Julia

Iowahawk has a funny caricature of the Obama campaign's Julia ad here.

Nothing could make more pellucid the sort of future liberals envision than does this ad. Julia seems to have no real family support, no friends, no husband, no church. She's a ward of the state, almost completely dependent upon others to see her through life's challenges. The government is her ersatz family. It's a dependency the left fervently desires to achieve universally.

Russ Douthat of the New York Times puts it like this:

All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of Julia is ripe for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal upper middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will not surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)

What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.

But if the slide show is easy to mock (and conservatives quickly obliged, tweeting Julia jokes across the Internet), there’s also a fascinating ideological purity to its attitudes and arguments. Indeed, both in its policy vision and its philosophical premises, the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism.

On the one hand, its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math. In addition to ignoring the taxes that will be required of its businesswoman heroine across her working life, “The Life of Julia” hails a program (Head Start) that may not work at all, touts education spending that hasn’t done much for high school test scores or cut college costs, and never mentions that on the Obama administration’s own budget trajectory, neither Medicare nor Social Security will be able to make good on its promises once today’s 20-something Julias retire.

At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness.

It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

Someone should do a clip that urges us to stay in school, get good grades, don't have children until you're married, stay married once you have them, shun drugs, alcohol and pornography, join a church, show up for work every day on time, and strive to be the best employee your employer has. If everyone followed these eight simple rules we'd have a lot fewer people in poverty and we'd hardly need government social welfare programs at all.

Hannity vs OWS

A few days ago I had some harsh words for a guy named Chris Mooney who claims in his book that Republicans are, by nature, intellectually inferior, or something like that. I thought his thesis was absurd, but afterward I got to thinking that maybe Mooney had a point. After all, I thought, a lot of Republicans adore Sean Hannity, a phenomenon I have never understood, and it seems to me that I should admit that that has to count at least a little bit in favor of Mooney's claim.

Anyway, Hannity recently had a guy from Occupy Wall Street on his television show, and the fellow's ideas were so incredibly naive that he made Hannity look, if you could somehow set aside his typical boorish self-righteouness, like a font of sagacity and reason. Here's the clip:

This is why OWS is going nowhere, and why people like Nancy Pelosi and others among the Democrat left simply make themselves look foolish when they embrace them. The guy evidently thinks that the rest of us owe him a living. He wants everything to be free, much like it is in Greece. One wonders how much he's really thought about any of this.

Musings on the News

A couple of thoughts on recent events in the news:

When it was discovered that the GSA had squandered a million dollars of our tax money to amuse themselves in Las Vegas there was justifiable outrage in the media. It seemed so irresponsible, so insensitive, to be wasting citizen's money on personal entertainment. Heads rolled as they should have.

But someone explain to me why there's not similar outrage when Mrs. Obama spends many millions of our tax dollars to amuse herself and her friends on her frequent vacations? What's the difference? She spent almost half a million of our dollars on a single trip to Spain. The individual responsible for the GSA disgrace was rightly dismissed. Why does Mrs. Obama get a pass?

When American intelligence agents located Kalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, George Bush didn't remind the nation that he was ultimately the man responsible for catching the big fish. When American forces killed Abu al Zarqawi, the sadist who beheaded Daniel Pearl and who turned Iraq into an abattoir, George Bush didn't strut around pointing to himself and beckoning audiences to applaud him. When American troops captured Saddam Hussein George Bush didn't do an endzone dance. Nor did Mr. Bush ever suggest that his opponents wouldn't have done any of these things.

Yet, Mr. Obama gives the "go ahead" to the American team that took out Osama bin Laden and you'd think from how often he and his surrogates remind us that he rappelled into the terrorist's lair himself and throttled bin Laden with his bare hands. Not only is the president taking every opportunity to remind people that he's the one who "got bin Laden" he's quite explicitly allowed that Mr. Romney would not have done so.

Think what you will about George Bush, he conducted himself with professionalism, dignity, and class. His successor could learn a few things from studying his example.

Finally, as someone asked this week, who is this "Julia" woman, and why do the Democrats think I should have to pay for her whole life?

Occupy Bomb-Throwers

Kevin O'Brien has a piece at the Cleveland Plain Dealer talks about the Occupy Movement's continued slide toward the lunatic fever swamps. The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Occupiers are a motley collection of rapists, druggies, vandals, slobs, naifs, all mixed together with incoherent economic arguments, and recent developments have done little to burnish their image.

Speaking of the arrests of five men who plotted to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, O'Brien says:

There was no danger to the public because the explosives were inoperable and were controlled by an undercover FBI employee, the agency said Tuesday in announcing the men's arrests. The target of the plot was a bridge that carries a four-lane state highway over part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Brecksville area, about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland, the FBI said.

What a lucky, lucky week this has been for Greater Cleveland -- especially for whichever unsuspecting souls were driving across the Ohio 82 bridge across the Cuyahoga Valley while five petty criminals associated with Occupy Cleveland were trying to community organize it.

The Occupiers, authorities tell us, thought they had rigged the span with plastic explosives that would detonate when they punched a code into a cellphone. The only thing that went up in smoke, though, was their plot. They were working with dummy devices -- fitting -- sold to them by an FBI informant whom they failed to recognize as the Man.

The arrestees are being dismissed as "fringey," which is downright hilarious, considering who is offering the description. Their self-description as anarchists is being presented as an indication that they're outside of the Occupy "mainstream." Yeah, right.

Take the anarchists out of an Occupy protest and you're down to half a protest. More likely, the bomb plotters are just a little ahead of the curve.

The people who proclaim the nonviolence of the Occupy movement are, for the most part, sincere. But they're riding the tiger.

As the local Occupiers try to regain their stride, we'll hear comparisons to the violence and division supposedly preached by the Tea Party, the movement Occupy was ginned up to counter. We'll hear how Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was really the leading edge of the Tea Party.

Most people, though, will have the sense to recognize the difference. Here's an idea that might generate some useful data: Let's have the FBI infiltrate both movements. Ten years from now, if they both last that long, we'll tally up the arrests and see which side has occupied more jail cells.

This summer will tell the future of the Occupy Movement. It seems to me that, bereft as they are of any coherent policy proposals, the only way they'll be able to keep the nation's attention is to become increasingly confrontational. If they don't, the movement will flicker out. If they do, the bomb-throwers and left-wing ideologues will gain more control and violence will accelerate. I suspect, though, that the movement is so heavily infiltrated by the F.B.I. that it'll all come to naught. Either way, I don't think the movement has much of a future.

Had Enough

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 Peggy Noonan was one of the most loyal of the loyal opposition. She was willing to give the new president the benefit of every doubt, but after three years she seems to have had enough.

Her column deserves to be read in its entirety but here are some excerpts:

[I]t still matters that the president doesn't have a coherent agenda, or a political philosophy that is really clear to people. To the extent he has a philosophy it tends to pop up furtively in stray comments and then go away.

I listen to him closely and find myself daydreaming: This is the best-tailored president since JFK. His suits, shirts and ties are beautifully cut from fine material. This is an elegant man. But I shouldn't be thinking about that, I should be thinking about what a powerful case he's making for his leadership. I'm not because he's not.

There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama's White House. It was seen again this week in Supreme Court arguments over the administration's challenge to Arizona's attempted crackdown on illegal immigration. As Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News wrote, the court seemed to be disagreeing with the administration's understanding of federal power: "Solicitor General Donald Verrilli . . . met resistance across ideological lines. . . . Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is 'not selling very well.' " This follows last month's embarrassing showing over the constitutionality of parts of ObamaCare.

All of this looks so bush league, so scattered. Add it to the General Services Administration, to Solyndra, to the other scandals, and you get a growing sense that no one's in charge, that the administration is paying attention to politics but not day-to-day governance.

The two most public cabinet members are Eric Holder at Justice and Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security. He is overseeing the administration's Supreme Court cases. She is in charge of being unmoved by the daily stories of Transportation Security Administration incompetence and even cruelty at our airports.

It will be interesting over the next several months to see how the president's reelection campaign unfolds. Will he try to make the case that he deserves to be given four more years, or will his team, perhaps feeling they have little in the way of accomplishments to tout, amp up attempts to destroy Mr. Romney?

The Evil Men Do

One of the most hellish places on earth, perhaps the most hellish place there has ever been on earth, is North Korea. Bill Keller of the New York Times has written a review of a book written about a man who managed to escape one of the prison camps in what is a prison camp of a nation, and his account is horrific:

I’ve just read Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14,” the harrowing story of a young man’s flight from one of the slave labor camps where as many as 200,000 political unreliables — a category that includes not just those who run afoul of authority but their relatives for three generations — are sent to be starved, tortured and ultimately worked to death. The political camps are just part of a larger network of detention sites designed to crush any spark of free will.

Harden’s story of Shin Dong-hyuk differs from the best previous refugee narratives — “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” by Kang Chol-hwan, Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy” — because Shin was in every sense a product of Camp 14. Born in captivity to a pair of inmates picked by camp commanders for a loveless bit of procreation, Shin grew up with no awareness of anything beyond the electrified fences. He is like the boy-narrator of Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room,” whose entire world is the backyard shed where he and his kidnapped mother are held captive. Except that the boy in “Room” knows love.

Harden’s book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country. It explains how the regime has endured longer than any of its bestial prototypes: longer than Hitler, longer than Stalin, longer than Mao, longer than Pol Pot. The tools are enforced isolation, debilitating fear, dehumanizing hunger and utter dependence on the state. By the time he was a teenager, Shin had watched a teacher beat a 6-year-old girl to death for hoarding five kernels of corn; worse, he had betrayed his own mother and brother, and had witnessed their public execution without remorse.

Yet Shin, who is not exactly a master escape artist, manages to evade the state’s controls, and along his stumble to freedom he encounters many others who — not in words, certainly, but in practice — are defying the system. What strikes you is how the shackles of totalitarianism are being corroded by bribery, barter and black-marketeering, including a thriving cross-border trade with China. It’s still a crushingly oppressive regime, arbitrary and brutal. But more often than you would imagine, need trumps fear.

Harden’s narrative is reinforced by more systematic studies. When David Hawk of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea researched the first edition of his camp exposé “The Hidden Gulag” in 2003, some 3,000 North Koreans had found asylum in the South, including several score of former political prisoners. When he returned for the second edition, just published, the pool of refugees was 23,000, and included hundreds who had endured detention. The updated report is a vivid chronicle of horrors, illustrated by crisp Google Earth photos that make the slave camps as palpable as suburban real estate on Zillow.

North Korea is a vivid, if extreme, illustration of what happens when materialistic atheism is wedded to absolute power and leftist ideology. We witnessed it throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, Cambodia, Cuba, and dozens of other loci of misery and cruelty around the world. Combine power and leftism with the lack of any basis for moral restraint in the leaders of a state and the result is pure evil. North Korea is but the most current instantiation of the rule.

Fibonacci in Nature

Here's a lovely video that illustrates how the geometry of nature so often exhibits the Fibonacci sequence:

The mathematical order in nature is astounding and quite inexplicable if it were just produced by blind chance. Everywhere one looks one sees why physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked that God must be a mathematician. Mathematics permeates the architecture of the universe, a fact which would be very odd if there's not behind it all a mathematical mind.

How Hollywood Hates America

Ann Coulter explains why America, which would love to love Hollywood, doesn't. The reason is because Hollywood hates America. Here's Coulter:

Americans love movies and would like to love Hollywood, but I suspect they are getting a little sick of Hollywood hating them. By "them," I mean:

• Southerners (as portrayed in A Time to Kill, Deliverance, Easy Rider, Talladega Nights, Pulp Fiction, Raising Arizona and Law & Order)
• Residents of small towns, except the Hamptons and Malibu (Footloose, The Last Seduction, Pleasantville and Law & Order)
• Christians (The Virgin Suicides, Easy A, Seven, Straw Dogs, Carrie and Law & Order)
• Connecticut WASPs or their equivalent (Ordinary People, Far From Heaven, Caddyshack, Trading Places, The Ice Storm, every single movie on "Lifetime: TV for Women" and Law & Order)
• Priests (Primal Fear, Stigmata, Priest, Godfather III and Law & Order)
• Conservative politicians (The Contender, Good Night, and Good Luck, The West Wing, any movie by Oliver Stone and Law & Order)
• The rich -- but never rich trial lawyers, rich environmentalists, rich educators or rich-off-the-taxpayer politicians (Titanic, Sleeping With the Enemy, Wall Street and Law & Order)
• Businessmen (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, Silkwood, Michael Clayton, every John Grisham adaptation, even The Muppets, where they reunite to save their old theater from a greedy oil tycoon! And Law & Order).

Southerners are dumb hicks, presumptively Klanners. Residents of small towns are narrow-minded xenophobes, presumptively Klanners. Christians are hypocrites and anti-everything (even dancing!), presumptively Klanners. Businessmen are cheating, soulless vermin, presumptively Klanners (unless they are in a Hollywood-approved business like making solar panels). And Connecticut WASPs are dull, sexually neurotic snobs who beat their wives and molest their daughters. Presumptively Klanners.

Hollywood's heroes are just as odd. Moviegoers flocked to a film about a prostitute who was not only gorgeous and charming but disease-free because they wanted to see a Cinderella story. We know Pretty Woman's winsome streetwalker was as plausible as a talking bear, except we've always wanted to see a talking bear.

It was the same with The Da Vinci Code. That movie mocks the most sacred belief held by a majority of Americans -- the divinity of Christ -- but we ignored that because we just wanted to see an exciting Hollywood thriller.

Out in America, the country is fairly bristling with crosses and American flags, but in the Hollywood oeuvre, those symbols appear rarely, and when they do, they generally show up as signifiers of White Supremacists or child-molesting Connecticut WASPs. In real life, there are a lot more girls wearing cross necklaces than teenagers with Che Guevara posters in their rooms, a peculiar staple of Hollywood movies.

There's more at the link. If you watch movies you'll get a few chuckles out of Coulter's roast of the narrow-minded bigots who make so many of them - unless, that is, you've been somehow brainwashed into believing that Hollywood really does accurately portray America.

The Policy of Pretend

Charles Krauthammer looks at the president's Syria policy and sees incoherence:

Obama’s other major announcement — at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, no less — was the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board. I kid you not. A board. Russia flies plane loads of weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies money, trainers, agents, more weapons. And what does America do? Supports a feckless U.N. peace mission that does nothing to stop the killing. (Indeed, some of the civilians who met with the peacekeepers were summarily executed.) And establishes an Atrocities Prevention Board. With multi-agency participation, mind you. The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that we do not have a duty to protect. That foreign policy is not social work. That you risk American lives only when national security and/or strategic interests are at stake, not merely to satisfy the humanitarian impulses of some of our leaders. But Obama does not make this argument. On the contrary. He goes to the Holocaust Museum to commit himself and his country to defend the innocent, to affirm the moral imperative of rescue. And then does nothing of any consequence.

If Obama wants to stay out of Syria, fine. Make the case that it’s none of our business. That it’s too hard. That we have no security/national interests there. In my view, the evidence argues against that, but at least a coherent case for hands off could be made. That would be an honest, straightforward policy. Instead, the president, basking in the sanctity of the Holocaust Museum, proclaims his solemn allegiance to a doctrine of responsibility — even as he stands by and watches Syria burn.

If we are not prepared to intervene, even indirectly by arming and training Syrians who want to liberate themselves, be candid. And then be quiet. Don’t pretend the U.N. is doing anything. Don’t pretend the U.S. is doing anything. And don’t embarrass the nation with an Atrocities Prevention Board. The tragedies of Rwanda, Darfur, and now Syria did not result from lack of information or lack of interagency coordination, but from lack of will.

Perhaps someday we'll get an explanation from our President or our Secretary of State as to why we had a duty to kill perhaps thousands of Libyan soldiers to protect Libyan civilians from Qaddafi's threat to do them harm, but we have done nothing perceptible to help the tens of thousands of Syrian civilians who are currently being slaughtered in the streets of their cities by Bashar Assad. We have thus far been given no explanation whatsoever for the disparity in the way we've reacted to these two situations.

If there's a reason why we go to war in one case but not in the other the American people have a right to know it, and if the administration won't tell us, and the media won't press them on their reasoning, then we're perfectly justified in assuming that there simply is no defensible rationale for it. We're justified in concluding, in other words, that this administration is simply pretending to have a policy and in fact has no idea what it's doing, at least insofar as resisting tyranny is concerned.

If the Universe Had a Beginning

When it was first proposed that the universe was not infinitely old but rather had a beginning in a cosmic explosion many cosmologists resisted the idea. Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" to describe the explosion, but he was actually using the term derisively. Many scientists were dismayed by the thought that the universe suddenly originated out of nothing because that sounded dangerously close to the story in Genesis at which many intellectuals had been scoffing for over a hundred years.

Even after predictions based on the Big Bang model were accidentally confirmed in the 1960s cosmologists continued to advance all sorts of sophisticated hypotheses to prop up the notion that the universe is eternal. According to a recent report in Technology Review, however, hopes of escaping the implications of a cosmic beginning are rapidly fading:

The Big Bang has become part of popular culture since the phrase was coined by the maverick physicist Fred Hoyle in the 1940s. That's hardly surprising for an event that represents the ultimate birth of everything. Hoyle much preferred a different model of the cosmos: a steady state universe with no beginning or end, that stretches infinitely into the past and the future. That idea never really took off.

In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun to study a number of new ideas that have similar properties. Curiously, these ideas are not necessarily at odds with the notion of a Big Bang.

For instance, one idea is that the universe is cyclical with big bangs followed by big crunches followed by big bangs in an infinite cycle.

Another is the notion of eternal inflation in which different parts of the universe expand and contract at different rates. These regions can be thought of as different universes in a giant multiverse. So, although we seem to live in an inflating cosmos, other universes may be very different. And while our universe may look as if it has a beginning, the multiverse need not have a beginning.

Then there is the idea of an emergent universe which exists as a kind of seed for eternity and then suddenly expands.

[T]hese modern cosmologies suggest that the observational evidence of an expanding universe is consistent with a cosmos with no beginning or end, but that may be set to change.

Today, Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts say that these models are mathematically incompatible with an eternal past. Indeed, their analysis suggests that these three models of the universe must have had a beginning too.

Their argument focuses on the mathematical properties of eternity--a universe with no beginning and no end. Such a universe must contain trajectories that stretch infinitely into the past.

However, Mithani and Vilenkin point to a proof dating from 2003 that these kind of past trajectories cannot be infinite if they are part of a universe that expands in a specific way. They go on to show that cyclical universes and universes of eternal inflation both expand in this way. So they cannot be eternal in the past and must therefore have had a beginning.

Since the observational evidence is that our universe is expanding, then it must also have been born in the past. A profound conclusion (albeit the same one that lead to the idea of the big bang in the first place).

Numerous questions jockey to be asked: If the universe had a beginning in time what caused it to come into being? Could it have somehow caused itself? How did it come to have the exquisite degree of fine-tuning that it has? Given that there are only two kinds of causes, personal and impersonal, and given that impersonal causes have never been known to produce information, and given that the universe contains biological information, wouldn't the cause of the universe have had to have been personal?

I.e., if the universe is not eternal it seems to have been brought into being by a personal agent that looks very much like the traditional theistic version of God. That will certainly not sit well with those who insist that science entertain only material explanations for material effects.

The Root of All Evil

Bill Whittle gives an Afterburner talk on how intellectuals come to be so profoundly committed to their theories that they're blind to contradictory evidence. Like love-struck adolescent girls infatuated with the class bad boy they simply don't see what everyone else sees.

The context of Whittle's talk is anthropogenic (man-caused) gobal warming (AGW) and Marxist economics, but he could just as easily have been talking about Darwinism. Give it a look:

Another Reason to Be Skeptical

There are a number of reasons why someone might be skeptical of claims that we're on the brink of eco-catastrophe if we don't do something soon to reverse the warming of the planet, and I think I've just come across another one. A science writer named Chris Mooney is a firm believer in man-caused global warming which is ipso facto sufficient reason to be skeptical of it.

I say that because Mooney has such bizarre views on other topics that simple induction leads me to be suspicious of anything he opines upon. Mooney has, for example, written a book in which he claims, presumably while sober, that Republicans are genetically inferior to Democrats.

Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, a couple of scientists, slap him upside the head in a review of Mooney's argument, such as it is:

Are Republicans genetically inferior to Democrats? That might sound like a preposterous question, but essentially that is the thesis of Chris Mooney's latest book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality.

In a recent article, Mooney summarizes his case. "[I]t often seems there are so many factually wrong claims on the political right that those who make them live in a different reality." He continues, "So here's an idea: Maybe they actually do. And maybe we can look to science itself...to help understand why it is that they view the world so differently."

Translation: Republicans are stupid and there has to be a biological explanation for it.

If Mooney's argument sounds familiar to you, it should. It's called "eugenics," and it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior. Taken to an extreme, it encouraged people to selectively breed in order to improve the gene pool and eliminate those who the elites determined were unfit. It was rightfully dismissed decades ago, but this does not stop a modern-day science writer from resuscitating it and applying it to political adversaries.

Berezow and Campbell offer more at the link, but, really, their effort is probably unnecessary. No one except people on the lunatic fringe is likely to take someone like Mooney seriously enough to read his book anyway.

Who Is Paul Ryan?

It's not often that one encounters a congressman at home with the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, but Republican Paul Ryan is such a man. In a piece at National Review Robert Costa profiles the Budget Committee Chairman who has been, in my opinion, far and away the brightest, most articulate government spokesperson on budgetary matters in the last four years. His critics, perhaps sensing that they're out of their league, come across as little more than pesky ankle-biters when they set out to tear him down.

One of the indictments the left levels against Ryan is that he's a disciple of Ayn Rand, but he dismisses this with a chuckle:

"You know you’ve arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine," chuckles Representative Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, as we discuss his purported obsession with author and philosopher Ayn Rand.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, recently called Ryan “an Ayn Rand devotee” who wants to “slash benefits for the poor.” New York magazine once alleged that Ryan “requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s gospel of capitalism. President Obama has blasted the Ryan budget as Republican “social Darwinism.”

These Rand-related slams, Ryan says, are inaccurate and part of an effort on the left to paint him as a cold-hearted Objectivist. Ryan’s actual philosophy, as reported by my colleague, Brian Bolduc, couldn’t be further from the caricature. As a practicing Roman Catholic, Ryan says, his faith and moral values shape his politics as much as his belief in freedom and capitalism does.

“I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

Ryan mentions the Catholic principle of subsidiarity as an influence on his thinking. He believes that the best government is a government closest to the people. He is a strong believer in the power of civil society, not the federal government, to solve problems. Community leaders and churches, he says, can often do more for the poor than a federal bureaucrat who scribbles their names on a check, sustaining dependency.

There's more on Ryan at the link. He also recently delivered a speech at Georgetown University. You can read the transcript here. It's excellent.

Letter to a Young Woman

Several readers have dug into the archives and retrieved a letter I had written to my youngest daughter when she was a junior in high school some five years ago. I had posted the letter on Viewpoint at the time, and after perusing the emails from those readers I thought I'd repost it in hope that someone finds it helpful.

I originally titled it "A Letter to a Young Girl", but some readers, never having been a father with daughters, thought "young girl" was not a particularly apt description of a high school junior, so I've retitled it to avoid further criticism.

Here it is:

Hi Honey,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,
Dad

How Serious Is the Chinese Threat?

There's been much in the news about the rapid growth of the Chinese military and a lot of speculation as to what Beijing's intentions are in building such a formidable force. Strategy Page has a good piece on this topic that offers some perspective. They think that the Chinese threat is primarily cyber theft and cyber warfare but not so much in the realm of conventional warfare:

Western military leaders are having a hard time figuring out what Chinese military strategy is. It’s becoming clear that China is not looking for a war, as that would turn the population against the communist dictatorship that still runs the country.

The communist leaders survive mainly by ensuring that the economy keeps growing. Any kind of war would endanger that, especially if the foe were someone with a large navy (like the U.S. or Japan). Yet China is fighting a war and they're winning. China has, for over a decade, been quietly fighting its way into Western computer networks and stealing military and technology secrets....Lawsuits have been more effective in fighting this than any military or diplomatic efforts, but most of the time the Chinese get away with the theft.

There is another aspect of the Chinese "Quiet War" that has not garnered much attention, and that is the large quantity of stolen military tech and data that (in theory) enables the Chinese to deceive many high-tech Western systems. Particularly vulnerable are electronic warfare, communications, and satellite based systems. Interfering with satellite communications or taking over control of satellites is a major nightmare. With the quantity of data China has stolen such meddling becomes possible. The Chinese are not going to reveal what they can do until they have to do it.

Strategy Page has this to say about their rapid accumulation of military hardware:

Are the Chinese really backing away from preparations for conventional war? Consider the evidence. First, China is reducing the size of its armed forces, by over a million troops in the last decade and still going. China has also doubled its defense spending (to over $100 billion a year) in the last decade. The big mystery is figuring what the Chinese military up to with all this spending? This question's been rattling around inside intelligence agencies, and among diplomats, for the last decade.

China is not buying a lot of high tech weapons but is mainly trying to replace the large quantities of ancient weapons and equipment many of their troops are still equipped with. By world standards the Chinese armed forces are decidedly second rate, although numerous. China spends a lot of money on developing new military technologies but then does not buy a lot of the stuff. Instead they go on to develop the next generation. The Chinese appear to be trying to catch up with the West in the quality of their military tech, before building a lot of it.

Nor are the Chinese without their problems:

Chinese military analysts, commanders, and politicians decry the sorry state of their military leadership, training, and doctrine. It's easier to build new weapons than it is to train and maintain troops capable of using them effectively. The Chinese are more concerned with that but are having a hard time making it happen.

How combat ready are the forces Beijing would need to rely on if hostilities broke out?

Technically, a lot of Chinese gear is well built....Chinese have the talent and persistence to acquire the needed management and technical skills. It takes time and Chinese leaders like to take the long view. That means realizing that current Chinese armed forces are not so good. Peacetime soldiers in general and Chinese ones in particular develop a lot of bad habits that translate into defeats early in a war. But in a world with nuclear weapons the old Chinese strategy of fighting a long war and grinding down a superior (man-for-man) force no longer works.

If you use conventional forces you strike first and fast, then call for peace talks before the nukes are employed. This situation does not work to China's advantage. Chinese generals are going through the motions of creating a well-trained and led army, like many Western nations have, but are making very slow progress. Meanwhile, the Americans are particularly admired, with all their practical training methods and combat proven NCOs and officers. China still has far too much corruption in their military establishment and too little initiative and original thinking to create a force that can match the Americans. Going through the motions may work in peace time but not once the shooting starts.

Strategy Page concludes that the Chinese might actually be telling the truth when they say that the alarmingly rapid growth in military procurement is purely defensive:

China insists that its growing military power is for defense only. That makes sense, as a lot of money is going into the navy, which protects the imports (mainly of food and raw materials) and exports (of manufactured goods) that are driving the unprecedented economic growth.

The Chinese try to explain away the military buildup opposite Taiwan as political theater. This may be true, for a failed attempt to take Taiwan by force would not only disrupt the economy (and create a lot of unhappy Chinese), but would be a major failure by the government. Dictatorships cannot survive too many such failures or too many angry citizens.

Darwinism and Racism

Joseph Allen surveys the media hyperventilations over the recently passed Tennessee law that allows for the teaching of the evidences for, and the scientific arguments against, Darwinian evolution and does a good job (if one can overlook the occasional crudity) of explaining intelligent design. It's refreshing to see someone get it right given all the misrepresentations of ID one finds in the popular media.

The most interesting part of Allen's essay, however, was when he recounted a trip to the Dayton, Tennessee courthouse, the site of the famous Scopes Trial in 1925. The trial was held to prosecute a substitute biology teacher named John Scopes who claimed to have been teaching evolution to his students. At that time teaching evolution was against state law.

Allen writes:

I paid a visit to the courthouse in Dayton a few months ago. One item in the display cases immediately caught my attention. It was a copy of George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology — used by John Scopes in his class — opened to page 195 .... Of course, the next page is safely hidden:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure…the highest type of all [are] the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Had they (courthouse visitors) been able to turn to page 263, they would find even more juicy tidbits from the evolutionary perspective:

Just as certain animals or plants have become parasitic on other plants or animals, [biologically inferior humans] have become parasitic on society…corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease....If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.

Contemporary Darwinians huff that racialist beliefs such as these are no longer held by biologists, but the point is there's no reason not to hold them given their devotion to the evolutionary process. There's no reason to think that every species and race evolves at the same rate, pari passu, and indeed no Darwinian believes they do, but they make an exception for Homo sapiens. The exception, however, is motivated by political correctness not by their science.

Darwin himself believed that some races were superior to others and his followers in the social sciences accepted that inequality as a matter of course until Hitler carried their thinking to its logical conclusion and showed the world the horrific implications of Darwinian assumptions about survival of the fittest. Even though such views have been muted since the atrocities of WWII the logic remains unrefuted. Given naturalistic Darwinism there's no basis for thinking that all men or races are equal or have equal potential and there's no non-arbitrary moral reason why those in power shouldn't treat the races in their jurisdiction differently and prejudicially.

Indeed, the only reason for thinking that all human beings have equal value and dignity, the only reason for thinking that there are rights which inhere in every human being, is the conviction that we are God's property, as John Locke put it, and that we were created by God in His image and that He loves us. No one can harm with impunity what God loves.

That is the sole ground for human worth and human rights. Take God away, as Darwinism does, and substitute in His place purposeless and impersonal mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection, and it's hard to see how any of those passages in the textbook Scopes was teaching from are wrong.

Obama Boondoggle

No sooner does one ethical imbroglio in this administration begin to recede than another rears its ugly head. This time the chicanery has been uncovered by a pair of New York Post reporters named Benjamin Sasse and Charles Hurt.

Sasse and Hurt have a column up at the Post in which they explain how the Obama administration is using over 8 billion taxpayer dollars in a scheme to keep seniors in the dark until after the November election about the administration's plans to trim Medicare Advantage:

Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department. Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

Here is how it works.

The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters....

But certain voters would surely notice one highly painful part of the law before then — namely, the way it guts the popular Medicare Advantage program.

For years, 12 million seniors have relied on these policies, a more market-oriented alternative to traditional Medicare, without the aggravating gaps in coverage. But as part of its hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts, the Obama one-size-fits-all plan slashes reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage starting next year — herding many seniors back into the government-run program.

Nothing is more politically volatile than monkeying with the health insurance of seniors, who aren’t too keen on confusing upheavals in their health care and are the most diligent voters in the land. This could make the Tea Party look like a tea party.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election. This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

In other words, the administration is using taxpayer money to lull seniors into thinking that their Medicare benefits are not going to be lost when in fact they will be. This is not only devious but also unethical and possibly illegal. The rest of the article explains why.

Mr. Obama promised us a transparent and ethical administration - the most open and honest administration in history - and many voters bought into his assurances, but the reality has proven to be somewhat less than what was promised. From shady deals to Congressmen in order to secure their votes for Obamacare to equally shady loans to big donors in failing green industries like Solyndra, to waivers from the health care law to his union supporters, to the Fast and Furious scandal, to the GSA and Secret Service Scandals, to the various assaults on the First Amendment, to the numerous luxurious vacations on the taxpayer's tab, as well as dozens of lesser malfeasances and instances of poor judgment, the current administration has been rife with ethical lapses and constitutionally dubious maneuvers.

If Obama was Bush the nation would be on fire over the corruption and mismanagement which plagues this presidency, but our media, like a woman in love with a cad, is still in denial. They haven't yet been able to comprehend that a man who gives such marvelous speeches and has such a winning smile could really be just a typical pragmatist politician, willing to do whatever works to keep himself in power.

Romney's Choice

One of the finest wordsmiths in contemporary journalism, Washington Post columnist George Will, penned a meditation last week on who Mitt Romney might select as his running mate and in the process offered logophiles and connoisseurs of fine writing, at least those frustrated by Mr. Obama's unsteady relationship with factual accuracy, quite a treat.

Here's his lede:

Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle. It should, however, influence Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate.

In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

Although Obama is not nearly as well educated as many thought, and he thinks, he surely knows he was absurd when he said last Monday, regarding Obamacare, that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to overturn a “passed law.”

More important, and particularly pertinent to Romney’s choice, was Obama’s Tuesday speech comprehensively misrepresenting Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. (For Ryan’s refutation of Obama, go to http://ow.ly/a6hPz.) Remarkably, the 42-year-old congressman is today’s agenda-setting Republican. Admirably, Romney has embraced Ryan’s approach to altering the ruinous trajectory of the entitlement state and forestalling what that trajectory presages, a “government-centered society” (Romney’s phrase in his fine Milwaukee speech Tuesday night).

Obama’s defense of reactionary liberalism — whatever is must ever be, only increased — is not weighed down by the ballast of scruples. His defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

So Romney’s running mate should have intellectual firepower, born of immersion in policy complexities, sufficient to refute Obama’s meretricious claims and derelictions of duty. Here are two excellent choices.

You'll have to read the column to see who Will endorses. Suffice it to say that either would make an excellent pick.

Watch at Your Own Risk

C.S. Lewis once wrote that a young man who wishes to remain an atheist can't be too careful about the books he reads. Something of the sort can also be said about students who wish to remain Darwinians. They can't be too careful about the videos they watch.

This one, for example, is an animation that shows how six feet of DNA is coiled into a microscopically small volume, how that DNA replicates, and how it transcribes RNA which is then translated into proteins.

I once commented on VP that when I was a student evolutionary biologists would constantly impress upon us the amazing awesomeness of the systems we were studying. They didn't hesitate, back in those days when Darwinism had the field all to itself and no competitors were anywhere to be seen, to exclaim about the astonishing design of biological systems.

Now, however, with intelligent design posing such a powerful challenge to standard Darwinism, I suspect that Darwinian biologists are much more reluctant to marvel at these things in front of their students. So many young people watching videos like this will be filled with such a sense of transcendent wonder that there's a high risk that they'll conclude that life is indeed so marvelous that it just can't be an accidental consequence of blind natural forces.

Doing What Comes Naturally

There's been a lot of soul-searching in the wake of the Secret Service and GSA scandals in which significant numbers of federal employees behaved dishonorably and with utter contempt for the taxpayers who employ them.

As awful as it is, though, we shouldn't be surprised at the behavior. A society which has declared traditional moral restraints and motivations obsolete and irrelevant shouldn't be shocked when people conclude that whatever one can get away with is okay and the only thing that's really wrong is getting caught. In fact, given the subjectivism and relativism they've been hearing all their lives, they're exactly right.

For four decades we've been scrubbing our public life of all vestiges of the only ground there is for objective moral duty. We've been purging our public spaces of any mention of any standard of moral value that transcends human arbitrariness and emotivism, and then we're disappointed when people behave in ways that are perfectly consistent with the loss of that standard. We shouldn't be. We should expect it, and we should expect that it'll get worse in the future.

As we watch the video of the GSA employees squandering our tax dollars on lavish frivolities with complete indifference to the people who're paying for their self-indulgence, when we read about Secret Service agents disgracing their country and themselves cavorting with prostitutes in Columbia, we should remind ourselves and others that it's all a part of the price we're paying for insuring that people hear as little about God in the public square as is possible.

When we lose the sense that we have an obligation to live up to a standard higher than our own feelings and social convention then we inevitably lose the sense that we have an obligation to live up to any standard at all. When we reach that point we just do whatever comes naturally which is, I guess, exactly what the GSA staffers and the Secret Service agents were doing.