Intelligence <i>Success</i>

There's a fascinating story in the New York Times about the source of the information on the new terror threat to American financial centers. Some excerpts:

The unannounced capture of a figure from Al Qaeda in Pakistan several weeks ago led the Central Intelligence Agency to the rich lode of information that prompted the terror alert on Sunday, according to senior American officials.

One senior American intelligence official said the information was more detailed and precise than any he had seen during his 24-year career in intelligence work. A second senior American official said it had provided a new window into the methods, content and distribution of Qaeda communications.

"This, for us, is a potential treasure trove," said a third senior American official, an intelligence expert, at a briefing for reporters on Sunday afternoon.

The documentary evidence, whose contents were reported urgently to Washington on Friday afternoon, immediately elevated the significance of other intelligence information gathered in recent weeks that had already been regarded as highly troubling, senior American intelligence officials said.

The American officials said the new evidence had been obtained only after the capture of the Qaeda figure. Among other things, they said, it demonstrated that Qaeda plotters had begun casing the buildings in New York, Newark and Washington even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Among the questions the plotters sought to answer, senior American intelligence officials said, were how best to gain access to the targeted buildings; how many people might be at the sites at different hours and on different days of the week; whether a hijacked oil tanker truck could serve as an effective weapon; and how large an explosive device might be required to bring the buildings down.

One of the things Americans need to keep firmly in mind is that this war has, in the minds of the jihadis, been going on for seven centuries. They're not going to surrender, nor are they going to stop attacking us any time soon. We need to unburden ourselves of our traditional notion of fighting a war for a distinct period of time and then enjoying peace for a generation thereafter. This war will not end until either Western civilization is destroyed or the Islamists are rendered impotent. Even if we critically degrade their ability to strike us, there will only be a temporary cessation of hostilities until they can regain enough strength to attack us again.

The Islamists are fanatics obsessed with killing Christians and Jews. There is no remedy for this. It's not a matter of reasoning with them or negotiating with them. It's not a matter of restoring land or improving economic conditions. It's not a matter of leaving them alone. They believe it is Allah's will that they kill all infidels. The only way to stop them, unfortunately, is to kill them first.

IRS, RIP

Matt Drudge has a bombshell. Evidently part of George Bush's plans during his second term is to eliminate the IRS and replace it with a national sales tax. According to Drudge:

A domestic centerpiece of the Bush/GOP agenda for a second Bush term is getting rid of the Internal Revenue Service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The Speaker of the House will push for replacing the nation's current tax system with a national sales tax or a value added tax, Hill sources tell DRUDGE.

I don't know how a sales tax could possibly compensate for the loss of income tax revenue, but I'm sure Hastert isn't just talking off the top of his head. They must have thought this through. Well, at least one hopes they have. It'll be interesting to see how the Kerryites respond.

No Extremists on the Left

The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal advocacy group, assigns a Liberal Quotient (LQ) to all voting members of congress. Senator Kerry has a lifetime ADA rating of 92% which makes him the most liberal pol in the current senate and third all-time among members of congress. Edwards is fourth among current congressmen and senators with an 88% LQ. Their combined averages make the Kerry/Edwards ticket the left-most pair of nominees for the American presidency in the history of the ADA.

The Washington Times writes:

From the premier liberal rating organization, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Mr. Edwards received an average annual (1999-2002) rating of 85 percent before falling to a career-low 65 percent last year. But that score was misleading because ADA penalizes legislators for missing any of its 20 annual key votes. In fact, on the 13 ADA votes for which the itinerant Mr. Edwards was present last year, he supported ADA 100 percent of the time. (On the 17 ADA key votes cast by Mr. Kerry last year, he also supported ADA's position 100 percent of the time. Thus, between the two of them, they were 30-for-30 on ADA votes.) With Mr. Edwards' lifetime ADA rating at 81 percent and Mr. Kerry's at 92 percent, the 2004 Democratic ticket boasts higher lifetime ADA ratings than the avowedly liberal 1984 Democratic ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.

If the Republican nominees in any election were as far to the right as Kerry/Edwards are to the left wouldn't we be hearing the word "extremist" used about every five seconds to describe them and their positions on the issues? Wouldn't candidates whose voting records were the most conservative in history be pilloried by the major media for being way "out of the mainstream"?

There's still time for the media to whisper a mention of the extremism of the current candidates, of course, but from the current silence on the matter one might be forgiven for thinking that extremists only reside on the right of the ideological divide and that the mainstream in this country runs from left of center all the way left to the far horizon. The reigning attitude among the media worthies is that, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, extremism in pusuit of a left-wing agenda is no vice.

Let's count how many times between now and November we hear the E-word applied to the current Democrat tandem by Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw, the NYT, LAT, and the WaPo. Viewpoint's guess is that it'll be a round number.

Dead or Alive

There's a report, as yet unconfirmed, that the terrorist al Zarqawi, the man responsible for many of the kidnappings and beheadings of American hostages, has been captured near the Iraqi/Syrian border. A number of Iraqi bloggers are carrying the report, but no major media have said anything about it yet as far as I know. They could be waiting for independent confirmation or the report may be groundless. We should know soon enough.

Yielding Home Field Advantage

Some of us have often wondered why it is that when Jerry Falwell urges his flock to vote Republican he is engaging in an unconstitutional breach of Church/State separation, but when Jesse Jackson urges black parishioners to vote Democrat he's standing in the best tradition of African American preachers. Creationists are accused of illicitly trying to impose a religious point of view on students by suggesting that metaphysical naturalism may not be true, but Darwinians who tacitly advocate metaphysical naturalism are not. It seems that religion in the public square is just fine as long as it's used to reinforce the liberal side in the culture war, but not if it is invoked by conservatives. Thus Bill Clinton's religious affirmations were never seen as a threat to the health of American politics, but George Bush's are.

Even granting that religion should have a legitimate place in our public life, however, there is a right way and a wrong way to express it. Steve Waldman has some interesting thoughts on this at National Review Online He writes:

The Left and Right have both followed the advice of the Founding Fathers at different points in history. Abolitionism and the civil-rights movement - two moral highpoints of our history - were driven by people attempting to impose their religious views on others. So is the right-to-life movement.

There is, however, a problem with the way some religious conservatives approach the political sphere. The problem is not dogmatism, but laziness. Someone who rests the argument for a certain position entirely on the fact that his religion told him to is not really attempting to persuade. Even if one is motivated by faith, one still has to convince others using secular, or at least broad-gauge, moral arguments. It is fine for someone to oppose gay marriage because Leviticus frowns on homosexuality. It's neither appropriate nor smart to say Leviticus calls homosexuality an abomination and so you should too. That is demanding that other people accept your religion. Some religious conservatives forget to persuade because they live in a political cloister, speaking mostly with others who agree with them, and for whom Leviticus is an effective shorthand. One of the reasons the Founding Fathers thought religion important to a functioning democracy is that it would tamp down passions and ensure that people would listen to each other. Religious conservatives need to understand that part of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, too.

Waldman is right. Unless people can argue from mutually shared assumptions they'll just be talking past each other. Thus Christians may hold to a particular belief primarily for religious reasons, but unless they can find non-religious premises from which to advocate their beliefs they'll be unpersuasive to people who don't share their religious worldview. If Christians wish to be effective players in the public arena they have to learn to meet those with whom they disagree on their opponent's turf.

In other words, every big game for the Christian has to be an away game. The only time they can play at home is when they debate each other. If they insist on engaging non-Christians on their own field by quoting Scripture, etc. they're going to find that nobody is going to show up for the game.

Kerry's Acceptance Speech

Usually when John Kerry speaks he reminds me of the history teacher played by Ben Stein in Ferris Buehler's Day Off, but last night he was pretty good, style-wise.

The actual content of his speech, however, was bizarre. It was as if he'd undergone a political sex-change operation.

Like the old football star who brings his game films to the 30th class reunion, Kerry wanted to remind us, and keep reminding us, that he had been a soldier, but he seemed to go right from the Mekong Delta to the campaign trail for president. I almost expected to see thousands of Special Forces troops rappelling down out of the Fleet Center ceiling instead of a balloon drop. Where was there any insight into his nineteen years as a U.S. senator? What did he accomplish during his three terms in the senate? Most importantly, how does his record in the senate support the guarantees he made in his speech?

From the emphasis that was placed on his military service by himself and others it's clear that he considers this his chief qualification to serve as president, but it all seemed surreal, as did the reaction to it in the arena. These people are not big fans of military service, much less of service in Vietnam, and if they really believed that military sacrifice makes Kerry more fit to be president than Mr. Bush they would have all voted for Bob Dole in 1996.

Kerry proudly proclaimed, as if to distinguish himself from George Bush, that he defended his country as a young man, but almost no one over fifty in that arena would agree with him that, his combat heroics notwithstanding, whatever he was doing in Vietnam, it was not defending his country. By 1975 that war was seen by almost everyone as completely unwarranted and unrelated to any conceivable threat to the United States. Kerry knows this. He said as much in his war protest years, so why insist now that he was indeed defending his country?

Aside from the mass hypocrisy of the left-wing of the Democrat party masquerading as pro-military hawks for the rubes out in the heartland there were a number of things about Kerry's speech which were plainly cheapshots.

For example, Kerry slapped Bush for preaching family values but, he said, you don't value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter serving in Iraq. Well, true enough. What you do is ask the senate to approve an 87 billion dollar appropriation to provide those kinds of things and hope that Senator Kerry and his left-wing companions will not vote against it. Your hopes are disappointed, of course, because, despite his grand rhetoric last night Kerry has voted against every single appropriation that has come before him in his 19 year tenure in the senate that would better prepare our military for the battles they must face.

After having clearly implied that Bush lied to us about getting into Iraq, after having stated flatly that Bush only went to war because he wanted to, he called on the president to agree with him to conduct an honorable campaign. This is the Democrats' idea of an honorable campaign: They get to call the president a liar and a betrayer of his country, they get to allege that the president was AWOL from his National Guard service during time of war, they get to accuse the president of sending thousands of people to their deaths just because he wanted to, and they get to allege that the president's talk of values is hypocritical. The president, however, for his part, must refrain from citing the total disconnect between Kerry's votes on the senate floor and the promises he made on the convention floor because that would be a below-the-belt slander. In the democrats' vision of an honorable campaign the president may not even defend himself against the accusations against him for that would be to imply that those making the charges are liars which would be mudslinging of the worst kind.

Senator Kerry claimed that he would restore trust, credibility, and respect to the White House. If he did he would be the first Democrat since Truman to do so, but, the sorry record of his predecessors aside, how can we expect a man who so willingly distorts his opponent's record and motives to be honest with us when things get tough?

Why did Kerry imply that the Bush people have ever said that our economy can do no better than it's doing? When did any high ranking White House spokesperson ever say such a thing? Is this how we restore credibility to the White House?

Kerry observed that we need to bring our allies to our side and assured us that he's just the man to do this, but it's wrongheaded to think that our allies are not at our side because the wrong man is in the White House. As I wrote yesterday, there is a bitter hostility toward the United States percolating throughout Western Europe based primarily upon jealousy over our success and resentment that our success has shown up their own inadequacies. Europe (i.e. France and Germany) are disinclined to follow America's lead in any venture unless, and until, America subordinate itself to their wishes. Thus the only way Kerry will succeed in his arrogant claim to be the right man to bring France and Germany to our side is by diminishing our national sovereignty and weakening our economic, military, and cultural influence. We must, to appease them, repudiate capitalism in favor of the same socialism that has made them such economic juggernauts. In other words, no matter who is in the White House, the French, Germans, and even the Canadians will remain cold and aloof until we become as weak as they are. Like our own domestic politics, it's not about personalities it's about power.

Ultimately, though, neither convention speeches nor debate performances should matter much to a voter. Good speeches are not necessarily good indicators of whether a person would be a good president nor is a good debate performance. These events are media shows, and they do very little to help us determine how fit a man is for office. A man should be judged not on his style, nor his appearance, nor anything else but his record. It's insulting to the electorate to have political managers conducting focus groups and micromanaging a candidate's image, seeking to package a candidate to make him appealing to the least well-informed segment of the voting population, and tacitly telling us that they believe that all that matters to us are the most superficial qualities of the man. Both of the contenders in this campaign have an extensive record, and anyone who doesn't know by now what George Bush stands for or what sort of president John Kerry would be hasn't been paying attention and probably shouldn't vote in November anyway.

Stem Cells

On night two of the Democrat Convention Ronald Reagan, Jr. delivered what he promised would be a non-partisan speech which he concluded by, in effect, urging people to vote for John Kerry. If Americans want to realize the miraculous cures latent in embryonic stem cell research, Reagan averred, then George Bush must be turned out of office. The casual viewer was given the impression by Reagan that the Bush administration had prohibited all stem cell research, but of course this isn't true. Michael Fumento explains why in an essay at National Review Online.

Fumento also points out that adult stem cells are available from many tissues in the human body, all of which are morally unproblematic, and that these cells are showing a great deal of promise in the treatment of some diseases. An excerpt:

Far from blocking federal embryonic-stem-cell research funding, Bush specifically authorized it so long as it used existing lines of embryonic cells. But more remarkably, Ron Reagan made absolutely no reference to an alternative to embryonic stem cells that is decades more advanced and carries absolutely no moral baggage. "Adult stem cells" can be extracted from various places in the human body as well as blood in umbilical cords and placentas. They were first used to treat human illness in 1957.

By the 1980s, adult stem cells were literally curing a variety of cancers and other diseases; embryonic stem cells have never been tested on a human. Adult stem cells now treat about 80 different diseases; again embryonic stem cells have treated no one. Adult stem cells obviously aren't rejected when taken from a patient's own body, though they may be from an unmatched donor; embryonic stem cells have surface proteins that often cause rejection. Implanted embryonic stem cells also have a nasty tendency to multiply uncontrollably, a process called "cancer." Oops.

What goes mostly unmentioned in the criticism of Bush's decision to deny federal funding to the development of new lines of embryonic stem cells is his chief reason for doing so. The President believes, not unreasonably, that it is morally wrong to create human embryos which will be deliberately destroyed in order to harvest their cells.

It's true that the embryos that would be used, at least at first, would be excess products of in vitro fertilizations of ova done to produce embryos for couples that cannot otherwise have children. The concern among many ethicists, however, is that this would put us on a slippery slope where eventually embryos would be produced exclusively for the purpose of harvesting their cells, and, given current law regarding abortion, there would be no legal basis for stopping at the use of mere embryos and their cells.

It would be only a matter of time before fetuses and their tissues would be harvested as well, and it would not be much longer after that until there would be a legal trade in body parts extracted from unborn children. It's not hard to imagine women getting pregnant for the sole purpose of selling the tissues and organs of their unborn offspring. Given that abortion is currently legal for any reason the mother wishes, there's no non-arbitrary reason the courts could site for prohibiting such a grisly business. It would, of course, be justified by its advocates on the most humanitarian of grounds: ending the suffering of millions of people who are afflicted with terrible diseases and other maladies that might prove amenable to treatment with harvested tissue.

This is not the sort of activity Bush feels the federal government should be subsidizing with taxpayer dollars, and he's right.

Deconstructing Edwards

Those who listened to John Edwards speech at last night's session of the Democrat National convention might be forgiven for getting the impression that Kerry/Edwards are about to usher in the Millenial reign of Christ. If it is true that the American voter is too sophisticated and too cynical to swallow the "chicken in every pot" rhetoric of politicians who promise everything and anything, word has not yet reached John Edwards. I was waiting for him to promise that when he and Kerry are elected every American would receive a free trip to Disney World.

Certain of his claims, of course, generated a bigger spike on the baloney meter than others. For instance, he averred:

"We hear a lot of talk about values. Where I come from, you don't judge someone's values based on how they use that word in a political ad. You judge their values based upon what they've spent their life doing."

Is this an invitation to examine John Kerry's record? What has Kerry spent his adult life doing? He did four months in Vietnam, was sent home after receiving a dubious third purple heart for a wound that was treated with a band aid, and proceeded to confess that he and thousands of other Americans were guilty of war crimes. The grisly deeds he admits to committing make the offenses of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib wane into insignificance by comparison. After his stint in the anti-war movement he began a political career notable only for two things. As a senator he amassed, over nineteen years, the most left-wing voting record in the senate and at the same time accomplished absolutely nothing of any legislative significance. He was a senatorial non-entity. His most noteworthy accomplishment, since leaving Vietnam, that has come to light is having persuaded two very wealthy women to marry him to save him the trouble of ever having to actually do any real work.

"But we've seen relentless negative attacks against John. So in the weeks ahead, we know what's coming - don't we - more negative attacks. Aren't you sick of it?"

The "attacks" against Kerry have focused on his political record. They have examined his votes and his positions on issues. If Democrats think that scrutinizing someone's record and quoting their words is foul play then why do they relentlessly attack Bush's record? Speaking of attacks, Bush has been called a liar, a Nazi, a bigot, and a simpleton. He has been accused of betraying the nation, and deliberately taking us to war, with its attendant grief and loss of life, just to help his corporate friends. Aren't you sick of it?

"I have spent my life fighting for the kind of people I grew up with. For two decades, I stood with families and children against big HMOs and big insurance companies. And as a Senator, I fought those same fights against the Washington lobbyists and for causes like the Patients' Bill of Rights."

John Edwards' legal career is, in fact, an example of why medical malpractice insurance is so high and consequently why medical costs are daunting. He won huge claims for clients whose children were born with cerebral palsy, because, he convinced juries, the mothers of these children should have been advised by their obstetricians to have Caesarean sections. Such procedures have since increased unnecessarily with no discernable effect on the incidence of CP, but plenty of impact on medical costs and doctors' insurance premiums. See here for a more detailed account of exactly what Edwards has "spent his life fighting" on behalf of.

"We shouldn't have two public school systems in this country: one for the most affluent communities, and one for everybody else. None of us believe that the quality of a child's education should be controlled by where they live or the affluence of their community. We can build one public school system that works for all our children. Our plan will reform our schools and raise our standards. We can give our schools the resources they need. We can provide incentives to put quality teachers in the places and the subjects where we need them the most. And we can ensure that three million kids have a safe place to go after school. This is what we can do together."

These assertions reveal an incredible misunderstanding of why some schools are better than others. New York City's Schools spend more money per student than do many suburban schools, but the suburban schools are often more successful. Schools which are failing are not failing for lack of money, they're failing because of the quality of family life in the school district. Communities populated by healthy families will have better schools than those in which family life is chaotic regardless of how grandiose the buildings, how highly paid the staff, and where the school is located. If the Democrats want to improve education they can work to strengthen families but they would have to repudiate many of their philosophical principles and much of their legislative history to do that.

"So now you ask how are we going to pay for this? Well, here's how we're going to pay for it. Let me be very clear, for 98 percent of Americans, you will keep your tax cut-that's 98 percent. But we'll roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, close corporate loopholes, and cut government contractors and wasteful spending. We can move our country forward without passing the bill and the burden on to our children and grandchildren."

Has anyone run the numbers on this? What loopholes would they close? How much revenue will they produce by rolling back the tax cuts for the top 2% of taxpayers? How, exactly, are they going to cut wasteful spending? Haven't these same promises been made ever since the Great Depression? How many times will candidates be able to snooker their listeners with vague, meaningless promises before we catch on that this is all political legerdemain. Show us the numbers or forfeit your credibility.

"I mean the very idea that in a country of our wealth and our prosperity, we have children going to bed hungry. We have children who don't have the clothes to keep them warm. We have millions of Americans who work full-time every day for minimum wage to support their family and still live in poverty - it's wrong."

That children are poorly clothed or go to bed hungry is no doubt true. The question is whether this is because there is no alternative for them or because they are in families which do not avail themselves, for whatever reason, of the assistance which their fellow citizens provide for them through government programs or charitable organizations. For Edwards to make it sound as if government is somehow failing these children is disingenuous. Likewise his claim that there are millions who work full-time and who still live in poverty is hard to credit. Few adults who work full-time earn only minimum wage. Most workers at the minimum wage are teenagers and others who are not the chief wage-earners in their family. If Edwards wants to do more than just rouse the masses of faithful at the Fleet Center, if he actually wants to demonstrate the truth of his claims, he's going to have to show that heads of households in significant numbers, despite working full-time, nevertheless have total household income, including government benefits, under the poverty line (about $22,000 for a family of four).

"With a new president who strengthens and leads our alliances, we can get NATO to help secure Iraq. We can ensure that Iraq's neighbors like Syria and Iran, don't stand in the way of a democratic Iraq. We can help Iraq's economy by getting other countries to forgive their enormous debt and participate in the reconstruction. We can do this for the Iraqi people and our soldiers. And we will get this done right."

This reveals a disturbing naivete on Edwards' part as to why we are unable to get some of our erstwhile allies to follow our lead in world affairs. It's not because Bush is abrasive or because he lacks diplomatic skills. That's just a rationalization. It is rather because many of our supposed "allies" resent and even despise us for our hyperpower status. The United States is an economic, military, and cultural colossus, and much of the rest of the world resents the dominant role we play around the globe, a role they believe, in some cases, is rightly and historically theirs. This is especially true of France and Germany. Russia is reluctant to follow us because they resent their defeat in the ideological struggle of the Cold war. Nobody likes to feel inferior, everybody experiences shadenfreude when the top guy stumbles. As these nations see things, it is in their national interest for the U.S. to fail and it would take more than John Kerry to persuade them to act against that interest. John Edwards, and every other American for that matter, would do well to read Jean Francois Revel's book Anti-Americanism. It would perhaps cure him of the na�ve idea that American "unilateralism" is a result of inept American diplomacy and that a more agreeable face in the White House is all we need to mollify the Europeans and others.

"What we believe - what John Kerry and I believe - is that you should never look down on anybody, that we should lift people up. We don't believe in tearing people apart. We believe in bringing people together."

Bush gets a lot of criticism for dividing people, but the criticism is silly. People in this country are divided because of the multiculturalist emphasis on celebrating our differences. We are divided because of the practice of special interest politics, the appeals to people on the basis of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc. These are not Republican phenomena. This is the basic weaponry of the Democrat party and has been ever since the sixties. Democrats who accuse Bush of being divisive are projecting their own habits onto their opponent. Their definition of "divisive" is any condition in which you don't agree with them.

If, for example, you think it's immoral to kill children as they're being born then you're being divisive. If you think we should have judges who will rule according to what the law and the constitution say rather than according to the political whim of the day then you're being divisive, if you think that marriage is important and that we should preserve the understanding of marriage that has prevailed for two thousand years then you're being divisive. If you think the first amendment is being wrongly interpreted as it touches upon matters of religious expression then you're being divisive. They're trying hard in this convention to moderate their rhetoric, but all one need do is compare the words of Democrat leaders like Kennedy, Carter, Dean, Gore, Jackson, and Kerry during the primary months to those of Republican leaders to see who has been a force for division and who has been a force for national unity.

Dukakis Redux

If you haven't seen the NASA photos that have the Kerry folks steamed but would like to, you can see them here. I can understand why the Dems are so upset about the release of these pictures. They make Kerry look like a gopher.

Ten Economic Truths

One of the hammers that the Democrats have used, and will continue to use, to beat the Bush administration over the head is the matter of job flight beyond our borders. As Senator Kerry has alleged, "Benedict Arnold CEOs" are outsourcing work to third world countries and depriving Americans of job opportunities. Bush's general commitment to free trade and globalization, the Democrats have argued, is resulting in tens of thousands of people being added to the unemployment rolls as their employers export their jobs offshore. The conventional wisdom among many is that job outsourcing is enormously harmful to the American worker and economy and Bush should be punished for it at the polls.

The conventional wisdom, however, is quite mistaken according to Brink Lindsey in a Reason article entitled Ten Truths About Trade. The article is clear, concise and very helpful in answering the main arguments raised by the left against free trade. An excerpt:

Is globalization sending the best American jobs overseas? If you get your news from CNN's Lou Dobbs, the answer is "of course" and the only real issue is how many trade restrictions should be applied to stem the bleeding. But the recent scare about "offshoring" is just the latest twist on an inaccurate, decades-old complaint that global trade is stealing jobs and causing a "race to the bottom" in which corporations relentlessly scour the world for the lowest wages and most squalid working conditions. China and India have replaced 1980s Japan and 1990s Mexico as the most feared foreign threats to U.S. employment, and the old fallacy of job scarcity has once again reared its distracting head.

The truth is cheerier. Trade is only one element in a much bigger picture of incessant turnover in the American labor market. Furthermore, the overall trend is toward more and better jobs for American workers. While job losses are real and sometimes very painful, it is important -- indeed, for the formulation of sound public policy, it is vital - to distinguish between the painful aspects of progress and outright decline.

Lindsey then goes on to discuss ten reasons why free trade is beneficial to the country and, in the long run, to our workers.

Thanks to Dan Drezner for the tip. Drezner himself has a much lengthier, more scholarly piece on the same topic in Foreign Affairs for those who are interested in a deeper economic analysis of the effect of outsourcing on American workers.

Goldberg, P.S.

Jonah's latest. It's masterful. An excerpt:

[T]his is not a party weighed down by the ballast of facts. Indeed, you have to carry a light pack when racing against the clock. For more than a year, Democrats have been fueled by a violent, irrational hatred of George W. Bush. These feelings were almost never based upon facts, so much as on an almost glandular paranoia.

Librarians set fire to their records, lest Attorney General John Ashcroft's Gestapo find out who borrowed The Catcher in the Rye. They insisted that Bush was some sort of criminal mastermind and buffoon who could orchestrate a war for oil while not being smart enough to work as a spellchecker at an M&M factory. Countless anti-Bush canards contradicted each other, but consistency was a luxury the Democrats could not afford.

The problem for them is that not even the now decidedly anti-Bush press can conceal the fact that virtually none of these allegations were true. The Senate Intelligence Committee report, the British Butler Report and the 9/11 Commission report undermine every key allegation of the anti-Bush flat-earthers. The 9/11 Commission, which was being hailed as an oracular council of truth and light when it made Bush look bad, has essentially said the Patriot Act does not go far enough (and Ashcroft, by the way, never even poked his nose in a library); that Bush never lied and that several of Bush's more famous accusers did - including those who, knowing otherwise, insisted that Bush's "16 words" about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of uranium were lies.

He does a fine job in this piece of deconstructing the hypocrisies of both Clinton and Carter. It makes one eager for his critique of Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech last night which seemed like it was being delivered on valium.

It may seem picky, but I thought it just a little bit odd that the Democrats appealed last night to their African American base by touting two speakers who lay claim to the coveted identity but who are African-American in only the most technical sense. Obama Barak had a Kenyan father whom he never really knew, but he shares almost nothing else in common with the heritage of American blacks. Teresa Kerry immigrated from Mozambique, but very few blacks would regard this white multi-millionaire heiress as a racial "sister." It's a small point, but one can imagine the hooting that would ensue if the African-Americans featured at the Republican convention included a white South African and a man whose maternal ancestors were white and whose paternal ancestors were never enslaved, nor ever experienced Jim Crow or the civil rights movement.

I guess that for people who consider Bill Clinton to be the first black president, almost anybody counts as an African-American, except Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice, Rod Paige, Colin Powell, and J.C. Watts.

Masquerade Ball at the Fleet Center

USA Today fired Ann Coulter for being too, well, too much like herself. They replaced her with Jonah Goldberg who also has the distinction of having fired AC a couple of years ago from National Review for saying something like we should kill all the terrorists and convert the rest of the Muslim world to Christianity, or something like that. Anyway, Jonah's column on the Democrat Convention is here.

He makes the point that the fractious Democrats have constructed a Potemkin Village to fool the rest of the country into thinking that they're really all lovey-dovey with each other and with John Kerry when, in fact, the glue that's holding this convention together is not John Kerry, but a deep and irrational contempt for George Bush. The Democrat Party has for the last four years, been a roiling, seething cauldron of hate, but they know that even though venting their animus makes them feel good, they can't let the American voters see this. So the convention Democrats remind the viewer of Dennis the Menace all dressed up, sitting in church looking angelic, when in fact he's bursting inside to get out and roll in the mud.

Goldberg writes:

It was only when Howard Dean's head exploded like one of those dudes in Scanners that they suddenly switched to Kerry because he was the most "electable," according to all of the exit polls. In other words, Democrats voted for Kerry not because they liked him, but because they thought other people would.

This is the logic of hate. It lets convention delegates who by every measure are far to the left of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, let alone the American public, cheer a candidate who has spent the past few months holding something of a fire sale on Democratic principles. According to a New York Times survey of delegates, 9 out of 10 say they think Iraq was a mistake and 5 out of 6 say the war on terrorism and national security aren't that important; yet Kerry is surrounding himself with soldiers to the point where it wouldn't be shocking if delegates were required to wear camo fatigues. Even Ted Kennedy would be hard-pressed to play a drinking game in which players had to swig every time the words "Vietnam" or "war hero" come up in Democratic speeches.

Goldberg is always good. Read the whole piece.

The Beat Goes On

The list of endorsements of Senator Kerry continues to grow, which would be good news for the senator were it not for the fact that many of those who find him deserving of their support are people or groups who for one reason or another do nothing to raise Mr. Kerry's stature. Indeed, quite the opposite is true (See here for a recent discussion of this phenomenon on Viewpoint). The latest such endorsement that Viewpoint is aware of is that of the Communist Party U.S.A.

The good folks whose ideological soulmates, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong Il, brought you over 100 million dead in the twentieth century and the most repressive regimes in the non-Arab world - these folks who would abolish your right to own property, as well as the entire Bill of Rights - have this to say about Senator Kerry:

Kerry reflects a liberal agenda... he is the vehicle by which George W. Bush, representing the most extreme reaction, can be defeated. A Kerry presidency by itself will not bring the changes, it will undoubtedly require huge mass pressure to bring the changes. In this regard ... a Kerry election presents the possibility for greater struggles to undo damage and move forward.

Reassuring words coming from people who doubtless have the best interests of America and Americans at heart.

According to The Washington Times the CPUSA has also endorsed Democrat keynote speaker Barack Obama, senate candidate from Illinois, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and Inez Tenenbaum in South Carolina.

Viewpoint asks the question again. What is it about John Kerry that makes such people as these think that he's the man they want as president?

Prisoner Abuse

One of the many critcisms President bush has had to endure since the onset of the Iraq war is that he is presiding over terrible human rights abuses carried out by the United States military. Abu Ghraib, we've been told, was just the tip of the iceberg and that torture and other forms of abuse proscribed by the Geneva Conventions were widespread.

Last week the army issued its report on prisoner abuse and demonstrated that yet again the president's war critics have been wrong. Powerline features an excellent commentary on the report by Dafydd ab Hugh. Dafydd writes:

The Army has released the findings of its report on all confirmed or alleged cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the war on terror in general. The "shock" headline (for the mathematically challenged) is "U.S. Reports 94 Cases of Prisoner Abuse" But in fact, the report is stunning as an example of the dog that did not bark - and it's another vindication for Bush and Rumsfeld.

First of all, headline aside, the body of the AP story makes clear that the number ninety-four refers not just to confirmed cases but to all allegations of abuse as well: if a prisoner says "I was beaten," it's counted as part of those ninety-four, even if there is no corroboration whatsoever for it, or even if it's disputed by a dozen eye witnesses.

Second, and bearing the above in mind, the real shocker is at the bottom of the article: The Army inspector general report found that since the fall of 2001, overall the United States had held more than 50,000 prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, a number never before made public.

I blinked in surprise at this: out of 50,000 arrests and detentions during a war, a grand total of only ninety-four allegations of abuse were made? That's astonishingly low -- and it's a wonderful testament to the professionalism and calm devotion to duty among our soldiers, led by Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

When you actually break the numbers down, it gets even better. Fully 45 of the 94 allegations refer to the moment of arrest or detention: 20 are claims of "physical abuse" (which means a prisoner got roughed up during capture, which is hardly surprising, considering how many resisted such capture), the rest claims of "theft or other crimes;" both such types of claim are routinely made in a huge percentage of arrests by civilian cops of ordinary criminals, and without some evidence of extraordinary abuse (not just some prisoner saying "he shoved me!"), these are not to be taken seriously. Unless you want to make it illegal for police officers to arrest anyone, anywhere, for anything.

Finally, here is the part that truly vindicates Bush and Rumsfeld. The most serious charges - and the most despicable behavior by the Democrats, as such charges were routinely made without any evidence and without any consideration of how such reckless charges would affect the war effort - were that we routinely "tortured" prisoners during interrogations in order to gain intelligence. The word "torture" was explicitly used scores of times, as a simple Lexis/Nexus search would show.

Yet the total number of ALLEGATIONS of abuse during or related to interrogations was... eight. Eight total cases where there was even an allegation of prisoner abuse related to interrogation. And certainly Abu Ghraib would account for all or nearly all of these allegations.

This lays to rest the only serious charge in the entire scandal: clearly, we were NOT using torture or even abuse, either routinely or even commonly, to extract intel from prisoners. All but eight allegations of abuse (out of 50,000 prisoners, 0.016%) were, in fact, soldiers using more force to arrest a prisoner than the prisoner himself thought was necessary, or a prisoner claiming that the thousand-dollar wad of bills that he had in his back pocket was missing when he got to prison (yeah, right).

...Bush is on very solid ground on this one if he just stands up for his guys. I don't think too many Americans will be upset that some al-Qaeda killer in Iraq got a black eye during his capture.

One wonders how many more defeats of their credibility the left can suffer before they become a complete laughingstock.

Kerry's Religion Problem

This analysis by Steve Waldman of Kerry's "religion problem" says some interesting things, but it misses the root, I think, of the senator's difficulty. Waldman writes, for example, that:

[T]he Kerry campaign suffers from the fact that while most Democrats are religious, many liberal Democratic activists are not. Perhaps the real problem with the paucity of African-Americans at senior levels of the Kerry campaign is not that he doesn't understand racial language but that-forgive the gross stereotyping-the white aides tend to be more tone deaf about religion than the black ones.

In other words, religion is as important to the general population of Democrats as it is to Republicans, it's just that the Democrats to whom it's important are not in the leadership. So Democrats, including Kerry, tend to "act like the Party of Secularists even if they aren't."

Waldman thinks Kerry is making a mistake by not talking about religion more because, if he does, he'll have a very receptive audience among most members of his party. This is where I think Waldman misses Kerry's underlying difficulty.

Kerry's predicament is not simply that he's shy about his faith, it's that when he has talked about it he's given the impression of being only a nominal Catholic whose religious pilings are not driven very deep. He does not project the image of a man who is comfortable talking about religion quite possibly because it truly is terra incognita to him. For a person who has given little thought to matters of faith over the last several decades to suddenly assume the role of a man of piety is very difficult, not to mention extraordinarily hypocritical.

To suggest, as some of his supporters are, that Kerry talk about religion in order to reassure a voting public which looks for such convictions in a president is to ask him to adopt a persona to which he may well be philosophically and psychologically allergic. It's to ask him to be someone he's not. The gambit, if not sincere, can only make him appear phony, which, of course, he would be.

Kerry would be better off, if he has to say anything at all, to simply tell the truth about his religious beliefs, or lack thereof, and let religious voters decide for themselves if the honesty of his response is sufficient in itself to give him a pass on the matter.

Ben Stein

The following piece by Ben Stein, who writes for The American Spectator and who appeared on Win Ben Stein's Money and in small roles in numerous movies, sums up the feelings of so many of us that I thought I'd share it with Viewpoint readers today.

Note: The restaurant Stein refers to, Morton's, is a high end eatery in L.A. For many years he has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's", but he's now terminating the column to move on to other things:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World? As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonline FINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament, the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive, The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero. We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters.

This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard-or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them. But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Ben Stein

To which the only thing left to be said is "Amen."

Real Reform

Joanne Jacobs at Joanne Jacobs.com specializes in education news. Her site has this intriguing report on the relationship between immigrants and their academic performance. An excerpt:

According to the National Foundation for American Policy, which backs employment-related visas, 60 percent of the finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search, 65 percent of the U.S. Math Olympiad's top scorers and 46 percent of U.S. Physics Team members are the children of immigrants. "Seven of the top 10 award winners at the 2004 Intel Science Talent Search were immigrants or their children. In 2003, three of the top four awardees were foreign-born."

It often astonishes educators that children who have to overcome serious linguistic and other cultural hurdles to learn frequently outperform those who face no such impediments. It is also worth pointing out that these children often succeed in the same schools that are said to be failing so many children of our native-born population.

One would think that ascertaining the reasons for this would be a top priority in the Department of Education since it would be crucial to improving education in this country. I suspect, however, that it's not a priority for a simple reason.

Children of immigrants don't always do well. Generally, it is the children of Asian and Hindu parents who excel most frequently. And when they do, it is because their families are usually tightly-knit and very religious, they value education, respect, and self-discipline. The parents themselves are often professionally successful, they're oriented toward the future, not the present, and they often have not yet bought into the more dysgenic elements of American culture. These are, of course, the same reasons why children of non-immigrants also do well in school, when they do. Parents, whether immigrants or not, who lack any single one of these qualities may well produce high achieving children, but the more of these qualities they lack the less likely it is that their children will excel in the academic sphere of their schooling.

There's little interest in political circles in stressing this because if it is true, the key to school improvement lies in reversing the deterioration of the family, and this is an area where the only role government is willing to play is negative. For close to two generations government policies have been undermining the bedrock supports of family structure that many immigrants bring to this country. No fault divorce, promiscuous welfare benefits, abortion on demand, increased secularization of the public square, and now gay marriage rights, all have a corrosive effect on the values many immigrants cherish.

Moreover, improving our childrens' educational performance would take a conscious repudiation of the entrenched cultural relativism that many in government embrace. The view that different societies have different ways of doing things and hold different values, but that no one's values are any better or more corect than anyone else's is philosophically inane, but is, for all that, still part of the psychological furniture of many public servants today.

Add to the structural exacerbations of government policies a highly seductive pop culture which celebrates sexual infidelity, drugs, rebellion, and other expressions of short-term hedonism, the very opposites of the values which make for academic success, and it is not difficult to understand why the "immigrant effect" wears off after a generation or two.

It's also not difficult to see why government is not interested in focussing on these factors. It's much easier to blame failing schools than to muster the political will, courage, and consensus necessary to do something meaningful to reverse the academic trendlines. So politicians and other bureaucrats content themselves with attacking the symptoms rather than the problem. The decline of American education is a concomitant of the deterioration of faith, family, and pop culture, and there's no inclination in government, particularly not on the political left, to do anything at all about that.

God and Evil

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future, that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future, it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil. Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

This is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wanting to prevent evil but for some reason he chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility but, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers, if he could do something to stop it? No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God the theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork. First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist might say here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having said this, let's look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that it is within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in a future post.

The argument that many Christian theologians have put forward goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it. This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it. On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him strikes me as very plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning. Let us assume that it is possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create. Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation. He has an image of every world he could possibly make in his mind. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created. At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't. Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often.

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell. People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out, or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right, or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure how man would choose to use his gift of choice. Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed them worth it.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create some other world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it. Some have even called proponents of the "Open Future" idea heretics. I myself am open to the argument but am sympathetic to the objections of the traditionalists. Perhaps, readers can shed some light here. I invite anyone who's interested in pursuing it to contact us through our Feedback option.

The argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc. These will be discussed in another post.

Dr. Strangelove

Here's interesting news. Apparently deployment of our missile defense shield has begun. Perhaps this will cause the chuckleheads in Pyongyang and Beijing to think twice before they decide to launch offensive nuclear missiles.

Of course, there are those who are skeptical about whether the missile defense system can actually perform as it's supposed to, and for all I know their doubts may be warranted, but this particular argument strikes me as silly:

The interceptors have not proven their reliability, hitting targets only five times in eight tests, said Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. He said they failed even when using advanced information "an enemy would never give us," including when they were launched.

Coyle's objection seems to be that since this first generation of missiles can only succeed against 60% of incoming ICBMs that therefore the system is useless. I don't think he would say that if North Korea launched a ten missile attack against the West Coast and Coyle happened to be living in one of the six target cities that was spared because of the deployment of a less than perfect defense system.

In fact, though, the system doesn't have to work perfectly to be useful. Merely the uncertainty it creates in the minds of the war planners on the other side is itself a deterrent, a deterrent that one cannot put a price tag upon.

Coyle goes on to pile another strange argument atop his previous effort:

"It's not something you want to depend on in real battle," said Coyle, now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "It's also misleading to say we don't have any defense now." If U.S. troops saw a "country building a missile, they would blow it up on the ground. They would never wait to see if it was launched."

Is Coyle saying that we're better off depending solely upon a preemptive strike than we are by having a backup option? Furthermore, haven't North Korea and China already built several dozen missiles? Did Coyle call for us to bomb them when they were being built? Should we do it now?

Moreover, these missiles are not usually constructed out in the open with bullseyes painted on them. To preemptively destroy them, assuming that were politically feasible, would require inserting ground troops, which would doubtless precipitate an all-out war. Nice alternative. What think tank is this guy with?

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip on the story.

Sharing the News

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has some interesting thoughts on Christian evangelism. Reading it, I wondered how many people accept the Gospel because someone just walked up to them and invited them to give their life to Christ? I suppose it happens and I suppose some of those commitments are enduring, but I still wonder even so if, on balance, that approach is more often seen by the "target" as insulting and simple-minded.

I think Carter is exactly right when he says that:

Our evangelistic mission, therefore, is simply to share with others the "good news" that they too can know what we know. Sometimes this will require us "sharing our faith" by telling others about our own experiences. Other times it can mean removing the "worldview underbrush" that prevents them from seeing clearly what they, by disposition, can and should know. Most times, though, it will simply mean living as if we really believed that the gospel truly is good news for believers right here, right now, and not just in the hereafter.

His tongue-in-cheek conclusion also resonates:

While I believe some forms of evangelism are ineffective if not downright counterproductive, I don't want to presume to say how God can or cannot spread the "good news." It is quite possible that He could use such methods as prayer cards or religious tracts to bring the lost to salvation and redemption. In fact, I believe that it's even possible that he might be able to use evangelical Christians to further the work of his Kingdom. Not likely, perhaps, but possible. The Lord can, after all, work miracles.

Good stuff.