparently includes doing the unthinkable (for a code cracking outfit); admitting that you had successfully taken apart an opponent's secret code.

Israel is trying to convince Iran that a long-time superiority in code-breaking was now accompanied by similarly exceptional hacking skills. Whether it's true or not, it's got to have rattled the Iranians. The failure of their counterattacks can only have added to their unease.

One almost imagines teams of Woody Allen look-alikes sitting in front of their monitors saving the world from a nuclear holocaust while seasoning their successes with a little trash-talk directed at the opposition. God bless 'em.

Casey as Metaphor

People who support Israel in their effort to resist the aggressions of their enemies in the Middle East are sometimes asked why they do. There are lots of reasons which come to mind, of course - our shared democratic values, shared language, the awful treatment that Jews have suffered throughout history, their courage, their status as victims of terrorism, their admirable ability to defend themselves repeatedly against overwhelming odds, the fact that their enemies are driven by an irrational hatred and a desire to kill every Jew (and every American for that matter), and so on.

Perhaps another reason is that so much of the world, not just Arabs and Muslims, is hostile to Israel. They criticize Israel simply for trying to defend itself. They criticize Israel for using "disproportionate" force in defending itself. Israel is expected to perpetually turn the other cheek while no such demands are ever made of the Arabs who attack them with rockets every day, blow up school busses full of children, and sneak into their homes to slit the throats of entire families. The world seems to treat such atrocities as what is to be expected from Arabs, but if the Israelis retaliate, or build a wall to keep the murderers out, then they're denounced at the U.N. for "brutality".

It all reminds me of a video that was the talk of the web a few months ago. In the video an Australian boy named Casey was being punched and taunted by a little punk - an ordeal he had had to endure on previous occasions as well. Finally Casey defended himself and a surprising number of commentators sniffed that the poor kid overreacted, that he shouldn't have resorted to violence, that he could have hurt his tormenter. Casey was essentially condemned for protecting himself and giving his antagonist the thrashing he deserved.

I'm sure the Israelis sympathize with Casey:

Swinburne on the Soul

Having read several of Richard Swinburne's philosophical works over the years and having just this winter reread his book The Existence of God, I was eager to listen to an interview he did recently on the soul. Swinburne is a highly prominent philosopher of religion at Oxford, a Christian, and a substance dualist who conflates soul and mind.

By that I mean he assumes soul and mind are essentially two words for the same thing. This is not the only view of the soul a dualist(one who believes that there are at least two disparate substances comprising reality - mind and matter)could hold, but it's probably the dominant view.

Swinburne's argument against physicalism (the belief that there is no non-physical substance) is that if the self just is the material body then if my body exists then I must exist. However, there is a possible world in which a body just like mine exists, but in which I don't exist. If so, then it's possible to have a body like mine but not have me, or, in other words, my body and I are not identical.

In the course of the 17 minute discussion he touches upon the problem of personal identity, the problem of mind/brain interactionism (i.e. the problem of believing that two disparate substances can somehow interact), and makes an interesting distinction between how he came to believe in God as opposed to why he continues to believe. His reply toward the end to the interviewer's suggestion that he only believes what he does about the mind/soul because of his theological commitments is excellent.

The interview can be listened to at The Microphilosopher.

Thanks to First Thoughts for the link.

Ditchkins

Here's an amusing send-up of atheists Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens. The guy who does the composite "Ditchkins" sounds almost exactly like Dawkins:

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the link.