What We Can Now Say We Know

It's a commonplace to observe that it's not the political "crime" that does politicians in when they're caught in a scandal, it's the attempt to cover it up that usually proves their undoing. Well, in the case of the Benghazi debacle it seems to be both the actions (or inactions) themselves and the attempt to cover them up that are proving to be a major embarrassment for the Obama administration.

Until now a supine media has been loath to dig into exactly what happened on September 11th in Benghazi, Libya, but now that hearings have been held and whistleblowers have come forward to testify, the media seems to be rousing itself from its slumbers. They can hardly do otherwise, though some will try, since there are a few things we can now say we know about this sordid episode, and none of them reflect at all well on the Obama administration:

We know, for instance, that:

• repeated requests by our diplomats in Libya for increased security were not only denied but their security was actually reduced on orders by officials in the State Department.
• during the attack on the consulate troops were requested to be sent but were twice denied permission, by whom is unknown, to go to the aid of the besieged diplomats.
• during the attack President Obama was inexplicably unavailable. Where he was and what he was doing is also unknown, but while our people were being murdered the Commander in Chief was indisposed and uninvolved.
• the administration knew immediately that it was an organized terrorist attack, but despite this knowledge and despite the testimony of the President of Libya that it was a terror attack, they repeatedly put out the false claim, at whose order is still unknown, that the attack was perpetrated by an unruly mob angered by an insulting video. This was not only a lie, it was a diplomatic calamity since it in essence meant that the Libyan President was either himself lying or was uninformed.
• State Dept. whistleblowers have been "punished" for declaring the truth about the attack.
• to this day eight months later none of the attackers have been brought to justice.

In other words, this administration - the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State - are guilty of grossly incompetent judgment that cost four Americans their lives, of dereliction of their duty to protect American personnel, of lying to the American people about the facts of the incident, and probably of obstruction of justice. They've also shown no inclination to hold the murderers responsible.

That Democrats and their media allies have heretofore shown so little interest in all this - a posture which is especially remarkable since they expended so much outrage during the Valerie Plame affair - certainly opens them to the charge of hypocrisy. That they've seemed unconcerned with getting to the bottom of why four Americans died and others were severely wounded, that they've seemed unconcerned with the lies told to the American people, that they've seemed unconcerned that whistleblowers are suffering professionally for having demonstrated personal integrity and courage, is reprehensible and disgraceful.

Why the Left Hates Families

Melanie Phillips was a born and bred liberal who had the scales fall from her eyes. She writes about the reproach and vilification she has suffered from people she thought were friends in an article for the UK Daily Mail. The piece is titled Why the Left Hates Families but probably should be titled How the Left Hates Apostates.

For some people ideology is religion, it's the key to salvation, and infidels, particularly those who were once firmly in the fold but who subsequently fell away, are to be treated with contempt, or worse. Here's Phillips:

For the Left, I am the target of deepest hatred.

For my trenchant views, expressed in this newspaper, they call me ‘insane’, ‘reactionary’, ‘racist’, a ‘Nazi’, a ‘shroudwaver’, a ‘witch’ and a ‘warmonger’.

I have been accused of ‘unmatched depths of ignorance and bigotry’ and being the ‘queen of mean’. It was even suggested (in a particularly extreme spasm of hyperbole) that I eat broken bottles and kill rats with my teeth.

This resort to crude insult against anyone who dares to challenge their shibboleths is typical of the Left. It doesn’t argue its case. It simply tries to shut down debate by bullying its targets and labeling them as extremists and enemies of humanity in order to frighten people away from listening to them.

But they reserve a special loathing for me. This is not just because I refuse to be cowed.

It’s because I was once one of them, one of the elect, a believer.

Phillips operated under the delusion that she could convince her former friends through reasonable argument why she could no longer share their views and why her present convictions are much more sensible.

Unfortunately, reason and argument are considered superfluous, even treacherous, by those who just know that what they believe has to be true. When one's dogmas are based on emotion rather than facts and evidence, reason will be unavailing against them. When one's experience of life eventually leads one to reject those dogmas those who still cling to them will regard the conversion as a personal betrayal and indictment. Thus the bitterness.

Read the rest of the piece at the link. It's not only a compelling indictment of the left from a former devotee, it's also a fascinating if sad glimpse into the mindset of those who can't abide anyone who disagrees with them, especially those who were once ideological comrades.

History Repeats

An MSNBC host named Toure delivered himself of the opinion recently that what the world needs now is open borders. According to Mr. Toure, if we opened our borders to let anyone in who wishes to come in there'd be, for one thing, a lot less Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Without wishing to sound snarky I think that's the sort of idea one comes up with when one realizes one's about to go on the air and has forgot to prepare.

At any rate, that's MSNBC. Meanwhile, in the real world, as a Fox News report by Raymond Ibrahim explains, millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other and thousands are being murdered, raped, and sold into sex slavery by Muslims who apparently believe that this delights Allah who wants the infidel Christians to suffer. Why Toure thinks these pious Muslims would feel any differently toward Christians were they here living on welfare, like the Tsarnaevs, rather than abroad living on welfare, I'm not sure. Here's Ibrahim:

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion: Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

Now, as the U.S. supports the jihad on Syria’s secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived for centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque [leaders] telling the populace that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.

In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

Ibrahim goes on to tell us that the situation is no better in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood, so favored by the Obama administration, gives tacit approval to the murders and property seizures of Christian Copts. The situation is also terrifying in much of the rest of Africa:

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”

In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have literally been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.

In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian religious orders, serving the sick and needy in the country since 1921, to flee.

This, of course, is how Islam originally spread throughout the Middle East, across North Africa, and into Europe. Muslims simply exterminated anyone who refused to adopt the Islamic faith. Toure might try reading a little bit about how Muslims think before he opines on what a wonderful world it would be if we'd just make these folks feel more welcome.

By the way, you probably haven't heard too much about all this if you find out what's going on in the world by watching the evening news, but I'll bet if Christians were extirpating Muslims it'd be all you'd be hearing about on our news outlets. Evidently, however, the murders of tens of thousands of Christians at the hands of Muslims and their forced eviction from the homes and country in which they've lived for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is a big yawner.

What Conservatives Believe

The recent post titled "Why I'm Not a Liberal" motivated a couple of readers to comment that, having been given reasons for eschewing liberalism, it might be helpful to read what conservatives stand for. One reader asked who the seminal thinkers in conservative thought might be and two readers suggested it might be interesting to clarify the connection between classical liberalism and modern conservatism.

I thought these were excellent suggestions so here's my response:

A partial list of the historical progenitors of conservatism would include Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Locke, the American Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville, and perhaps John Stuart Mill. Many readers will be able to think of others, I'm sure.

In our own age, starting in the 1950s, intellectual conservatism was shaped mostly by the people at William Buckley's National Review (Buckley, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, William Rusher). Their thought nourished generations of conservative politicians, most notably Ronald Reagan, and paved the way for numerous popularizers like Rush Limbaugh and myriad other media talkers and columnists. Nevertheless, despite the fecundity of contemporary conservative thought, it was the thinkers at NR who pretty much established its intellectual lineaments. There were others, of course (Robert Tyrrell at the American Spectator and Ayn Rand come to mind), but the NR crowd was really the heart of it.

Conservatives today generally agree on the following seven elements, although they'd differ on which should be given priority in the event that two or more come into conflict:

1. Limited government - Freedom and prosperity are inversely related to the size of government. Big government not only tends to be oppressive, it also tends to be inefficient, wasteful, unresponsive, and easily corrupted.
2. Free markets - As a rule, when people are left to engage in a free exchange of goods and money with minimal government interference and regulation, everyone benefits.
3. Individual liberty - Conservatives believe that citizens should be free from government interference to pursue their own dreams and desires consistent with the rights of others.
4. Private Property - Conservatives believe that the right to personal ownership of life's material goods is an essential element of freedom and that states in which government is the property owner are perforce oppressive.
5. Strict constructionism - This is the view that the Constitution is not indefinitely malleable and that no law should go further than what a reasonable interpretation of the words of the Constitution permit. As an example, most conservatives would agree that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was an extra-constitutional abuse of power by the Supreme Court which fabricated a constitutional right to abortion whose existence in that document most conservatives deny.
6. Strong national defense - Conservatives believe that the best deterrent to war is the ability to decisively project force and defend the homeland and that weakness is an invitation to national insult. Conservatives believe that a great nation should behave as historian Edward Gibbon described Rome under the emperor Hadrian: It was as little willing to suffer insult as it was to give it.
7. Traditional values - Conservatives believe that a people which holds itself to high standards of sexual morality, which places a high value on traditional family and religion, and which loves their country, its heritage and principles, will form a strong and vibrant society, and that failure to hold these values results in societal dissolution.

It's true that sometimes these elements need to be balanced one against another, and individual conservatives will, in such cases, elevate the importance of one above the other. Those who are primarily social conservatives tend to give preeminence to #5, 6, and 7, whereas those who are primarily economic conservatives tend to emphasize the first four. Despite such differences conservatives generally agree that all seven are crucial to a maximally healthy polity.

Moreover, the first four elements reflect the genealogical connection of modern conservatism to classical liberalism. Eighteenth and nineteenth century liberals (classical liberals) all embraced #1, 2, 3, and 4. Modern liberalism as it is incarnated in today's Democratic party, however, pretty much rejects all seven. This rejection severs modern liberalism from classical liberalism and places it instead in the descendency of early 20th century progressivism which itself was the intellectual offspring of 19th century Marxism and 18th century French Jacobinism.

Anyway, if you agree with these seven points, or at least most of them, you're a conservative. You may not have realized that you are, you may even have voted in the last election for liberal Democrats, but if you embrace these seven elements, you weren't being very consistent if you did.

Sweatshops

On April 25th a poorly constructed garment factory building in Bangladesh collapsed killing over five hundred workers. This sort of tragedy, not to mention the sometimes deplorable conditions workers must endure in such sweatshops, inspire many Americans to boycott products made in such factories. Protestors believe that they're acting in solidarity with the impoverished workers whose misery is compounded by their grueling, unsafe working conditions.

It's an understandable response, but it's also shortsighted and counterproductive. Benjamin Powell explains why in an article in Forbes.

He observes that there are in Bangladesh some 4,500 garment factories employing approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of things, he states, the workers are better off with the factories than they would be without them; the benefits outweigh the risks. He writes:

In fact, compared to other opportunities in Bangladesh, the garment industry pays reasonably well. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Sweatshops: Improving Lives and Economic Growth, while 77 percent of Bangladeshis live on less than $2 a day – the international poverty standard – and 43 percent live on less than $1.25 a day, workers at the much-demonized Bangladeshi “sweatshops” average more than $2 a day. Granted, that’s not a lot. But it’s more than they would earn elsewhere.

If United States companies stopped buying from these factories what would happen to these workers? According to Powell, and common sense, if the factory loses U.S. customers the workers will lose their jobs. That's hundreds of thousands of workers who would, as a result of our good intentions, have no income with which to support their families. I daresay that 100% of these wretched people would prefer their current deplorable working conditions to no work at all.

Some activists argue that rather than abandoning the factories American clients should demand upgraded safety standards, but this is a solution that fails to take into account what the workers themselves want. Here's Powell:

[W]e need to recognize that safety is not free, and some workers – as well as consumers, ultimately – will pay a price.

As an economic matter, employers are largely indifferent as to how their labor costs are balanced – that is, whether the compensation consists of wages, the administration of safety standards, health care benefits, or vacation time. A cost is a cost.

Workers, on the other hand, do care about the mix of compensation. When workers are poor, they want most of their compensation paid in wages, because they are trying to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families. When activists insist that companies invest more in safety, what they are doing, in effect, is overriding the preferences of low-income workers.

As part of the research for my book, I surveyed Guatemalan workers in firms where the National Labor Committee had raised red flags and called for improved safety standards. More than 95 percent of the workers we surveyed were unwilling to give up any pay for increased safety.

One's heart goes out to people living and working in such conditions, but the temptation to "do something" to force reform is, as it is in most cases, fraught with unintended consequences. As hard as it is to accept, as much as some might want to do something to alleviate these terrible working conditions, the workers themselves would doubtless prefer we just mind our own business and continue to buy their products.

What's So Funny?

CNN's Piers Morgan and his guests have a good guffaw at the expense of the hapless Mitt Romney because he quotes a Psalm (127:3-5) that tells us that children are a blessing from God and a source of happiness. This makes him a "religious fanatic" in the estimation of Prof. Lamont Hill who proudly boasts that he didn't vote for Romney for precisely this reason, presumably preferring to vote for a man who himself once demonstrated the measure of his regard for children by actually opposing legislation that would have banned the sort of thing that happened regularly in Kermit Gosnell's abattoir.

That someone would actually be made the object of ridicule on national television for offering an encomium on behalf of children should be deeply disturbing. The guests on Morgan's show apparently think that the sentiment Romney expresses is uniquely Mormon, but, of course, it's not. The notion that children are a blessing is shared by almost all Christians as well as many members of other faiths. That these media luminaries find this derisory reveals a disturbing antipathy toward traditional views of family.

In addition to Hill's fatuous remark, it was astonishing that Ms Reston opined that it was because Romney is "into his marriage" that he didn't do well with single women in the last election. Are we to infer that single women are so philistine that they would withhold their vote from someone simply because he's devoted to his wife and kids? If this really is how most single women think then we're closer to the abyss than even I had thought.

Perhaps this derision and disdain for someone who holds children in such high esteem takes us some distance toward explaining why progressives and other pro-choice folk have been reluctant to condemn what the execrable Gosnell did. There's been little outrage from liberals over revelations of Gosnell's blood bespattered clinic, the shelves of pickled babies, and the tales of grisly executions of living children because, I submit, a lot of pro-choice people really don't see anything wrong with killing a child that was supposed to be killed in an abortion anyway. Indeed, infanticide is hard to oppose once one commits to the fight to keep late-term abortions legal, as our President could probably tell you.

So liberals haven't had much to say about the Gosnell horrors - at least not compared to, say, the volcanic eruptions of anger we witnessed from them when Rush Limbaugh insulted a woman who insisted that you and I be forced to pay for her contraception - but they'll gleefully mock someone who encourages families to have lots of kids and who quotes the Bible to boot.

Romney's blend of love of family and religious piety (before an audience comprised primarily of Mormon students) is more than the sophisticates in the liberal media can bear. Their scorn is reflexive. It's odd, when one thinks about it, that they make a hero out of NBA player Jason Collins for shouting from the housetops that he's gay, as if anyone other than President Obama - who felt impelled to call him to congratulate him on his entirely gratuitous announcement - really cares, but they seek to humiliate a man who has repeatedly demonstrated genuine character and virtue throughout his life. They laugh at him precisely because he prizes his wife, his children, and his faith.

I'm afraid that video clip, more than anything else, reveals four very shallow and pathetic souls. It's terribly sad.

Why I'm Not a Liberal

Over the years at Viewpoint we've taken a position that leans conservative on most issues. Though liberals are often quicker to recognize problems that need to be addressed in our society, problems to which conservatives are sometimes tone deaf, the best solutions to those problems, once they're acknowledged, are usually those that follow from a conservative philosophy. Liberal solutions are not only often less efficacious they're quite often disastrous, as we're seeing with the Affordable Health Care Act which Democrat Senator Max Baucus, who helped push it through the Senate, is now calling a "train-wreck."

Liberals themselves are often well-meaning, compassionate people, but their policies have been corrosive and counterproductive both to the individuals they seek to help and to our larger society. Here are a couple of ways I think that's true:

Start with work. Work ennobles us, matures us, nourishes our soul.

Liberalism, however, encourages people to shun work. It promotes a mentality - in unions, for example - that discourages initiative and hustle and seeks to maximize pay while minimizing effort. The worker who does more than his fellows, who's willing to do more than is required by his contract, often finds himself reprimanded or punished by his union.

Liberalism promotes a mentality among the poor that's even worse. Liberalism tells the poor that the state will meet all their needs and many of their wants. It rewards sloth and subsidizes dependency. As Adam Smith put it, "Nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency," but liberal policies almost invariably increase dependency.

Dependency also breeds resentments. The taxpayers who pull the wagon, so to speak, tend to resent the free riders who often feel entitled to the taxpayers' beneficence, and the free riders, in turn, resent the "pullers" for resenting them. The free riders also resent those who are doing all the work because they implicitly recognize their superior virtue. The very fact that others are carrying them on their backs is an indictment of their own lack of the qualities necessary to raise themselves to a higher estate, and they resent it. Moreover, their gratitude, such as it is, is directed not to those whose labor makes their ride possible but to the political party that yokes the pullers to the wagon so that their ride may be both free and comfortable.

When the state inserts itself between the giver of benefits and the recipient it blocks the virtue of gratitude and divorces the giver from the lives of those who receive his gift. The Tsarnaev family received, for some inexplicable reason, $100,000 in welfare over the last couple of years. They demonstrated their gratitude to the taxpayers of America by killing four people and maiming over a hundred others.

Nor does the state demand accountability from the recipient, as private donors might, and, because the exchange between state and recipient is impersonal, it lowers whatever inhibitions there might otherwise be among recipients to manipulating and abusing the givers' generosity.

Liberalism, in a nutshell, teaches the poor that they're entitled to ride in the wagon and instructs the chumps pulling it to pull harder and complain less. This is a message guaranteed to corrode virtue and breed resentment.

Furthermore, liberalism erodes the very foundation of society by destroying families. It tends to amplify the centrifugal forces acting on parents that separate children from their parents and parents from each other. All one need do is look at those sectors in society where liberal social policies have had their most profound effect and one invariably sees a tangle of pathologies and dysfunctionalities afflicting the family.

By usurping the role of fathers and subsidizing children government makes husbands and fathers superfluous. When men are not necessary to provide for women and their children women will not demand commitment from men and men will not commit themselves to the children they spawn nor to their mothers. Thus generations of children grow up without having a positive, loving, male figure in their lives which is why the most reliable commonality among men in prison - and among women who are sexually promiscuous at an early age - is fatherlessness.

By taking away from parents the right, for instance, to supervise their child's purchase of birth control or to decide whether a child will have an abortion, by making divorce easier to attain, liberalism weakens the bonds that tie families together. It reduces society to a collection of disparate individuals rather than a community of strong families.

And the family isn't the only institution that liberalism weakens. Liberal educational policies and assumptions have wrought havoc with what was once a fine system of public education in this country and liberal attitudes toward matters of faith and religion have weakened and undermined the church which has historically been perhaps the chief support and focal point of American communal life.

Liberalism, moreover, encourages people to indulge their passions. Whatever one has a mind to do, as long as no one else is hurt by it, is just fine and the rest of us, we're told, should accept it. It's not merely that people should tolerate behavior they find offensive, but that it's at best socially gauche and at worst hate speech to pass any kind of judgment on those behaviors. Thus, not only should we tolerate, for example, the sexual predilections of others, we must either approve of them or keep our mouths shut.

Such are the fruits of liberalism. It fosters fatherlessness, destroys communities, reduces people to social atoms, stifles virtue, suppresses free expression of moral opinion, and discourages initiative and hard work while promoting dependency. It shrivels the souls of individuals and fractures communities.

Those are a few reasons why I'm not a liberal.

Twidiocracy

My friend Jason sent me a link to the perfect story (except that it's long). It's a piece by Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard, and it says all the things about twitter that I think and a lot of stuff that I never thought of. Labash is an unapologetic techno-troglodyte who has refused, so far, to join what he calls the twidiocracy, a phenomenon he claims is destroying our culture 140 characters at a time.

I appreciate his complaint. If you've ever sat in a restaurant with several acquaintances or young family members only to have them place their phones on the table and not look up from them the whole time you're there, you'll appreciate his complaint, too. Unless, that is, you're one of those people whose social graces have atrophied to the point where it's impossible to carry on a conversation with you because you're unable to detach yourself from your phone long enough to engage an actual human being in an actual dialogue.

Anyway, Labash's essay is long but it's a great read. Here's a sample:

If you haven’t gathered by now, I’m not a Twitter fan. In fact, I outright despise the inescapable microblogging service, which nudges its users to leave no thought unexpressed, except for the fully formed ones (there’s a 140-characters-per-tweet limit). I hate it not just because the Twidiocracy constantly insists I should love it, though that certainly helps. Being in the media profession (if “profession” isn’t overstating things), where everyone flocked en masse to the technology out of curiosity or insecurity or both, I’ve hated it reflexively since its beginning.

But with time’s passage and deliberation, I’ve come to hate it with deeper, more variegated richness. I hate the smugness of it, the way the techno-triumphalists make everyone who hasn’t joined the Borg feel like they’ve been banished to an unpopulated island, when in fact the numbers don’t support that notion. Even after seven years of nonstop media hype, only 16 percent of Internet users tweet, the same as the percentage of 14-49-year-olds who have genital herpes. The difference being that the latter are not proud of their affliction, while the former never shut up about theirs.

I hate the way Twitter transforms the written word into abbreviations and hieroglyphics, the staccato bursts of emptiness that occur when Twidiots who have no business writing for public consumption squeeze themselves into 140-character cement shoes. People used to write more intelligently than they speak. Now, a scary majority tend to speak more intelligently than they tweet. If that’s a concern—and all evidence suggests it isn’t—you can keep your tweets private, readable only by those you invite. But that reduces your number of “followers,” so almost nobody does it. A private Twitter account cuts against the whole spirit of the enterprise—a bit like showing up at a nude beach in a muumuu.

The idea that others should "follow" me as I propound the most banal vacuities and inflict them on all and sundry is absurd, pompous, and narcissistic. It's almost as egocentric, perhaps, as thinking that others should read one's blog.

The Future of the GOP

You've probably heard the story of the child who was asked at a custody hearing which parent he wanted to go home with. One parent gave him everything he wanted, promised him more, and allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased. The other parent told him he'd have to work hard and earn the things he wanted, that he'd have to follow certain rules and meet certain behavioral expectations.

Which parent do you think the child chose to live with?

The Republican party finds itself today in the situation of the parent who told the child that he'd have to work hard and follow the rules. There's just no way they can compete for votes among an electorate in which a majority of people, like the child in the custody story, will vote for whomever promises them the most stuff.

Mr. Obama offers "free" medical care, "free" birth control, "free" cell phones, "free" housing and "free" food. Does the child care how the parent will pay for their amenities? No, all the child cares about is that he's going to get them and that he's not the one who'll have to pay. Nor will he have to do anything more arduous to get them than fill out a form.

It's been said that a democracy can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself money out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits which inevitably eventuates in the collapse of the democracy which is ultimately supplanted by a tyranny.

The base of Mr. Obama's plurality consists largely of the poor and young people. These are two of the least invested demographic groups in our nation. They're the least informed, they usually pay little to no income tax, and they're often the most indifferent to politics, but their numbers are growing. They're a major reason why Mr. Obama won in both 2008 and 2012.

Republicans have before them three roads that they can take. They can either resign themselves to being a rump party, irrelevant to the governance of the country; or they can morph into a kind of Democrat-lite, abandon their conservative principles and pander to the various groups that comprise the majority of voters; or they can find a better way to teach those principles and make them more attractive to those whose support they need.

I vote for the third option, fully recognizing that it'll be the most difficult to pull off. It'll be very much like trying to convince the child that it's in his best interest to go with the parent who offers him discipline and responsibility, but the future of the country and of our children depends upon it.

Time

One of the deepest mysteries in science and philosophy is the nature of time. The puzzlement goes back at least as far as Augustine (354-430) who raised a number of perplexing questions about it in his Confessions. Some thinkers, including many physicists, follow Immanuel Kant in believing that time has no existence apart from the human mind and that our experience of time is a kind of illusion. Lee Smolin, however, dissents from the consensus view in his new book Time Reborn.

In a conversation with Duke University neuroscientist Warren Meck, theoretical physicist Smolin, who's based at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, argued for the controversial idea that time is real. "Time is paramount," he said, "and the experience we all have of reality being in the present moment is not an illusion, but the deepest clue we have to the fundamental nature of reality."

Smolin said he hadn't come to this concept lightly. He started out thinking, as most physicists do, that time is subjective and illusory. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, time is just another dimension in space, traversable in either direction, and our human perception of moments passing steadily and sequentially is all in our heads.

Over time, though, Smolin became convinced not only that time was real, but that this notion could be the key to understanding the laws of nature.

"If laws are outside of time, then they're inexplicable," he said. "If law just simply is, there's no explanation. If we want to understand law … then law must evolve, law must change, law must be subject to time. Law then emerges from time and is subject to time rather than the reverse."

This view, however, is subject, as Smolin acknowledges, to a major criticism called the "meta-law dilemma":

If physical laws are subject to time, and evolve over time, then there must be some larger law [i.e. a meta-law] that guides their evolution. But wouldn't this law, then, have to be beyond time, to determine how the other laws change with time? Other physicists have cited this objection in reaction to Smolin's work.

Columbia University physicist Peter Woit wrote to Smolin on his blog that "you speculate a bit in the book on ways to resolve this, but I don't see a convincing answer to the criticism that whatever explanation you come up with for what determines how laws evolve, I’m free to characterize that as just another law."

Smolin is persistent, though. He believes the meta-law problem can be solved. Perhaps it can, but the discussion sounds as though it's pointing to a higher reality beyond the space-time reality in which we are embedded. It's interesting how so much of science tends to do that.

At any rate, the view that time is an illusion is believed by some to entail that all events are simultaneously existent. Future and past events exist concurrently with the present, like frames on a movie film, but our consciousness moves through them in such a way as to give the illusion that they are coming to be and ceasing to be. Think of the movie projector, our consciousness, moving along the film casting the frames on our mind rather than the film moving through the projector.

Unfortunately, if the future already exists then we're not really free to create it. If we're not free to choose what the future will be then we're just so much temporal flotsam carried along by the current of existence, and it's hard to imagine what basis there'd be in such a world for human dignity.

"If I think the future's already written, then the things that are most valuable about being human are illusions along with time," Smolin said. "We still aspire to make choices in life. That is a precious part of our humanity. If the real metaphysical picture is that there are just atoms moving in the void, then nothing is ever new and nothing's ever surprising — it's just the rearrangement of atoms. There's a loss of responsibility as well as a loss of human dignity."

I wonder, though, why time can't be an illusion, a subjective phenomenon created by our minds, without that entailing a predetermined future. I suppose I should read the book.

Graduation, Mothers' Day Gift

Graduation is right around the corner. Mothers' Day is even closer. If you're trying to think of a gift to give the family member or friend who's about to graduate, or if mom's a reader, perhaps you might consider presenting them with a copy of In the Absence of God.

If you're not familiar with it you can read about it by following the link at the upper right of this page.

Absence is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Berean, BAM, Lifeway, and my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds.

Books aren't a gift appreciated by everyone, of course. A lot of people, unfortunately, don't read, and if they do they sometimes shy from reading anything that might be a little demanding, but if you know someone who enjoys books and who's not averse to having a little metaphysics mixed in with their drama (or vice versa), you could do a lot worse than putting a copy of Absence in their hands.

Aside from making a good gift for a thoughtful graduate or mom, In the Absence of God would also make a fine selection for book clubs, reading groups, or youth groups. Here's what one reader said about it:

Thanks for telling me about your book, In the Absence of God. I bought it last Tuesday for my Kindle and finished it in two evenings, although the last evening lasted until 3:05 a.m.. I could not put it down. Thought provoking, good story lines and characters, entertaining reading, and very educational. Absolutely loved the book and have been talking about it to my kids, family and friends.

If you order a copy from Hearts and Minds I'll autograph it if you request it.

Background Knowledge

The Pew Research Center gave slightly more than one thousand adults a thirteen question true/false test to assess the general population's scientific background knowledge. Only 7% of those taking the test got all thirteen questions correct. You can take the test yourself here.

How did you do?

Most people got between 7 and 11 answers correct. One percent of respondents answered none of the thirteen questions correctly. An analysis of the results can be found here.

The Coming Insurrection

I recently shared a thought with a reader during an email exchange that I'd like to also share with the VP audience. I told the reader this:

I'm going to make a prediction. I think that there'll be an increasing estrangement between legislative Democrats and the White House over the remainder of Obama's presidency. As things stand now their alliance is one of political necessity, but I don't think there's much fondness flowing in either direction in their marriage. If the Democrats fail to retake the House in 2014 Obama will be a very lame duck, and I think the cumulative frictions and irritations that have been festering privately between his party and him are going to become less endurable, and their relationship will grow more noticeably frosty.

I also think that now that Obama is safely reelected media cheerleaders will begin to feel freer to criticize him for his manifold shortcomings. I expect that we'll see less adulation and more impatience from journalists who wish to salvage their tattered reputations and make themselves appear to be something more than frenzied groupies pleading with Obama to toss them a sweaty handkerchief from the stage or to permit them to touch the hem of his garment.

If the Dems also lose the Senate in 2014 Mr. Obama will spend the last two years of his presidency playing golf and jetting around the world with his family, and the Democratic Party will privately, and maybe even publicly, seethe at his imperiousness, their abandonment, and his indifference to their political fate. It'll be interesting to watch.

Indeed, there are signs that the disaffection is already well underway. One indicator is the growing Democratic disillusionment with Obamacare. Of course, the Democrats were eagerly complicit, at the White House's behest, in ramrodding this socialist grotesquerie through the legislature. Never having taken the time to actually read the legislation themselves, they simply trusted the administration that it was good, well-thought-out policy. Now that it's turning out to be quite otherwise, they're embarrassed by their support for it.

With every passing week the Dems are realizing that they've created a monster that's going to have very painful consequences for the American people and, consequently, very painful political consequences for the Democrat party. They're angry, some of them, that they've essentially been compelled to sacrifice their political careers on the altar of the President's progressive ambitions, and they resent him for it.

Another indication, perhaps, that the days of blindly doing the President's bidding are over was the recent thwarting by Senate Democrats of Mr. Obama's desire to see gun control legislation enacted.

I suspect we'll see other such instances in the months ahead, especially if the Democrats get spanked in the 2014 midterm elections. If that happens rank and file resentments might turn into outright hostility toward the administration. I hope so. It'd be good for the country.

Molecular Machines

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying the principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would say that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has whetted your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it the product of intelligence?

A Dying Sport?

Chicago tribune columnist John Kass predicts that football is a dying sport and that within ten years it will cease to be played. This sounds preposterous given all the money it brings in, especially at the college and pro levels, but Kass believes that lawsuits will force high schools to drop programs and without the scholastic feeder systems the upper levels of the sport will wither and die:

With all that college beef on parade this week, the NFL draft is a wonder of sports marketing, a televised pageant for the multibillion-dollar American football industry.

But there's something football fans should know:

Football is dead in America.

Even through all the chatter and cheerleading and media hype, football as an American cultural institution lies in final spasm. It's as dead as the Marlboro Man.

And if the professional game survives at all, it will be relegated to the pile of trash sports, like mixed martial arts or whatever is done in third-rate arenas with monster trucks and mud. It won't be as American as apple pie. Instead, football will become the province of people with face tattoos.

Lawyers are circling football now. For years they've had their wings locked, cruising overhead, but lately they've swooped in low, landing and hopping over to take chunks out of the great billion-dollar beast. But it's not the lawyers who are the death of football. Blaming lawyers misses the point. Like their counterparts in nature, lawyers are merely the cleanup crew. What finishes football are the parents of future football players.

The NFL desperately needs American parents. Not as fans, but as suppliers of young flesh.

The NFL needs parents to send their little boys into the football feeder system. And without that supply of meat for the NFL grinder — first youth teams, then high school and college — there can be no professional football. And yet every day, more American parents decide they're finished with football. Why? Because parents can no longer avoid the fact that football scrambles the human brain.

Kass may well be right about this. Athletes today are so much bigger, stronger, and faster than they were thirty or forty years ago, the speed of the game and the violence of the collisions at every level of play is so far beyond what it once was that it well may be that football has literally outgrown itself.

But here's an irony. For all the concern about concussions and head trauma among football players I have personally seen more athletes diagnosed with concussion in the last five years watching my grandchildren play soccer than I saw in two decades of coaching high school football, and yet no one seems to be demanding that youth and high school soccer players be required to wear some sort of protective head gear. Why is that?

If we're so concerned about head trauma why do we allow kids to participate in a sport in which they use their heads to redirect the ball, in which they often bang their heads on the turf during a hard fall, or, in the case of goalies, get kicked in the head by opposing players, all without requiring them to wear any kind of protective equipment? It makes no sense to me.

Kass goes on in his column to explain that he played football and loves the game but he and his wife decided not to let their sons play it, and that a lot of parents are making the same decision. This parental veto, he argues, will bring about the demise of the game.

He may be right. Parental concern may reduce the number of kids playing, but if so, I think the effect will be seen mostly among the more affluent. At the elite level, however, football is largely played by kids that don't come from wealth. Many of those kids are poor and their parents may not be as likely as more educated parents to force them when they're young into an alternative like soccer.

We'll see. Here's Kass (after the ad):

Maher Is Right Again

Sometimes events transpire so as to cause one to worry that the world is turning upside down. For the second time in as many weeks I find myself applauding Bill Maher for calling liberal flummery what it is - though flummery is perhaps more polite than the word Maher chooses to use.

The first time I found myself agreeing with Maher was when a week or so ago he refused to go along with Rachel Maddow's desire to see the wealthy socked with even higher tax rates than they already pay. In the present case he makes a guest named Brian Levin, a putative expert on religiously inspired terrorism, look condignly simple-minded.

Levin tries to argue that all religions are equally violent, a claim so preposterous that even someone as hostile to religion as Maher can't let it pass:

It's incredible that an intelligent, educated man could believe what Levin apparently believes, i.e. that there is some sort of equivalence among the world's religions in terms of their propensity to commit violence.

The fact that Levin had to go back seven hundred years to find examples of how Christians committed the kinds of atrocities that are routine today throughout the Islamic world should have given him a clue that he was making himself sound foolish.

A Nation Asks Why

The headline in my local paper yesterday read a "Nation Asks Why," in reference, of course, to the Boston bomb attack. If any among the authorities knows what motivated the Tsarnaev brothers to commit this awful crime, they haven't yet made the information public, but I have a couple of thoughts nonetheless.

1. Moral evil is real: It's fashionable in our post-modern, non-judgmental, enlightened age to pooh-pooh the notion of evil as an anachronism, a throw-back to an age when we knew less than we do today about neuroscience and how the brain works. Today sophisticated, educated people know that those who do terrible things simply have something wrong with their brains. It's not a moral issue at all.

To all of which we might respond that a society that's reluctant to call the deliberate maiming of children and other innocents evil is a society that is morally paralyzed and perishing from spiritual inanition. It has lost its soul.

I tell my students the story of a prof at Yale who after the 9/11 attack surveyed her students and found many of them were unwilling or unable to call the mass murder perpetrated on that day evil. They couldn't bring themselves to pass judgment on people from a different culture. Ironically, however, a couple of weeks before this survey the same students were almost unanimous in condemning those who kill whales for a living.

Not only are we morally paralyzed, we, or at least some of us, are terribly confused.

2. Evil is ubiquitous: Alexander Solzhenytsin said that the line between good and evil does not run between nations or cultures but through every human heart. Human beings need something outside of themselves, a set of convictions, to constrain them from the evil they often feel impelled to do, but other than Christianity there's no belief system in the world that offers an adequate constraint.

This is not to say that Christians have not done evil. They have, but the difference is that if a Christian wantonly murders innocent people he is violating the beliefs he professes to hold. He's repudiating the most fundamental tenets of his religion and betraying the God he professes to love. When, however, a Muslim or an atheist murders, especially if they murder religious or political enemies, they're not violating any such set of beliefs. Most Muslims or atheists will subjectively recoil from the idea of such a crime, but nothing in their belief systems forbids it. Their aversion to acts of evil is purely a consequence of their personalities. If those personalities were otherwise there would be no check, internal or external, on their passions.

So perhaps at least part of the answer to the question why the Tsarnaevs were willing to slaughter three people, including an 8 year-old boy, and blow the limbs off dozens of others is because the Tsarnaevs were haters and there was nothing in their hearts or minds telling them that hatred is evil and that acting upon it is even worse. Quite the opposite, in fact. In their religion hatred of infidels is good and acting upon it gains Allah's favor. For people such as the Tsarnaevs the only internal factors limiting the carnage and suffering they're prepared to inflict are their intelligence and their courage.

So, why did they do it? Because they could, and there are, I fear, lots of Tsarnaevs out there.

Mind Over Matter

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent has posted a number of quotes from the founder of modern quantum mechanics and Nobel Prize winner (1918) Max Plank. Unlike many physicists of his time and ours, Plank was not a materialist. He believed that everything in the universe ultimately reduces to consciousness, and that mind underlies the phenomena that science studies. Here's a sampling of the quotes Arrington put up at UD:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Not only did Plank spurn the materialist faith of many of the scientists of his day (and ours), he also had disdain for the attempts by scientists (like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Stephen Hawking) to bury religious belief:

Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future.

This is an important point, I think. There's so much in our culture that is beautiful and noble, and just about all of it is rooted in the Christian tradition that the secularists and new atheists seek to ignore or eradicate. Read, for instance, what Jurgen Habermas, an atheistic philosopher, says about our culture's indebtedness to its Christian heritage:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post-modern chatter.

Habermas might have added science to his list of goods that are rooted in the Christian worldview. That worldview holds that the universe is the ordered creation of a rational God, that it is governed by logical laws, and that through the use of reason and empirical investigation its secrets can be uncovered. It also holds that the world is given to man for his use and is neither sacred, as the pantheists and others believed, nor contemptible, as the Greeks believed. Thus it is no sacrilege to study it and no defilement to work with it. It was these assumptions, widely held in the Christian world of post-Roman Europe, that allowed science to grow and flourish. It did so nowhere else because no other worldview was compatible with sustained scientific investigation.

Finally, since we're on the topic of Christian contributions to culture, we might also mention the modern university, hospitals, charities, art and music, women's rights and almost everything else that, when we stop to think about it, we consider a blessing. Christianity is the fountain of all this, but the secularists wish to ignore it, and the new atheists want to do away with it. What they yearn for and advocate, however, would amount to cultural suicide.

Why the President Lost

President Obama waxed choleric over his recent defeat in the Senate of the Manchin/Toomey gun-control bill. He went so far as to essentially call opponents of the bill liars and blamed the Republicans for the loss while somehow failing to note the critical fact that four Democrats voted against it.

Anyway, the President suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on this one for a number of reasons. Here are three:

1. The bill would have done nothing to prevent the Sandy Hook tragedy nor any of the other mass shootings which were cited as making the legislation necessary. Nor would it do anything to prevent the obscene gun violence in places like Chicago where three or four kids are shot to death every day. The bill was at best well-intentioned window dressing. At worst, it was an incremental addition to the burgeoning power of the federal government.

2. Even though the major feature of the bill, universal background checks, seems innocuous, and protections were built into the legislation to keep it from being turned into a registry of firearms owners, the fact is that tens of millions of people simply don't trust this president. The sense is that this was just the camel's nose insinuating itself into the tent and that just as the president, as soon as he won repeal of the Bush tax cuts, began campaigning for even more tax hikes, so, too, the concern was that once background checks were in place there'd be a campaign for even further restrictions on gun ownership.

Almost nobody believes this president when he assures us that he supports Second Amendment rights, just as nobody believed him when he said in 2008 that he opposed gay marriage. Most people are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that Mr. Obama's ultimate goal is to make it next to impossible to purchase a gun and to essentially drive American gun manufacturers out of business, just as the ultimate goal of his environmental regulations is to put the coal industry out of business and his apparent goal with Obamacare is to put private insurance companies out of business.

3. The Manchin/Toomey bill ignores what many people believe to be the real cause of much of the violence in our society: Our culture's increasing secularization, it's lust for violent entertainment, and the accelerating dissolution of the family. Put these three factors together and you get millions of young men growing up in a religious/moral vacuum with no strong male figure to inculcate virtue into their savage little hearts. These young men consequently spend their adolescent years wallowing in entertainment that makes killing and bloodshed exciting and cathartic, and there's no one in their lives to effectively teach them otherwise.

It's as though our society were in an advanced stage of a virulent cancer and the Manchin/Toomey bill sought to treat it by applying lip balm. Consequently, no one but Democrats really took it seriously.

The President's petulant reaction in the Rose Garden may have been sincere, but it's hard to believe that he really thought that the legislation, had it passed the Senate, would have also made it through the House of Representatives. He must have known that the Republican-run House would defeat it so why was he so upset that it lost in the Senate?

I don't wish to sound cynical, but I have little doubt that at least part of the reason he was angry was that it was defeated in the Senate due to Democrat defections. Had it passed in the Senate and then gone down in the House he would've had a club to use against House Republicans in the 2014 election. This is a crucial matter. Unless President Obama wins the House in 2014 he's going to be a very lame-duck president and he'll accomplish none of his remaining goals. Now, thanks to four of his fellow Democrats, the cudgel with which he had hoped to pummel the GOP won't be available to him.

I don't suppose those four Democratic senators should expect any White House dinner invitations for the next three years.

Quiet

I just finished reading Susan Cain's book titled Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. It's a delightful read, and I couldn't help thinking that in so much of what she said she was perfectly describing me.

Early in the book she provides a test which will reveal whether the reader is more of an introvert or an extrovert. You can take it yourself here:

Identify whether the following statements about you are true or false:

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing.
3. I enjoy solitude.
4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status (and popularity).
5. I dislike small talk but I enjoy talking more deeply about topics that matter to me.
6. I'm told that I'm a good listener.
7. I'm not a big risk taker.
8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions.
9. I prefer to celebrate birthdays quietly and on a small scale with only a few friends or family members.
10. I'm sometimes described as "soft-spoken" or "mellow."
11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until I'm finished.
12. I dislike conflict.
13. I work best on my own.
14. I tend to think before I speak.
15. I feel "drained" after I being in a social setting, even if I've enjoyed myself.
16. I often let calls go through to voice mail.
17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with nothing to do to one with many activities scheduled.
18. I don't enjoy multitasking.
19. I can concentrate easily.
20. I prefer lectures to seminars in classroom situations.

The more of these that are true about you the more likely you are to be an introvert. If a roughly equal number are true as are false then you are likely an "ambivert," and, of course, if the statements are in your case mostly false then you're probably an extrovert.

There's nothing wrong with being any of these, but Cain is herself an introvert and her book is about introversion and the struggles that introverts sometimes have in a culture that seems to reward extroverts. She offers a lot of interesting insights on this and related themes.

If you're an introvert you'll certainly learn a lot about yourself from reading her book.