Sweatshops

I have from time to time found myself in conversations with friends who argue that free trade with nations who have no laws protecting laborers, particularly children, actually encourages the exploitation of poor people abroad who find themselves working in sweatshops for pennies a day under awful conditions. My reply has been that the alternative is that without this meager employment these people will simply starve, which is, they would probably judge, a somewhat more awful condition.

When people are living at the subsistence level a few pennies a day is a Godsend, and even though their working conditions are ghastly the poor are certainly better off slaving in these manufaturing shops than not working at all.

Now comes a piece by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times which makes essentially the same point:

Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about "labor standards," I'd like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh. This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It's a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

President Obama wants to demand that countries with whom we do business enact child labor laws and other regulations that would in effect eliminate sweatshops, but like so many well-meaning measures it has tragic unintended consequences. Such laws would make many foreign businesses unprofitable and uncompetitive and force them to lay off workers. Where would these workers go? In many places around the world they'd go to the dumps and try their luck at scavenging. This is why Kristoff thinks that so far from trying to eliminate sweatshops we should be encouraging them.

If the Obama administration has its way they will actually increase, not alleviate, poverty and suffering in the poorest nations of the world. The irony is that people here want so much to do something to help the poor that they often don't give much thought to the actual impact their good intentions have on the people they want to help. One might have thought that our experuience over the last forty five years with the "War on Poverty" would have taught us better. Solutions that make us feel good are often the most counterproductive and fraught with unintended consequences.

If you're skeptical you really should read the whole essay and make it a point to watch the accompanying video.

RLC

How to Close Down Gitmo

Steven Hayward at No Left Turns has an idea that would in one stroke solve several problems that vex the left. First, our political port-siders want us to close down Gitmo. Second, they want us to either bring the detainees to trial or let them go. Third, they want us to end the embargo on Cuba. Hayward writes:

It appears already that the Obama Administration is going to have its hands full figuring out how to close down Guantanamo. Since no Congressperson wants a detainee sent to their district, and many countries of origin of these fine world citizens won't take them back, why don't we just cut a hole in the fence and set them loose in Fidel's island paradise? It would be a nice first step in lifting our obsolete embargo.

It would also make Fidel happy to have such rabid America-haters among his citizenry. This really is a grand idea, although it's not true, unfortunately, that no congressperson is willing to have detainees sent to their district. John "bribe me later" Murtha recently allowed as how he'd be happy to have them brought to his district in Pennsylvania. Of course, since he believes his constituents are largely just a bunch of racists, maybe bloodthirsty killers would fit right in.

The state slogan "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania" apparently applies even to terrorists, at least as long as John Murtha's in Congress.

RLC

It's Gillibrand

New York Governor David Paterson, a liberal Democrat, mind you, has picked Representative Kirsten Gillibrand to fill the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Gillibrand is a Democrat also, of course, but she's much more conservative than Clinton and indeed more conservative than most New York Democrats. She supports gun rights (she's endorsed by the NRA), opposes gay marriage, and opposes the TARP bailout. Consequently, many Democrats are quite angry with Paterson's selection.

Oddly, Gillibrand was heavily promoted by the very liberal New York senior senator Charles Schumer, who apparently thought that a conservative Democrat has the best chance of winning reelection in 2010 in New York.

We take our glimmers of hope where we can find them.

RLC

Aftermath

Strategy Page offers this post-operational assessment of the Israeli incursion into Gaza:

Hamas thought they were invulnerable to Israeli attack. By placing so many of their military and government facilities in densely populated residential neighborhoods, they believed any Israeli bombing or shelling would cause high, and politically unacceptable, civilian losses. But the Israelis used surprise, more precision than expected, and innovations like calling civilians in the target area and telling them to get out before the bombs hit nearby. As a result, most of the 1,300 Palestinian dead were Hamas personnel, and nearly all the damaged structures were those used by Hamas.

The Palestinians cranked up the spin machine anyway, and accused the Israelis of war crimes and genocide. But Israel responded with a media campaign featuring aerial videos of Hamas fighters setting up mortars and rockets next to schools and residential neighborhoods. This didn't stop the usual alliance of leftists, anti-Semites and Islamic radicals from calling Israel names, but the mud didn't stick nearly as much as in the past.

What dismayed Hamas the most was Israel finding the location of their officials. Even before the ceasefire took effect on the 18th, Hamas death squads were rounding up the usual suspects (members of rival Fatah, and anyone else unlucky enough to be a suspect) for torture and execution. The UN did not pay much attention to this, as it has been going on for over two years in Gaza. In that time, over 400 Fatah members have been killed by Hamas death squads, and many more Fatah (and any other Hamas rivals) tortured, wounded or jailed. Hamas apparently didn't realize that there were other ways to get target locations, besides informants on the ground. All they understood was informants...But the bombings continued.

Israel believes it has destroyed 60 percent of the 200 or so smuggling tunnels that bring weapons (particularly long range rockets for attacks on Israeli civilians) into Gaza. Israel wants Israeli or American sensors and technicians prowling the Egyptian border to detect all the tunnels, and for Egyptian border guards to destroy them. Hamas opposes this (as do many Egyptian officials, especially the ones who benefit from the bribes of the tunnel operators).

Ultimately, Hamas found that hiding their senior leadership in hospitals or orphanages offered the best protection from Israeli attack. Weapons and key items of military equipment could also be stored there. Hamas apparently exercised some restraint in the degree to which they took over these institutions for military purposes. Someone in Hamas began doing the math, and realized that, at a certain point, a hospital full of weapons and Hamas personnel stopped being a hospital to Israeli commanders, and became a prime target.

Israel believes that Hamas had about 3,000 rockets in late December, and that during the 22 day campaign, about 700 of those rockets were fired in the general direction of Israel, while Israeli air (mostly) and ground forces destroyed another 1,300. That leaves Hamas with about 1,000 rockets, and dozens of functioning smuggling tunnels to Egypt through which components for replacement rockets can be moved.

Hamas claimed that Israeli bombs and troops did $1.9 billion worth of damage. It was probably closer to a few hundred million dollars. There were only about a thousand smart bombs used, and many of these were small ones (like the new U.S. 250 pound SDB, which Israel recently received). Hamas claimed that 5,000 homes were destroyed (and 20,000 damaged), along with 16 government buildings and 20 mosques. There are about 147,000 buildings in Gaza. Israel may take another media shot at Hamas by releasing photos of what was actually destroyed, and let Hamas try to dance away from their lies. But that may not be necessary, as Hamas is already the growing target for ridicule in the Arab world. If Israel was trying to get Hamas exposed as a bunch of tyrants, genocidal liars and blowhards, they seem to have succeeded ....

Pray for the longsuffering Palestinian people who will be subjected to the same terror a year or so from now as their "leaders" rearm and prepare for yet another series of rocket attacks on Israel.

RLC

Smoking and Cancer

Studies in Massachusetts have found that smoking is responsible for more cancers than just cancers of the lung. In fact, according to this article in Science News 70% of all cancer deaths are smoking-related:

"This study provides support for the growing understanding among researchers that smoking is a cause of many more cancer deaths besides lung cancer," said lead author Bruce Leistikow, a UC Davis associate adjunct professor of public health sciences. "The full impacts of tobacco smoke, including secondhand smoke, have been overlooked in the rush to examine such potential cancer factors as diet and environmental contaminants. As it turns out, much of the answer was probably smoking all along."

I don't question this report, but the results seem at odds with my own personal experience. As I reflect on all the people I have known over the years who have had cancer, and the number is in the double digits, I can't think of a single one who was a smoker. It would be interesting to hear what our readers think about this. How many of the people you know who have had cancer of any kind were smokers?

RLC

Consolation Prize

Jonah Goldberg observes that just as the demise of communism was a blessing that nevertheless dissolved the glue that had long united conservatives so too might Obama's election be an event that deprives the left of one of its most powerful unifying themes - racism in America:

He has voiced an admirable disdain for the notion that academic excellence is nothing more than "acting white." His famous Father's Day speech in 2008 showed that Obama was willing to lend his voice to the effort to fight black illegitimacy and absentee fatherhood.

This puts Obama behind the two most important ingredients for black success, at least according to most conservatives: a rededication to the importance of education at an individual level, and the restoration of the black nuclear family.

At a more political level, a black president surely undermines the argument that American racism is so endemic that a system of racial quotas must remain a permanent fixture of the political and legal landscape.

Obama is most frequently compared to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But he also has compared himself to Ronald Reagan, saying he'd like to be a similarly transformative leader, albeit from a different ideological perspective. Only time will tell how successful he will be on that front.

But the analogy may be apt in ways that he and his supporters may not fully appreciate. By hastening the end of the Cold War, Reagan took away the defining cause of the conservative movement. The right had other issues, to be sure. But anti-communism was the coalitional glue. And while principled conservatives were happy to trade a live campaign issue for a dead Soviet Union, the damage to conservative cohesion was real.

If Obama lives up to the dreams of his supporters in writing a new, post-racial chapter for America, he will have at once done more for America than any Democratic president in generations. But he also will have cut the knot holding much of the left together. As an American and as a conservative, I certainly hope that's the case. He's already made a good start of it just by getting elected.

Goldberg observes elsewhere in the same essay that Obama wasn't his first choice for president, but even so, proof that this nation has surmounted its legacy of racism isn't a bad consolation prize. Neither, I might add, is depriving the left of one of the several clubs it uses to beat Americans over the head.

Obama's election makes racism a much less plausible card to play in any of the many venues in which people are fond of playing it. It will, for example, make it much harder for the race hustlers like Al Sharpton to use white racism as an excuse for black failure.

RLC

Do Your Job

Gilbert Meilander at First Things discusses a book by noted academic Stanley Fish titled Save the World on Your Own Time. In the book Fish argues that the attempts by teachers and college professors to make students into "good people" is misguided and in any event impossible:

...the book's entire polemical edge (and the point of its central second chapter, titled "Do Your Job") depends on the assumption that many college and university teachers are all too eager to use their classrooms for "partisan purposes." Rather than taking up ideas and arguments as objects for analysis, they offer them as "candidates for allegiance." Rather than doing what academics are trained to do-"passing on knowledge and conferring skills"-they commit themselves (with the full support of broad claims in the mission statements of their institutions) to turning students into people who are sensitive, tolerant, creative, and good (though, of course, globally minded) citizens.

In short, they seem to be in the business of offering a "character transplant" to students who thought they had "signed on for something more modest, to wit, a course of instruction."

What we can do in the classroom is, roughly, what Fish says we can (and should) attempt: impart knowledge and develop skills needed to analyze ideas. We can give training in critical reflection about how different individuals and traditions have proposed that we should live. We can, on our good days or good semesters, produce students who think more clearly, critically, and reflectively about such questions. And, if we've really done well, we may even produce students who realize that critical thought is by no means the whole of the moral life. It is what can be done in the classroom, what a college professor might be trained to do if he attempts not to save the world but to do his job.

If you're a teacher, or hoping to be a teacher, or have a child who is a student, this would be a good essay to read in its entirety.

RLC

What Will They Think of Next

The movie The Matrix popularized philosopher George Berkeley's idea that the world is simply a projection of our minds. The universe is fundamentally mental, according to people like Berkeley, it's not material at all. All that we experience when we observe an object are our ideas and ideas are in minds, they're not objectively real, so there actually is no world of solid matter.

Surprisingly, perhaps, a lot of physicists agree with the notion that the world is in large part the creation of our minds. Now, however, evidence is starting to point to the possibility that the world is really a hologram projected by some two-dimensional surface somewhere far away. A hologram, of course, is an image that gives the illusion of being substantial but which is really formed by light waves interacting with each other as they pass through, or reflect off, an image on a film. One of the bizarre properties of holograms is that every piece of the image contains the entire image. It's like a mosaic that's made of pieces every one of which contains the image of the entire mosaic.

If the universe is a hologram then it must be a reflection off a surface outside the universe which means that we must exist not only here, but also there. Moreover, our existence here is just an image, an illusion. Our real existence is there.

That the world is not really as it appears to us is something I'm quite convinced of. For me to accept that it's a hologram, however, is going to require a little more evidence, or maybe another good movie like the first Matrix.

RLC

Why Arabs Lose

Strategy Page points out that there's a reason why Arabs almost always lose in combat against Western militaries:

[T]here have been about 4,000 casualties from the fighting that began on December 27th. As with past battles between Israel and Arabs, most of the losses (in this case 98 percent) are Arab. This is worse than previous wars because Hamas has deliberately tried to get Palestinians killed, mainly for the propaganda value. The Israelis have developed new tactics that minimize their casualties and those of Palestinian civilians. The mass media is in the midst of their usual anti-Israel/pro-Hamas hysteria. But, as in the past, when the dust settles, it will be revealed (if not universally admitted) that Hamas was trying to get Palestinian civilians killed, and Israelis weren't. Israeli tactics have denied Hamas the bloodbath they hoped to achieve. The Hamas gunmen die quickly, and the Israeli troops are very difficult to hit ....

Arabs are dismayed by this disparity in [combatant] casualties, which has occurred whenever Arab and Westerners have fought in the last century or so. The reason for it is the corruption and inefficiency of Arab society. The Arabs have proved to be unable to rule themselves effectively, and a long list of bad habits makes it difficult for Arabs to create effective armed forces. Thus we end up with Hamas cynically using tactics that try to get more Palestinians killed, so the "victimhood" of Hamas will be enhanced by a world that averts their eyes when it comes to seeing Arab faults and the tragic results.

There is something sick about a government, in this case Hamas, which tries to win a war by getting as many of its own civilians killed as possible.

RLC

The First Four Minutes

One reason Hamas was unable to respond to the Israeli attack on Gaza with a massive rocket attack on Israel, as they had threatened, was that the Israeli Air Force had taken out almost their entire rocket supply in the first few minutes of the air assault:

The Israel air force demolished two key Hamas war systems in the first 4 minutes of its massive offensive on Gaza Saturday morning, Dec. 27, DEBKAfile's military sources report. The bombers destroyed six mosques in Gaza City which held the terrorists' biggest weapons arsenals and scores of "beehives" containing launchers primed for the simultaneous, automatic release of hundreds of powerful rockets against Israeli cities.

These launchers were rigged for precision-targeting in Israeli town centers. They were operated by a unit of 300 special Hamas operatives trained for their mission at Syrian military bases under the instruction of Hizballah rocket specialists.

The aerial offensive knocked out 80 percent of the rockets Hamas had prepared to launch and saved Israel's southern cities. The Palestinian Islamists were left only with inferior projectiles. Therefore, 98 percent of the hundreds of missiles they managed to fire in the 22-day war missed their targets and exploded in open ground.

Meanwhile, Egyptian and Israeli warships are searching the Red Sea for an Iranian freighter believed to be laden with a 60 ton resupply of rockets for Hamas. Hamas fighters have also broken the cease-fire by firing on Israeli soldiers.

It's difficult to understand what Israel thinks it has to gain by stopping its offensive before it has taken out all of Hamas' leadership. As soon as they are able they will be right back firing rockets at Israeli civilians. For the Israelis the cease-fire is an indication of their desire to curtail the killing, for Hamas it's an opportunity for them to rearm and continue their unending intifada against Israel at a later date. It doesn't make much sense for Israel to just play along.

RLC

Plague Attack

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algiers has closed down a camp after forty of terrorists in the camp died from what appears to be a highly contagious and lethal biological agent they appear to have been working on.

Imagine for a moment that their plan was to infect suicide carriers of the disease - some reports suggest it was bubonic plague - and then smuggle the carriers into the U.S. before they become symptomatic. All the terrorists need do once they're here is walk around any crowded city, or the Washington Mall during the Inauguration ceremony, and they could infect thousands who would then return home and in turn infect thousands more and so on in a cascade of sickness and death.

Meanwhile, we can thank goodness that the new Obama administration won't be violating anybody's rights by listening in to these terrorists' phone conversations as they plot their mass attacks. Nobody wants an attack like this to happen, of course, but stopping them by using a warrantless wiretap on the bad guys' phones in order to uncover their plot is just too high a price to pay, in our judgment, to save the lives of millions of Americans.

RLC

If Only Mugabe Were White

Bob Herbert describes the ghastly conditions that attend everyday life in Zimbabwe - a massive cholera outbreak, few medical facilities, no sanitation and schools businesses, etc. all shut down. Herbert says:

Most of the world is ignoring the agony of Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and medically advanced nation in southern Africa that is suffering from political and economic turmoil - and the brutality of Mugabe's long and tyrannical reign.

There are reasons for this indifference, of course, perhaps one of them being that neither Israel nor the United States is responsible for the plight of the Zimbabweans. Thus the world yawns. Another is that, in fact, Zimbabwe was once ruled by a white government and, despite being oppressive, was the most productive and prosperous nation in Africa. The whites were forced out by international pressure and Robert Mugabe took over in 1980, ruled even more oppressively, murdered thousands of political opponents, kicked white farmers off their land and gave the farms to his cronies who knew nothing at all about farming. Through corruption, murder, and mismanagement Zimbabwe was soon plunged into the deepest circle of hell.

Now millions of Zimbabweans are starving, there is no food distribution, tens of thousands more are dying of AIDS and cholera, inflation is at an astonishing annual rate of 231 million percent, unemployment is at 80%, male life expectancy is 37 and females can expect to live to the ripe old age of 34. These facts may be seen by some as having uncomfortable implications for majority rule in Africa and so some people, perhaps, prefer to ignore the disaster that Zimbabwe has become.

In any event, there are things, short of a military occupation for which there's evidently no stomach, that the world community can do to topple Mugabe. One strategy I've heard recommended is what's called cyber assassination: Employ talented computer hackers to go into the bank accounts of Mugabe and his henchmen and clean them out. Crash all government computers and deny the thugs the ability to use internet or cell phones to communicate. In other words, destroy the government electronically. Once the government can no longer pay their soldiers and police Mugabe will lose his grip on them and subsequently on his power. He will no doubt have to flee the country, but he should be denied landing rights anywhere outside Zimbabwe. With no money to buy loyalty from the brutes who prop him up, no way to communicate with his minions, and nowhere to go Mugabe would quickly wind up like Mussolini or Ceausescu.

Or the West can do what it's doing now. It can do what it's doing in Chad, what it's doing in Sudan, what it did in Rwanda. It can do nothing and just let the wretched Zimbabweans die long, slow miserable deaths.

Exit question: Why did the world care so much for the suffering of blacks in Rhodesia (former name of Zimbabwe) under Ian Smith, in South Africa under apartheid, and for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza today, but cares nothing for the suffering of Palestinians in the Arab world, or of Iraqi Arabs under Saddam Hussein, or blacks throughout the continent of Africa? In each case where world opinion has been loud and effective the "oppressors" were of European descent, and in every case where the world seems disinterested the oppressors are of non-European descent.

If Mugabe were a white tyrant the United Nations would have rolled the tanks onto his doorstep twenty years ago and had him exiled to Antartica. Why does the world only seem to care enough about suffering people to do something about it when the pain is caused by whites?

RLC

Not Their Finest Hour

Quick thought for those who watched or listened to the Inauguration coverage today: I can't decide which was most discouraging, the fawning hagiographical coverage of much of the MSM whose reporters have in some cases thrown objectivity to the winds to declare their undying fealty to their new political Adonis, or the niggling whining of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity over the merest parsings of Obama's speech.

All that these guys managed to do today was to remind a lot of those tuned in why they'd rather listen to Obama's dulcet adjurations than to their vacuous carping. It wasn't conservative talk radio's finest hour.

RLC

Little Arab Sympathy for Hamas

Strategy Page explains why Muslim criticism of Israel in the latest round of warfare against Hamas was relatively muted. It turns out that most Arab Muslims don't particularly care for Hamas, and weren't really sorry to see it get clobbered.

The article opens with this:

The only chance Hamas has of surviving its current battle with Israel, is to stir up enough anger against Israel to force the Israelis to stop fighting and enter into a ceasefire agreement that Hamas can easily subvert. This Information War campaign is not going well for Hamas. While there are demonstrations in Moslem countries, and in the West as well, they are not as numerous or as spirited as in the past. Worse, most Arab countries are either lukewarm in their criticism of Israel, or openly blame Hamas for the current round of fighting.

There are several trends going on here. First, most Moslem nations have had it with Islamic terrorism. Even before September 11, 2001, the current round of Islamic terrorism was unpopular in Moslem countries where Islamic terrorists had already been operating. The al Qaeda campaign in Iraq was particularly demoralizing to Moslems worldwide. Al Qaeda revealed itself to be more capable, and willing, to kill Moslem civilians, than non-Moslem troops. Al Qaeda made things worse by bragging about non-existent successes and claiming that victory was inevitable. By 2007, it was obvious that al Qaeda had been defeated, and even al Qaeda eventually admitted it. Now Hamas is asking Moslems to buy into another campaign, just like the failed al Qaeda effort. A lot of Moslems are not taking the bait, despite efforts by Arab media organizations to make it appear otherwise.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Inauguration Day

Today is certainly an historic day. A milestone in our cultural history has been reached as we inaugurate the first African-American president, indeed the first president of African descent ever to be elected in any non-African country. I'm delighted that the United States, alone, I think, among the nations of the world, has democratically chosen a member of a racial minority to be their chief executive and their commander-in-chief. It's another sign of America's greatness relative to the rest of the world. I just wish it had been a different African-American.

Don't misunderstand. I wish President Obama well, and insofar as he turns out to betray the people most responsible for getting him elected - the political far left - I will be cheering him on, but if he's a man of character he will strive to do the things he has promised to do over the last two years, all 510 of them, and the things he has promised are not things that I find particularly comforting.

Before the election we listed fifteen measures that Democrats could be expected to pursue should they acquire the political power to work their will in the legislature. Obama may not support all of these efforts, but if we're to take him at his word, he certainly supports most of them.

Here they are:

• Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
• Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
• Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
• Effect a redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
• Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
• Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes - e.g. higher minimum wage, capital gains taxes, greater health insurance costs - that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher cost to business and consequently higher unemployment.
• Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
• Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, education, and welfare.
• Nationalize health care.
• Deny to parents the right to choose the schools their children will attend.
• Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
• Quell freedom of speech, particularly conservative or religious speech, through vehicles like the "Fairness Doctrine."
• Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
• Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
• Strip workers of the right to a secret ballot in elections related to union matters.

To the extent that President Obama tries to achieve the agenda laid out above we will voice our displeasure. Until then he will have our support. Moreover, if and when we do find it necessary to oppose our new president that opposition will be carried out with as much civility as firmness. We will extend to him the benefit of whatever legitimate doubts there may be and will strive always to treat the man and his office with courtesy and respect.

In short, we will not act like so many of President Bush's detractors in the congress and the media. We urge our readers to do likewise. One service the left has inadvertently done for the political discourse of this country over the last eight years is to display the ugliness of their brand of rhetoric and the unfairness of consistently putting the worst possible interpretation on the President's actions, aims, and motives. It's our hope that those who now find themselves in the political opposition will recoil from the left's jejunne foot-stamping and follow instead the example that President Bush himself has set.

RLC

Finally

Viewpoint has periodically urged President Bush to pardon or commute the sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean (most recently here), two border patrol agents who were charged with illegalities surrounding the shooting of a Mexican drug smuggler. Ramos and Compean were given 10-12 years in prison and loss of their jobs. Not even the prosecutor of the case thought that the sentence was just.

Now comes word that clemency has finally been granted and that the two men will soon be released from prison after having served two years of their sentences.

They never should have gone to prison in the first place. They shouldn't even have lost their jobs. A suspension without pay and/or demotion would have been more than enough. We're glad that they're being freed.

RLC

Hope for the Hearing Impaired

There are lots of folks out there, especially among the boomers, who are beginning to experience hearing loss and related problems like tinnitus - a constant hissing noise that sounds like escaping steam. The problems are most often caused by damage to the hair cells in the cochlea due to exposure to loud noises (like music on our i-pods) or chemicals. Most Ear, Nose and Throat specialists (ENTs) say there's usually not much to be done about it at present except the use of hearing aids and some kinds of therapy to help with the tinnitus.

Lately, however, a promising line of research has emerged that might afford hope. It turns out that transplanted stem cells have been shown to regenerate and repair these cells to some extent which may restore, at least partially, the lost function and diminish the annoying ringing that often accompanies hearing loss.

Another potentially helpful line of research employs gene therapy to regenerate damaged hair cells.

Despite these breakthroughs it seems as if treatments for humans are still years away. A list of links to reports on this kind of research can be found here.

RLC

Martin Luther King Day

Today the nation honors the memory of Martin Luther King - his courage, his leadership, his vision, and his sacrifice. I can think of no better way to understand why he's so highly regarded than to watch or read his I Have a Dream speech and/or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Both are excellent windows into the soul of the man, and in them both we see that King was motivated and inspired by his deep faith in, and his understanding of, the message of the Christian Gospel. Here's his very powerful and very moving I Have Dream speech:

Reflecting on the history of the American civil rights movement and its roots in the American experience with slavery I was reminded of something I had read recently about contemporary slavery.

There are an estimated 27 million people in slavery today, most of them children. Thousands of boys hardly big enough to hold a gun are enslaved by militia thugs in Africa and forced to murder, maim and rape (See the movie War Dance). Thousands of Asian girls, barely pubescent, are sold as sex slaves, often by their parents. Millions of others are forced to work long hours, as many as twenty hours a day, shackled to machines and looms, or to toil as domestic labor.

One sometimes hears that the Bible endorses slavery and that American slave owners were often Christians. The first claim is not true. The Bible recognized that slavery was a fact in the first century Roman Empire and that there was little that a nascent Christian church could do to change it. Christian slaves were encouraged, therefore, to live so as to be a witness to God to a pagan world, to use their suffering to glorify Christ.

The second claim is technically true, but misleading. Early southern slave-owners were often nominal Anglicans whose religion had very little relevance to their moral lives.

In any event, the abolitionist movement, like the twentieth century civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King and his allies, was led by Christians who took the Gospel seriously - people like William Wilberforce and his Clapham group, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, even the misguided and possibly deranged John Brown. Add to these the thousands of lesser known Christians who participated in the underground railroad, who wrote editorials in newspapers and magazines, who preached from the pulpits of hundreds if not thousands of churches on the need for Christians to live up to their creedal beliefs that all men are God's children, created equal and in His image. It was this preaching and influence, it was this conviction of the equality of all men before God, that gradually persuaded more marginally committed Christians of the incompatibility of slavery and the Gospel.

Today it is the case that slavery flourishes mostly in those lands where Christianity languishes, or where Christians have little political clout. This is a fact that should be troubling to anyone concerned about human rights as our society grows increasingly secular and Christianity gets pushed further into the shadowy margins of our public life.

Western secularists would do well to ask themselves what grounds they will have to keep slavery at bay if their dream of a completely naked public square is ever realized. Once Christian theism ceases to be the ground, guide, and motivation for moral conduct, as it was for Dr. King, it will gradually, and inevitably, be replaced by an ethic of might-makes-right, and in such a world slavery will almost certainly make a roaring comeback. A completely secularized world will look very much, at least as far as human oppression is concerned, like those parts of the world today where Christian influence is minimal.

RLC

So Much for the Iranian Unit

IsraelNationalNews.com reports that the Israelis took only a day or so to all but wipe out a 100 man elite unit trained by the Iranians:

The so-called "Iranian Unit" of Hamas has been destroyed, according to Gaza sources cited Thursday by the Haaretz daily. The sources said most of the unit's 100 members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood of Gaza City.

The terrorists had been trained in infantry tactics, the use of anti-tank missiles and the detonation of explosives, among other skills, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at Hizbullah camps in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley, as well as sites in Iran.

If the Israelis can so easily dispatch units trained by the Iranians the strength of the Iranian army itself is called into question. At the very least this is a huge embarrassment to Iran and Hizbollah. It also restores a lot of respect for the prowess of the Israeli Defense Force that had been diminished in the war in Lebanon two years ago.

In fact, one captured Hamas fighter said as much:

Two captured terrorists interviewed by Maariv/NRG say that Hamas was not expecting Israel's response to the escalation in missile attacks on Israeli targets that preceded Operation Cast Lead. One of them, a 52-year-old victim of a premature detonation who had already done time in an Israeli jail, said, "Hamas took a gamble. We thought, at worst Israel will come and do something from the air - something superficial. They'll come in and go out. We never thought that we would reach the point where fear will swallow the heart and the feet will want to flee. You [Israel] are fighting like you fought in '48. What got into you all of a sudden?"

Well, what got into them was that Hamas left them with no real alternative but to fight. Hamas may not have expected them to respond so vigorously, but what is the point of doing what Hamas thought they would do? A tit-for-tat retaliation solves nothing and only postpones the day when Israel will have to choose to dissolve itself or to eliminate Hamas.

In response to an e-mail from a friend asking me how I felt about the circumstances of the Palestinian people caught in the cross-fire, I replied that:

I feel deeply sorry for the Palestinian people. They have suffered terribly, and I wish their plight had some other solution. I know that most of them just want to live normal lives and raise their children and try to make a living. The whole situation is tragic. Yet I don't know what else Israel can do, given the leadership the Palestinians in Gaza have chosen for themselves. Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel, the deaths of Israelis, and the return of their land to Palestinian Arabs. That commitment is implacable. Given their determination I don't see how Israel can do anything other than follow one of several courses.

1. They can acquiesce to Palestinian demands and dissolve the Israeli nation.
   
2. They can try to cling to their security while establishing a border with Gaza something like we have with Canada.
   
3. They can seek to protect themselves from murderous Palestinians infiltrating into Israel by setting up checkpoints and building walls along the border.
   
4. They can seek to protect themselves from Palestinian terror by preventing them from getting the weapons the Palestinians use to kill Israelis.
   
5. They can try to eliminate the leadership of their implacable foe and hope that the Gazan Palestinians follow the example of their West Bank cousins and select somewhat less bloodthirsty leadership.
   

One and two amount to national suicide. Three, four, and five impose terrible hardships on the Palestinian people. Yet, I think that three, four, and five are the only options left to Israelis unless they're willing to dissolve their state and emigrate. The Palestinian people are caught in a terrible situation, but it's mostly the fault of their own elected leadership. Just as the leadership of the German and Japanese people had to go in the 1940s in order for there to be peace, so, too, must the Palestinian leadership go if their people are going to have any hope of a future. And just as removing the German and Japanese leadership cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilian Germans and Japanese, the removal of Hamas cannot occur without severe hardship to the people they govern. It's a terrible tragedy but no different than the tragedy suffered by the German and Japanese people during WWII.

Hamas has to go. If the Israelis end this offensive before they've excised the cancer it will only metastasize throughout the region and come back more virulently than ever. In the meantime, let us pray for the Palestinian people.

RLC

Hiccups

When it was discovered that Joe the Plumber had an outstanding tax debt of about $1200 there were cries of outrage from the left which was incensed that Joe had already committed the blasphemy of asking candidate Obama a question the answer to which caused Obama serious embarrassment. Joe asked the question. Joe had unpaid taxes. Joe must be a weasel.

Now it turns out that President-elect Obama's selection for Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner failed to pay almost fifty thousand dollars in taxes dating back to 2001 until he was about to be appointed to the position of chief tax collector of the nation.

Since he's an Obama appointee, however, that's okay, even if he's not being quite forthright about why the taxes are unpaid. Democrats have circled the waggons around Mr. Geithner calling his tax delinquency, which would have gotten you or I thrown in jail and did get Joe the Plumber's personal records rifled through by Ohio's bureaucrats, an "honest mistake." Well, according to the pieces linked to above it doesn't seem like an honest mistake.

It might be something to think about when Barack Obama fulfills his promise to raise the share of your income that goes to pay the salaries of such as Mr. Geithner that the obligation to pay taxes only applies to you. It doesn't apply to the members of his cabinet. If you don't want to pay higher taxes you are, in the words of Vice-President elect Joe Biden, "unpatriotic," unless of course, you're part of the Democrat elite in which case your deliberate failure to pay is just, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, a "hiccup."

It's ironic that Charlie Rangel (D. NY), the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, the committee which writes tax legislation, claims he didn't know he had to pay taxes on several rental properties he owns, and that now the guy who will be in charge of raising the money to bailout our economy in the Obama administration claims he didn't know he had to pay taxes on income he made working for the International Monetary Fund - despite having received numerous notices from the IMF specifying his tax obligations.

One has to wonder whether these guys are dishonest or just incompetent. Either way it doesn't do much to boost one's confidence in the ability of the party that's promised to steer us through these difficult financial times. Nor does it do much to reinforce their image of themselves as the party of the little guy.

RLC