Just Sayin'

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No Accountability

One of the reasons the Tea Party was birthed is that more and more Americans have less and less trust in their government and in the politicians who run it. The Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to further erode what little faith is left. Not only have they stonewalled every congressional investigation into every administrative debacle (Fast and Furious, the IRS abuses, and the Benghazi attacks most prominently), but they've refused to hold anyone accountable for them which just gives the impression that the underlings were doing the bidding of the president himself.

Take, for example, this report on the fate of the four state department employees who were suspended for various derelictions related to the Benghazi affair:

When no one is held accountable, when no one can even be persuaded to honestly and forthrightly testify to what happened in these various scandals, citizens can't help but conclude that the administration is simply hiding what they know to be their own malfeasance and culpability.

Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama

Washington Post columnist George Will fillets politicians with the deftness and virtuousity of a benihana chef. His latest subject is President Obama whose lawlessness and disregard for constitutional restraints Will subjects to a slicing and dicing which almost forces the reader to the conclusion that the extra-legality of Barack Obama is in fact worse and more brazen than that of Richard Nixon. Here's part of it:

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.

Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy. He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”

When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.

Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.

Will vents much more of his displeasure with the manner in which Mr. Obama has conducted himself in office at the link. It causes me to wonder were Mr. Obama not the first black president, or were he a white Republican, whether he'd have been impeached by now. Is it unfair and/or unreasonable to think that his administration has been at least as incompetent and feckless as Jimmy Carter's, and at least as arrogant and corrupt as Richard Nixon's? Am I wrong in thinking that no president, absent a major war, has polarized the nation as much as has Mr. Obama, especially racially but also ideologically, and that no president since FDR has presided over such a weak economy with such high unemployment for so long a period of time? Am I wrong in asserting that no modern president been beset by so many scandals of so much magnitude, nor spent so much of the taxpayer's money on his own personal recreation and that of his family, a fact which is especially galling given the unprecedented number of people struggling to make ends meet?

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps if I knew more of the facts I wouldn't have arrived at these judgments, but until those facts are forthcoming I don't see how anyone who tries to look objectively at the current state of things can draw any other conclusion. Given that the Democrats hailed Mr. Obama's ascendency to the Oval Office as almost a secular second coming it's all very disappointing.

Defining the Class of 2017

The Beloit College Mindset List describes the class of 2017 as the "sharing generation." Here's why:

They share information: it's a generation that has grown up with the electronic cut and paste and forward.

They share themselves: it’s a generation that is constantly “chatting,” which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily talking, even on the phone, much less face to face. They text all day; they text all night. They wake up and text before their feet hit the floor.

They share transportation: they tend to flock to big cities for employment, where it’s more expensive to keep a car, but in fact they seem less interested in owning their own autos than previous generations have been, and they take public transport.

They share our national identity: it’s a generation that is not sold on the idea that there is a single national identity. They’ve grown up in a multi-ethnic society. One survey suggested that in the future they wouldn’t follow a political party that could only attract whites, even if they are themselves white.

They share knowledge: it’s a generation that has not grown up with the lecturer (in educational terms, “the sage on the stage”) but with the facilitator (“guide on the side”). They’ve absorbed educational methods that involve small-group collaborative learning rather than more passive listen-and-take-notes.

Finally, they share spiritual values: it’s a generation that is interested in spiritual ideas—such as meditation and service—but it’s not a sectarian generation. It has a more ecumenical approach. It’s spiritual but not religious in the sectarian sense.

I'm not sure what it all means or even how accurate it all is, but there you have it. Do you think it's a correct description of young people today? If it is, how significant is it?

Why Should He Care?

Atheist blogger P.Z. Myers says he's been handed a hand grenade with a pulled pin. A major figure in the atheist community has been accused of repeated sexual misconduct and Myers debates with himself the right way to handle the information:

So I’ve been given this rather…explosive…information. It’s a direct report of unethical behavior by a big name in the skeptical community (yeah, like that hasn’t been happening a lot lately), and it’s straight from the victim’s mouth. And it’s bad. Really bad.

She’s torn up about it. It’s been a few years, so no law agency is going to do anything about it now; she reported it to an organization at the time, and it was dismissed. Swept under the rug. Ignored. I can imagine her sense of futility. She’s also afraid that the person who assaulted her before could try to hurt her again.

But at the same time, she doesn’t want this to happen to anyone else, so she’d like to get the word out there. So she hands the information to me. Oh, thanks.

Now I’ve been sitting here trying to resolve my dilemma — to reveal it or not — and ... what’s dominating my head isn’t the consequences, but the question of what is the right thing to do. Do I stand up for the one who has no recourse, no way out, no other option to help others, or do I shelter the powerful big name guy from an accusation I can’t personally vouch for, except to say that I know the author, and that she’s not trying to acquire notoriety (she wants her name kept out of it)?

You'll have to go to the link to learn the identity of the alleged cad, and no it's not someone named Filner, Spitzer, Weiner, Clinton, Kennedy, Gore, or Menendez (Quick quiz: What do the aforementioned all have in common?). It is, however, someone who's very well known for his advocacy of atheism.

What interests me about this, though, is Myers' moral wrestling match with his conscience. If the allegations of sexual misconduct are true, and they're certainly well-corroborated, what's the problem? Why should atheists be in a moral swivet about what the gentleman did, or, for that matter, whether to make it public. Given atheism, there's no morally right or wrong action, only actions that people don't like. Morally speaking what this prominent atheist did has no more moral significance than might be assigned to bad manners and neither does Myers' decision to publicize the behavior.

To assert that X is morally wrong is to assume that there's some standard of moral behavior that we have a duty to obey, but where does that standard come from and what imposes the duty to obey it? On atheism, there's no moral authority qualified to impose such a standard and no authority which can impose such a duty. Only a personal, transcendent moral authority could establish a non-subjective standard and obligate us to adhere to it. Since atheists deny the existence of such a being, the last thing an atheist can do is make a moral judgment of someone else's behavior.

This is a serious problem with atheism, of course. Most atheists simply can't live consistently with their conviction that there's nothing more to reality than atoms and energy. They know that atoms and energy can't confer moral value, but they insist on living as if they can.

Put another way, when a Christian behaves as this prominent atheist author is accused of behaving the Christian has betrayed his calling, violated an objective moral standard, and deeply disappointed his God. When an atheist behaves like this he has betrayed nothing, violated nothing more than society's arbitrary norms, and disappointed no one except other human beings.

Why should he care about any of that?

Back from Panama

I've just returned from a week spent trekking through the forests and meadows of Panama in pursuit of tropical species of birds. Panama has a rich avifauna and some of the birds there are almost unimaginably beautiful. Here are a couple of photos culled from the internet of just a few of the species I was able to see:

The bird above is a Golden-hooded tanager. It's found in garden type environments and along forest edges.

It's hard to capture in a photo the beauty of the Blue dachnis. The blue is electric. It's an amazing fact about birds that there's no blue pigment in their feathers. The color is structural. That is, it results from the way light is reflected and refracted off the feathers.

This was my favorite bird of the trip. It's a very large member of the vulture group called the King vulture. This was my eighth trip to Central America, and I had futilely searched the skies for this bird on every previous trip. Finally, on this one I saw it. In fact, I managed to see three of them, all of which were soaring at just about the height of the bird in the photo.

Notice

Dick Cleary is out of the country for the week of August 12 and may not have access to the internet. If that's the case, there won't be new posts to Viewpoint until next week.

Bill

Why He Uses a Teleprompter

The Blaze has a link to a video of some of the President's more memorable moments where his mind, or his education, simply failed him.

Anyone can make such mistakes, of course, but the media absolutely killed Dan Quayle for misspelling potato, ridiculed George H.W. Bush for remarking on supermarket laser scanners, crucified George W. Bush almost every time he opened his mouth, and yukked it up over an apocryphal story about Sarah Palin having claimed to be able to see Russia from her home. Yet Mr. Obama repeatedly makes statements one might associate with an uneducated dolt and the media scarcely blinks.

Consider just a few of the bloopers the President, whom we're told possesses a towering intellect, has produced over the last few years:

• At a military service he pronounced corpsman as corpse man.
• When speaking in Hawaii he referred to the island state in which he spent much of his youth as being in Asia.
• When trying to make the case for government-run health care he said that UPS and FedEx, two private enterprises, are doing just fine, but the Post Office, which is subject to government oversight, is "always having problems" thus undercutting his own argument.
• In a Memorial Day speech he said, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong."
• He also once claimed that a Kansas tornado which took twelve lives had actually killed ten thousand people: "In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed."
• Most recently he declared Charleston, Norfolk and Savannah to be Gulf Coast ports.

There are many more examples. The point is not to make fun of Mr. Obama, he is the president after all, but rather to poke a little fun at those of his worshipers who have apotheosized him and especially at the liberal media who would have collapsed in spasms of hilarity had a Republican president committed just one of these blunders, but which politely averts its eyes from the accumulating pile of howlers delivered by this Democratic president.

Rush Limbaugh, from whose site the video was borrowed, put it this way:

“[President Obama] has committed far more gaffes than George Bush and Sarah Palin combined....Folks, you let that be George W. Bush, you let that be Ronald Reagan, and the stories today are, ‘Is Alzheimer’s setting in? Do we have dementia?’ I’m not kidding. They would have psychiatrists and psychologists on TV, and they would be analyzing this, and they’d be looking for any indication that a declining mental capacity is taking place.”

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a similar montage of the wit and wisdom of our Vice-President. It should be even more entertaining.

Politicians Say the Darnedest Things

Kirstin Powers at the Daily Beast illustrates for us the fact that so many pro-choicers base their advocacy for the right to terminate the life of an unborn child not upon any rational argument but rather upon simple emotion. Some of them apparently have a very tenuous grasp of the facts surrounding the issue of abortion, particularly late-term abortion.

Powers cites as exhibit A of her indictment the Texas state senator, Wendy Davis, who fought to prevent the Texas legislature from effectively banning Kermit Gosnell-type abortion clinics from operating in Texas:

The Democratic star du jour [Davis] was asked this week to explain the difference between the late-term abortions she fought to keep legal in Texas and the illegal killings by Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” she told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who cornered her after her National Press Club speech on Monday.

This is incredible. After all, Davis is the state senator who held an 11-hour filibuster to fight legislation drafted in response to the abuses at Gosnell’s clinic. A passing knowledge of the case seems like basic due diligence.

She went on: “But I do know that [Gosnell] happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.” It takes real skill to pack so many falsehoods into so few words.

As Powers explains, Gosnell's crimes were conducted in a clinic that Pennsylvania's Department of Health failed to hold to the standards of an ambulatory surgical facility. Since then, the state has passed a law, over the objections of Democrats and Planned Parenthood, that would require that any facility performing abortions be held to the same standards of hygiene as are these facilities.

At one point in his interview, McCormack asked Davis what she made of the fact a majority of women support late-term abortion bans. Davis told him, “I…think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there.”

The small percentage, Powers notes dryly, translates to 18,000 late term abortions a year.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of ignorance and sheer stupidity in Powers' article came, unsurprisingly, from the lips of Nancy Pelosi:

In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.

Pelosi then told an outright lie: “[The 20-week ban] would make it a federal law that there would be no abortion in our country.” No reporter questioned this absurdity, even though they’ve heard pro-abortion rights leaders assert a thousand times that “only” 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. (For those who care, that’s “only” 18,000 late-term abortions each year.)

Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails.

And, Powers might have added, achieved escape velocity from the inconvenient constraints of logic. Only someone with an IQ low enough to freeze nitrogen would utter such an embarrassing non sequitur. Ms Pelosi's reply is a tacit acknowledgement that she had no rational response to give.

For those who might be wondering why people get upset over late-term abortion I recommend Powers' (who, by the way, is a liberal Democrat) last paragraph:

In May this year, former abortion doctor Dr. Anthony Levantino described late-term abortion in congressional testimony before a House subcommittee debating the 20-week abortion ban Pelosi and most Democrats opposed. It is similar to the one Davis opposed in Texas. Levantino told the committee: “The toughest part...is extracting the baby’s head. [Y]ou will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see white gelatinous material coming through the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you.”

A culture, a political party, and politicians who defend such a practice are either ignorant of the facts and/or morally destitute. Either way we have proceeded very far along the road to total cultural degeneration if we allow the thinking of such people as Ms Davis and Ms Pelosi to determine our posture on abortion.

Geographically Challenged

Perhaps Mr. Obama went AWOL from his high school geography classes to go "chooming" with his fellow stoners, but, whatever the reason, our president certainly lacks a basic grasp of the geography of the country over which he presides.

First he informed us that he has campaigned in "all 57 states," a pronouncement that startled the half of the population that realized the implications of the claim, and now he has located three east coast cities on the Gulf coast (relevant part starts at 2:55).

Sure, maybe he actually meant to insert the conjunction "and" in there between "the Gulf" and "places like" (as AP so helpfully did), and maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt on this, just like AP and the rest of the fair-minded liberal media would have given to George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. Or maybe Mr. Obama actually doesn't know how many states there are or the difference between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

That last possibility would at least explain a lot.

Profiled

I walk for exercise and over the last couple of weeks my peregrinations have taken me through neighborhoods other than my own. In some of them houses are sparse and isolated. Others are standard residential communities, but over the previous month or so I've had several interesting experiences.

People have always turned and looked, of course. A strange man walking in a neighborhood in which he's not known draws special attention, but in one case a week ago a fellow drove his pickup truck slowly past me on a country road and gave me a thorough look-over as if trying to assess whether he recognized me. On another occasion a gentleman stopped his car to ask me if I was visiting someone in the neighborhood. On yet another evening a policeman stopped his cruiser and talked briefly with me, ostensibly to ask why I was out walking in the rain (it started raining about ten minutes before).

What should I think about these encounters? Should I be offended that these people were obviously checking to make sure I wasn't up to no good. Perhaps I should have felt uncomfortable with all this scrutiny, but I didn't. I was a strange man in a neighborhood where no one knew me, people were simply being alert, I was being "profiled," and I didn't blame them (except the guy in the pickup was a little weird). I might've done the same thing.

The neighborhoods were mostly white and so am I, so race had nothing to do with how the residents and the police acted, but suppose I had been black. What might I have thought? Obviously, if I were like many blacks who complain about racial profiling I would assume that the attention I was receiving was because I was black. I would relate to my friends how uncomfortable it was to be targeted because of my race, that I was committing the crime of WWB (Walking While Black) and what a terribly offensive thing racial profiling is. I would have assumed that the residents of the neighborhood were red-necked racists, that they had no business giving me the eye, that it was yet another insulting example of whites' irrational fear of blacks, and so on.

My point is that often blacks assume that any insult, any slight, any criticism they receive from a white person is because they're black when in fact that's simply not the case. A stranger walking through a neighborhood is going to elicit attention regardless of his color. It may be that a black man would draw more attention in an all-white neighborhood because he's more obviously a stranger, but to assume he draws the stares because he's black should be the last assumption in the string of possibilities.

We'll never heal our racial divisions in this country as long as we keep viewing everything that happens to us through the lens of race and as long as blacks continue to react to interracial encounters as though it's still 1940.

Who Can They Blame?

The unemployment numbers for July recently came out and - good news! - unemployment dropped to 7.4%, lower than expected (at least until it's quietly revised upward in a few weeks). Unfortunately, the news is not so good after all. Unemployment is down because the number of people looking for work is down. If the labor participation rate were what it was in January of 2009 unemployment would be at 10.7%.

Just as bad is that the vast majority of jobs created were part-time jobs. Erika Johnson has the numbers and analysis at Hot Air.

After five years of progressive governance the economy is still virtually stagnant at 1.7% growth. I guess this doesn't matter much if you're already employed full-time and have some income security, but I feel very sorry for those young people who are graduating from college burdened with a ton of debt and unable to find a job in their field, or any decent job at all.

I suppose someone might say that these students are a core constituency of the folks responsible for our economic malaise, and I guess they are. It could be argued, too, that many other students were too apathetic or too busy to invest in educating themselves about what was at stake in the last two elections and didn't vote. All true. Young people, as a whole, have themselves to blame for their predicament just as much as the derelictions and incompetence of our political leadership.

Even so, I feel very sorry for them. For many of these kids the future, at least until we stop electing liberal progressives to office, is very bleak. Maybe by 2014 and 2016 they'll care about more than who's most "cool" and which candidate has the most charisma. Perhaps they'll be sophisticated enough not to be taken in by silly rhetoric about "green jobs" and "wars on women," and vote instead for the candidate who'll institute policies that'll restore the nation's economic virility. Heaven help us, and especially them, if they don't.

Innis v. Rangel

Congressman Charlie Rangel has no qualms about concocting libelous falsehoods about people he knows nothing about. He recently undertook to smear the Tea Party and anyone else associated with political conservatives. If anyone wants to know why our politics is so fractious and polarized all one need do is read the sorts of things people like Rangel say about those with whom he disagrees:

[The Tea Party] is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police. They didn’t care about how they looked. It was just fierce indifference to human life that caused America to say enough is enough. ‘I don’t want to see it and I am not a part of it.’ What the hell! If you have to bomb little kids and send dogs out against human beings, give me a break.

If a white congressman said something comparable about a black organization he'd be roundly condemned and censured, but Rangel has already been censured by the House for corruption so, perhaps that, plus the fact that he's black and 83 years old and perhaps a little dottery, disinclines people from judging him too harshly.

It may be unkind to suggest that Charlie is non compos mentis, but it's probably the kindest explanation for not only what he said above but also for this:

[House Republicans] have done more damage to American competitiveness than al Qaeda ever could. What is happening is sabotage. Terrorists couldn’t do a better job than the Republicans are doing.

Anyone who would make such a claim before a public audience is either suffering from dementia, incredibly ignorant, or dishonest.

Anyway, a Tea Party strategist and national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality named Niger Innis delivered a deft riposte to the addlepated Mr. Rangel. The Daily Caller reports:

"It is not surprising that lazy, shiftless politicians who have an abysmal record for their community would want to diffuse the issue of what they are doing for their communities by dropping the race card,” Innis, an African American and the chief strategist for TheTeaParty.net, told The Daily Caller in an interview.

According to Innis, Rangel comparing the tea party to segregationists represents the same strategy white Southern Democrats in the South used prior to the civil rights era — back then obscuring the issues by playing what he called the “nigger card.” Rangel is part of a “long tradition of Democrat, racist demagogues” who run to race when they are not able to deliver for their constituents.

“What Charlie Rangel should be talking about is the level of performance of kids in the public schools in his district, what he should be talking about are the lack of jobs and the record high unemployment rate in his district and among black Americans all across his country,” Innis explained.

“What he should be talking about is the black-on-black genocide that is taking place in the urban center,” he added. “But unfortunately leaders like Charlie Rangel and the leaders that have run Detroit for the last 50 years have nothing but a record of failure and want to change the issue.”

It amazes me how much vitriol is directed by the left at the folks who loosely make up what's called the Tea Party. These people stand primarily for smaller, constitutional government, less spending, and more growth. Despite these modest aspirations, the left, including people like Mr. Rangel, disparage them as if they were neo-Nazis.

Their insulting, uncivil rhetoric does nothing to bring people together. All it does is erect walls between groups, divide them along ideological lines, and guarantee that political gridlock will persist.

The Nature of the Threat

Debkafile claims to have information on the nature of the threat that has caused the U.S. to close its embassies throughout the Middle East. If they're correct it truly is frightening. Here's the crucial information:

US officials are beginning to release nuggets of information about the nature of the threat.

According to one high placed US official, concern focuses on the possibility of terrorists carrying explosive devices implanted inside their bodies. debkafile’s counterterrorism sources add that plastic explosives in the body of a would-be suicide bomber without metal components are undetectable by standard screening devices such as those used at most international airports.

It has been suspected for some years that doctors and surgeons in Yemen in the service of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were experimenting with implanting of plastic explosive devices inside the bodies of suicide bombers or even animals. According to Western counterterrorism sources, the surgeon would open the abdominal cavity and implant the explosive device amongst the bomber’s internal organs.

Some US sources are calling the current threat the most serious since 9/11. They are alarmed by the degree of confidence AQIM leaders show in openly using electronic communications to boast about the unstoppable attack they are plotting.

A senior US official described the terrorists as saying the planned attack is “going to be big” and “strategically significant.”

A couple dozen suicide bombers with explosive implants boarding aircraft around the globe is a terrifying prospect. Let's hope TSA is profiling young Middle Eastern males and asking them to raise their shirts to see if they have scars. Let's also hope that they're not wasting their time asking octogenarian ladies to do the same.

IRS Says "No Thanks" to Obamacare

IRS chief Danny Werfel last week testified to congress that IRS employees would rather not switch to Obamacare, thank you. The IRS, mind you, is the organization designated to oversee the implementation of Obamacare for the rest of us. Here's a video of his testimony remixed with some music from LFAO's Rock Party album along with some additional relevant video:

First it was the labor unions that wanted outof the "train wreck," then it was congress itself and their staffs who pleaded that they just couldn't afford it, now it's the very organization that will enforce Obamacare's provisions that they rest of us will have to live by. None of them want it for themselves because they know that, as insurance, it's a much worse deal than what they have.

Congress doesn't want it, even though they've foisted it on the rest of us, because under Obamacare their staff members will have to pay more of the premium which is currently paid by you and me. Congresspersons fear that Obamacare will drive their staffs into the private sector where they can make more money. Well, let them get a real job, say I. Why do we need them?

I remember Democrat proponents of the law piously intoning before it passed as to how they wished for all Americans to have the same quality insurance that they have. Well, now they still have good insurance plans and they've stuck us with with a system that none of them want.

Students of history are welcome to compare and contrast the current situation with the outrages perpetrated on the colonists by the England of King George III and to explain, if they can, how his government was more oppressive than the bunch currently residing in Washington.

Lenin with a Charming Smile

This story from Breitbart should come as no surprise. When the administration in Washington does everything it can to discourage employers from hiring: from raising taxes, to burdensome regulations, to onerous health care benefit requirements, to time-consuming paperwork it's no wonder that there are no jobs available.

Friday's jobs report was disappointing, but it also contained a truly heartbreaking statistic. Black teen unemployment is a shocking 41.6%. In July last year, the unemployment was considerably lower, at 36%. That almost half of black teens who want to work can't find jobs is a stain on Obama's economic policies.

This isn't a numbers trick. This isn't a rate based on the whole black teen population in the country. This is the proportion of the black teen population that is looking for work but can't find a job. Just in March, the number was eight points lower at 33%. The white teen unemployment rate is half the black rate, although still high at 20%.

Nor is it any wonder that black kids are especially hurt since in areas of high black population density there are relatively few businesses in the first place.

If Mr. Obama truly wants to improve the employment prospects of black teens, and everyone else, he simply has to reverse his lethal policies on business and carbon. He has to allow companies to unleash their economic energy without having to fear the next EPA regulation, or the next new tax, or the absurd disincentives under Obamacare to hire the marginal worker.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama appears to be waging economic jihad against the capitalist goose that has laid the golden eggs. He's not going to give up his struggle to cripple the most productive economy in the history of the world, even if it means that almost half of black kids are denied an opportunity to develop skills and a work ethic needed to succeed in the workplace. To paraphrase Lenin, if you want to make a socialist omelet some eggs have to be sacrificed.

Mr. Obama sometimes seems to be Lenin with a charming smile. It's dismaying that so few in the black community are able to see it, or care enough to oppose what he's doing.

The Third Way

A friend has on occasion stated wistfully that he wishes there were a tertium quid or third way between liberalism and conservatism. I understand his desire, I suppose, but I think the two poles he'd like to mediate between are not the two that a third way should mediate between.

In our contemporary situation we're faced with two stark alternatives. On one side beckons a radical individualism, a libertarianism that gives the individual complete moral autonomy and which eliminates, to the extent possible, government interference in one's life.

On the other are those, like our president and his epigones, who seduce us with the allure of cradle-to-grave security courtesy of an ever-expanding collectivist state which intrudes upon, or even controls, almost every aspect of our lives.

If these are the Scylla and Charybdis between which we must thread our way which of the political ideologies on offer is most likely to give us safe passage?

Philosopher Ed Feser, author of The Last Superstition, offers insight into this question in a chapter on ancient Greek philosophy. While discussing the errors of the pre-Socratics Feser delivers this aside:

Liberalism purports to offer a middle ground between radical individualism and collectivism, what it really gives is a diabolical synthesis of the two, a bureaucratically managed libertinism. Conservatism, which sees the family rather than the individual or society as a whole as the fundamental social unit, is the true "third way."

Precisely so. Liberalism is a false hope because so far from navigating between Scylla and Charybdis it actually blends the worst aspects of the two. Conservatism, by holding the family up as the focus of our political allegiance, dampens the allures of individualism while at the same time strengthening the individual to resist the coercions of the statists. As such it is the third way between radical individualism and totalitarian statism.

Readers not familiar with what I mean by the "coercions of the statists" might pick up Mark Levin's book Liberty and Tyranny (just after they finish In the Absence of God) and give it a read. It's a very helpful explanation of exactly what's at stake in the political and ideological struggles in which we are enmeshed, whether we wish to be or not.

Conversation on the Conversation

We see that the Democrats are calling, again, for a national conversation on race. That's understandable given that a conversation on almost any other topic would be an embarrassment for Democrats, but such a call is also futile.

It's futile because there are certain ground rules to these conversations that often cause them to devolve into lectures on what's wrong with white people. The rules require that whites sit by passively while being hectored by their liberal (black or white) mentors. This is as demeaning as it is unhelpful.

If a white interlocutor should have the temerity to violate the protocol and voice an opinion critical of blacks, as did Bill O'Reilly recently, he can expect to be informed at some point in the conversation either that he's a racist or that he has no business voicing such an opinion because he's not black. O'Reilly has had the pleasure, since committing his act of defiance, of being repeatedly indicted on both charges. Here are O'Reilly's comments which, dare I say it, sound completely sensible to me:

To seek to silence this sort of criticism by calling O'Reilly a racist or by invoking the rule that white men haven't the standing to complain about black problems is fatuous and certainly a conversation stopper, but that's the way these conversations on race always seem to go. It's as if white folks' role in such "discussions" is to just shut up and listen to what black folks tell them.

Here's Sherri Shepherd on The View giving us her version of this rule:

Ms. Shepherd's remark is absurd, of course, because it only applies to whites who criticize some aspect of the "black experience." It doesn't apply, apparently, to blacks who talk volubly enough about what's wrong with whites. Blacks evince little discernable hesitation, even though they're not white, to point out the shortcomings of white society. Would Ms Shepherd extend her rule to make such critiques illegitimate? Would she disallow the complaints of black shoppers who resent being carefully scrutinized by white storeowners even though the black shopper has never been a white storeowner? Would she insist that poor people who pay no income tax have no business commenting on government tax policies because they're not taxpayers? Would she maintain that unless one is a combatant in a war an individual has no right to complain about the conduct of the war? Where does Ms Shepherd draw the line? One suspects she draws it in a very tight circle around white criticism of blacks.

Anyway, any conversation on race in this country needs to focus on the fundamental question why it is that in black communities across the country, the needle is in the red on every measure of social dysfunction. Why is it that so few blacks form stable families? Why are black kids much more likely than kids in other groups to be fatherless, to drop out of school, to be in trouble with the law, to be unemployed, to be a burden on society?

Or, since those questions will almost certainly be aborted by howls of racism, as they were when O'Reilly asked them, or by application of what we might call the Shepherd rule which disqualifies any white from asking them because whites aren't black, let me suggest two other questions which should be explored in our "national conversation," but which almost assuredly won't be: What exactly is racism and why, exactly, is racial profiling, which is usually little more than mildly insulting or inconvenient (unless abused by police), so abhorrent?

An airing of these topics won't happen, though, because too many of those calling for a national conversation on race don't really want a conversation at all. If they did they wouldn't have any objection to O'Reilly's disquisition. What they want, actually, is to lecture the rest of us on race, to demand that we defer to their moral authority on the subject, to flagellate submissive whites with the lash of guilt, and they don't want to have to take questions.

Well, if those are the rules, I'm not playing.

Eight Baffling Questions About Your Brain

George Dvorsky at io9 discusses eight things about the brain that we have no idea how to explain. Here are the eight with a sentence or two of elaboration. For more discussion of these perplexing phenomena check out the link.

1. What is consciousness? The nature and origin of consciousness is perhaps the most puzzling problem in all of science and philosophy. How does brain chemistry produce awareness? How do chemical reactions in the brain produce sensations like taste, fragrance, and color? How can sensory stimuli generate a meaning or be about something? Where does meaning come from and how is it produced? It's a deeply perplexing mystery.
2. How much of our personality is determined by our brain? This is the old nature versus nurture debate. Are we a product of our genetic inheritance or of the environmental influences that act on us throughout our lives?
3. Why do we sleep and dream? We spend about a third of our lives asleep, but we’re not entirely sure why we do it.
4. How do we store and access memories? Like a computer’s hard drive, memories are physically recorded in our brains. But we have no idea how our brains do this, nor do we know how this information gets oriented in the brain. What’s more, there isn’t just one kind of memory. We have both short-term and long-term memory. We also can distinguish between memories that are recent and memories that are temporally more distant. How can chemical processes do that?
5. Are all aspects of cognition computational? Computer scientist Alan Turing argued that cognition can be translated into an equivalent computation. This has given rise to the theory that our brains are basically information-processors, but this is hard to credit since there's so much that brains can do that an information processor like a computer cannot. Computers don't doubt, understand, feel guilt, hold a belief, experience sensations, wish, hope, experience boredom, and a host of other things that our brains do all the time.
6. How does perception work? A primary function of the brain is to convert our senses into experiences. Our ability to perceive allows us to organize, identify, and interpret sensory information in way that helps us construct and understand our world. But how, exactly, does our brain transfer this incoming sensory information into such vivid qualitative experiences? And how is perception organized in the brain?
7. Do we have free will? If our decisions are the result of a chain of physical events and physical events are determined by physical laws where is their room for free will? But if we do not in some sense choose our actions in what sense are we responsible for them.
8. How can we move and react so well? We do an incredible job moving our bodies through space and time. But how we so seamlessly coordinate our movement remains a mystery. Think of the dexterity required to thread a needle. Or to play a piano concerto. These accomplishments are all the more incredible when considering how slow, haphazard and unpredictable our motor nerve impulses actually are. Clearly, there’s something very sophisticated going on between our motor cortex and the cerebral cortex that allows for such smooth, efficient actions. But what is it?

It is these sorts of facts about the brain that have led many philosophers and scientists to abandon the materialist view that we are made up solely of material stuff. In light of these profound mysteries, mysteries which seem impervious to scientific scrutiny, the idea that we have an immaterial mind or soul has become much more plausible and much more respectable among philosophers than it had been since the 19th century.

Fourth Trimester Abortion

This would be funny were it not for what it says about how uncritical and thoughtless are some of those who are allegedly among our best and brightest.

The video records how easy it is to get people to sign a petition endorsing infanticide. I know that some of the signers didn't really care or give any thought to what they were doing, but that's the point. These people vote, and one has to wonder how much thought they put into that:

Now that this is all over the internet I wonder if some of the signers are still wondering what they did that's such a big deal.