Swine Flu and You

Much of the news reportage on the swine flu has focussed on numbers of infected people and where those people live. It hasn't been very helpful in explaining what exactly this flu is and how serious is the threat that it poses. This Q and A at New Scientist is more useful in that it answers a lot of questions people are starting to ask about this virus. Check it out.

RLC

The Fascist Temptation

The other day I commented that everyone should read George Orwell's 1984. The crushing thought control that oppresses the citizens of Oceana in Orwell's depressing vision of a future dystopia is not just a boogeyman of paranoid conservatives, it's a real and present danger, especially in a world in which technology is so far advanced and liberal assumptions are so blithely accepted.

Lest you think I exaggerate please take fifteen minutes to watch this video that appeared at Hot Air, and ask yourself how many universities across the country have similar indoctrination programs for incoming freshmen and how discordant such programs are with the traditional concept of free speech and free minds:

Liberalism in the 19th century was a noble pursuit of individual freedom. Classical liberals prized freedom of thought, speech, and religion. They would have been horrified to see the transmogrification of their views that has taken place in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st. Contemporary liberalism stands almost diametrically opposite its predecessor. Today, so far from valuing the rights of the individual, liberalism values the collective and lists toward the totalitarian and tyrannical. It employs coercion, particularly in academia, to enjoin conformity of thought and speech. It resorts to public humiliation of ordinary students and other citizens to ensure they don't stray from the approved point of view. It punishes "thought crime" and seeks to homogenize thinking until everyone holds the same opinions, i.e. those acceptable to the liberal elite. In short, liberalism is gradually morphing into fascism.

This disturbing "orientation" program would still be in place at Delaware were it not for organizations like FIRE, but not even the vigilance of these organizations will be enough to stanch the totalitarian impulse unless more people recognize the oppressive tendencies of contemporary liberalism/progressivism and wean themselves from it.

RLC

Pants on Fire

For those of you who may not be aware of who Porter Goss is, he was at one time the Chairman of the House intelligence committee and later served as Director of the CIA under President George W. Bush. He has an article in yesterday's Washington Post in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that she knew nothing about detainees being waterboarded:

Goss writes to challenge Pelosi's claim:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

• The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
• We understood what the CIA was doing.
• We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
• We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
• On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

The rest of Goss' editorial is worth reading as well. It certainly makes you wonder about the integrity of our political leadership.

On the other hand, it may surprise you to learn that I'm quite prepared to accept the possibility that both Goss and Pelosi are telling the truth in this matter. Having listened to Ms Pelosi speak on numerous occasions on various topics I have to say that I really have no difficulty believing that she sat through every one of those briefings and understood not a word of what was being said.

RLC

Re: Freedom Is Slavery

Sarah responded to the post Freedom is Slavery with the following clever takeoff from George Orwell's 1984. Those who've read 1984 - and everyone should - will appreciate Sarah's parody of the Janet Napolitano Department of Homeland Security:

This is ungood thoughtcrime. It has many oldthink thinks. This is ungood because it is unnice to the government. The government needs to crimestop itself against the doubleplusungood right wing extremists who unbellyfeel the government's think. So the government needs to tell everyone that these people are doubleplusungood so that everyone will goodthink. Blackwhite. Minitrue needs to use the right words when telling this to the people so the people will goodthink. By using "extremist" the people goodthink.

They see facism or communism or people with guns who are doubleplusungood and unnice and unhappy. These people are scary and make everyone want the government to crimestop them. These people unagree with the government. They must be crimestopped. If we all unagreed with the government there would be no government. And if these people were allowed to speak more people might unagree and unbelly with the government and less people would blackwhite. It is better if the government says what to think instead of extremists so everyone thinks what to think and upsubs.

The extremists want to hurt us and the government. The government is doubleplusgood for letting everyone think what to think about these ungood people.

On a different note, Newspeak is supposed to be the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Though I don't think that is true. I don't exactly have any facts, but it certainly seems like the English language is taking a similar downward spiral. I read books written a hundred years ago and the vocabulary is rich and diverse. Then I use some of those words and no one knows what the heck I am talking about. They ask what shelf it's on, I say the penultimate. No clue what I'm talking about. I say my mother is parsimonious and get blank stares. I throw up my hands and say this is egregious. No idea. There is a dearth of words being circulated throughtout the English language.

I was learning how to write articles for newspapers or magazines a few years ago, and the lecturer said to write like I was writing for a fourth grade audience. I thought this was intolerable. Fourth graders weren't going to be reading this, adults were! If the newspapers and magazines dumb everything down, what hope is there for anyone? Maybe if the newspapers and magazines started employing a plethora of vocabulary things would change. Until then, THIS IS EGREGIOUS!!!!!!

Very well put, Sarah.

RLC

Pandora's Box

So, will the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against Bush administration officials for using "torture" against terrorist detainees in the wake of 9/11? I'll be surprised if they do. Right now I imagine President Obama is taking phone calls from everyone from former President Bill Clinton to current Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asking him what the heck he thinks he's doing. Doesn't he [Obama] realize that any inquiry into Bush administration misdeeds would consume a whole host of former and current Democrat public officials including the aforementioned duo?

Why, after all, stop with alleged mistreatment of detainees by the Bush people? In the 1990's the Clinton administration initiated a program that resulted in far worse treatment to prisoners than anything the CIA did under Bush. In the 90's the Clinton people, in the spirit of outsourcing, practiced what's called extraordinary rendition in which a detainee was sent to countries much less punctilious about human rights than are we. In these hellholes the detainee was "questioned" by methods a description of which would revolt any decent human being.

Then in the wake of 9/11 the Bush CIA briefed several of the ranking congresspersons involved with Intelligence oversight, which included Democrats, which included Nancy Pelosi, on the details of the methods they were using to extract information from captured terrorists. According to the Washington Post nary a one raised any substantive objections. They were all tacitly, if not overtly, on board with the program.

So, if we're going to go after Dick Cheney, George Tenant, Condi Rice, and Don Rumsfeld let's include anyone guilty of breaking the law in order to insure your children's safety. Let's also go after Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Sandy Berger, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephart and a host of other Democrats who were complicit in the use of torture to gain information to save us from another 9/11. If President Obama wants to send a message that torture will not be tolerated in his administration he'll have to haul all of the aforementioned before whatever tribunals the Democrats set up for the purpose. If he doesn't then the only message he's sending is that the only torture that won't be tolerated is that instigated by Republicans.

I don't think the President or congressional Democrats are really interested in pursuing the matter to the point where top Democrats are being indicted. The purpose of pressing an investigation, after all, was probably just to get Dick Cheney's scalp, and perhaps that of a few others of the hated Republicans. If Democratic scalps are going to also be forfeit then, well, let's just forget the whole matter and let bygones be bygones.

When it finally dawns on the Democrats what a Pandora's Box they've opened, I think they'll quickly turn their attention to other matters and let the torture business die from lack of oxygen. If I'm right then we can expect lots of talk in the weeks ahead about looking forward, not backward, etc., etc.

RLC

Louts

Over the last two weeks two conservative speakers were invited to appear on the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill. At both events the totalitarian enemies of the free exchange of ideas tried to shut the lectures down. The first week they were successful, the second they weren't. A report by Jay Schalin at The American Thinker explains why there was a difference in outcomes. Along the way Schalin gives us a glimpse of the ugly underside of the tactics employed by the American Left.

One thing that's plain, whatever else can be said about Lefties they're not lovers of freedom and other principles upon which this country was founded. People who do not let other points of view be heard are implicitly acknowledging that they have no case and that the only way they can hope to prevail is by stifling and suppressing the opposition. They can't hope to win a debate so they must prevent people from hearing the other side.

This is precisely the rationale of the Darwinist lobby whose mission it is to keep Intelligent Design out of schools so that students cannot hear the case against naturalistic evolution. It's also a tactic used by some on the Right who should know better. Conservative talk radio hosts like Sean Hannity are consistently rude to callers who disagree with them and the better the caller's argument the more Hannity interrupts in order to prevent the listening audience from hearing a case that might make sense to them.

No one, however, is less tolerant of contrary views, especially in public fora, as is the Left. Not even Sean Hannity would deny students the right to listen to a presentation by someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The Left's systematic suppression of views contrary to their own is not only rude, loutish and unjust, it's a tacit admission of intellectual impotence and impoverishment.

RLC

Raining Men

We've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in light of our post earlier this week on the Demographics of Depression: China is facing some very serious problems even as it emerges as one of the world's powerhouse economies and militaries. The problems are caused by their peculiar demographic circumstances:

While China may become the largest economy on the planet in the next few generations, it will also suffer from some catastrophic demographic problems. To control population growth over the last four decades, most couples are restricted to only one child. This has been widely enforced, to the point where the average number of children per couple has been 1.7.. But many of those couples aborted a child if it is a female, because much more importance is attached to having a male heir. Thus there are 30 million more males than females, and the number is growing. These surplus males are coming of age, and the competition for wives is causing problems. Women are taking advantage of their scarcity, but men are also going to neighboring countries to buy, or even kidnap, young women to be wives. This is causing ill will with neighbors.

The biggest problem, though, is the growing shortage of workers. As the population ages, all those one child families means there will be more elderly than the economy can effectively support. Currently there are 13 working age Chinese for every retiree. In 40 years, there will only be two for each retiree. At that point, retirees will comprise 30 percent of the population (versus 12 percent now.) Traditionally, children cared for their parents in multi-generation households. That model is dying out, and China is faced with huge pension cost increases at the same time they expect their economy to be the mightiest on the planet. But at that point, the largest single government expense will be the care of the elderly, and this will impose crushing taxes on those of working age. Many working age Chinese are worried about this, for there is no easy solution in sight.

A culture can accommodate a shortage of men by reverting to polygamy, but polyandry is not a viable solution for any society. So what does a dictatorial regime, flush with a strong industrial base, and burdened with a huge surplus of young, fighting age males, do? I'm sure that question is not far from the minds of all of China's neighbors.

RLC

Pre-Graduation Reading List

Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett once put the following question to 325 selected scholars and intellectuals: What books should every high school student have read by the time he/she graduates?

Thirty works were mentioned most frequently. Mr. Bennett commented that any 10 of them "would compare favorably to what is read in many schools," and added that he himself had not read all 30 on the list.

Not surprisingly, no book published in the last 30 years made the list.

Shakespeare's plays, especially Macbeth and Hamlet, were the only works listed by a majority of the participants - 71 percent.

Fifty percent cited such documents of United States history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Next came Huckleberry Finn, the Bible and the following works of literature, philosophy and politics:

• Homer's Odyssey and Iliad.
• Dickens's Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.
• Plato's Republic.
• John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
• Sophocles' Oedipus.
• Melville's Moby Dick.
• Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Thoreau's Walden.
• The poems of Robert Frost.
• Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby.
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
• Marx's Communist Manifesto.
• Aristotle's Politics.
• The poems of Emily Dickinson.
• Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
• The novels of William Faulkner.
• J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
• De Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
• The essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• Machiavelli's Prince.
• Milton's Paradise Lost.
• Tolstoy's War and Peace.
• Virgil's Aeneid.

I don't know many of these you read before you graduated (if you're a graduate) or have read since, but I guess I do know what should be on my reading list this summer - lots of poetry and lots of Faulkner.

RLC

Bleak Conclusion

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct discussion on the topic of the possibility ethics without God. I've edited his argument slightly:

In an earlier post I lamented the apparent extinction of what I called "Nietzsche atheists," by which I meant atheists with the courage and honesty to accept the bleak conclusions logically compelled by their premises. Some of our atheist friends seemed to not know what bleak conclusions I was referring to. Here is a comment that sums it up nicely. This post is adapted from a comment to that earlier post.

Make two assumptions:

(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.

(2) One can't infer an "ought" from an "is" [i.e. because things are a certain way doesn't mean that they ought to be that way].

Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.

Given our second assumption, there is nothing in the natural world from which we can infer an "ought." And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there's nothing in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action.

Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it's not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action. This ..... [all simply conforms] to standard principles and rules of logic and we've started out with assumptions that atheists have conceded.

And yet we reach the [following] absurd conclusion:

...therefore, for any action you care to pick, it's permissible to perform that action.

If you'd like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan "if atheism is true, all things are permitted." For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don't like this consequence of their worldview, but they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.

So here's the predicament that the atheist finds him or herself in:

If there is no God then there are no morally impermissible acts. But most atheists want to argue that there are morally impermissible acts, thus they are driven to the conclusion by modus tollens that there is a God.

To avoid this conclusion they must either agree that there are no morally impermissible acts and stop irritating the rest of us by indulging their silly penchant for passing baseless moral judgments or they need to show how, in the absence of a transcendent moral authority, there can still be something which is morally impermissible.

Unfortunately for atheists' self-image as paragons of rationality, few of them are willing to do the first and none of them is able to do the second.

RLC

Coming Soon to a Community Near You

So you say you want government to take over your health care? The maddening inefficiencies and inadequacies of government health care systems in Europe have been widely publicized, but it's good for us to periodically be reminded of what we're buying into if we go along with proposals to nationalize medical care in this country. Consider, then, this story from the UK Daily Mail Online:

A three-year-old girl waiting for vital heart surgery has had her operation cancelled three times in as many weeks because of a shortage of hospital beds.

Ella Cotterell was due to have an operation to widen her aorta artery in her heart on Monday at Bristol Children's Hospital, but her surgery was cancelled 48 hours before because all 15 beds in the intensive care unit were full.

Ella, of Bradley Stoke, Bristol, had open heart surgery when she was just nine days old and suffered a stroke at 18 months.

Her parents Ian Cotterell, 44, and Rachel Davis, 40, were told in October that she would need the operation within 12 to 18 months.

Her mother Rachel Davis said today she was devastated when the hospital told her the surgery would be cancelled because there were not enough beds. 'My husband and I were in tears,' she said.

Ms Davis, who works part time as an accident and emergency nurse at Bristol's Frenchay Hospital, called on the Government to plough more money into the NHS before a child died on the waiting list.

'This is a national problem, there are not enough resources in the NHS and it is about prioritising.

'Children who need routine grommet operations are seen quickly yet the children who need life-saving surgery are waiting because there are not enough intensive care beds and staff.

'It is a matter of time before a child dies on the waiting list and I don't want it to be Ella.

'If that does happen the Government will have blood on their hands.'

There've been reports that people who need MRIs in Europe must sometimes wait for months to have the procedure done because there aren't enough MRIs or technicians to meet the demand. This is typical in a government run system because, unlike a free market, government is not responsive to customer demand and in a nationalized system there's no profit incentive to be responsive. Take away profit and competition and what you get are too few beds and delays that could last months or years, yet government-run health care is what a lot of people are hoping to soon have in this country.

RLC

Wrestling with Torture

Damon Linker at The New Republic, unlike so many journalistic commentators on both Left and Right, resists the easy answers and actually wrestles seriously with the ethical questions involved in the use of torture. He writes:

I've pondered for years what to say about the Bush administration's use of torture in the years after 9/11. So far I've remained quiet about the issue because I'm so uneasy about it -- not just about what the United States has done, but also about the reactions of nearly everyone who has commented on it. On one side, the right mocks those concerned with our actions in that insufferably smug, proudly parochial tone that has marked nearly all conservative commentary about foreign affairs for the past seven years. As far as the right is concerned, we haven't tortured anyone, even though the definition of torture accepted by liberal-democratic nations around the globe (including the United States until the day before yesterday) clearly tells us that we did.

Meanwhile, on the other side, critics (often but not always on the left) work themselves into an indignant rage. I share much of their disgust as well as the conviction that torture rarely works as a means of procuring information. At the same time, I find much of their fury -- like their tendency to describe senior members of the Bush administration as war criminals -- much too easy. The United States did not engage in torture because the Vice-President's office and the Justice Department under Bush were populated by sadistic would-be totalitarians. On the contrary, we engaged in torture for reasons deeply rooted in the troubling nature of politics itself.

In the end, the statesman needs to rely on his judgment - on what Aristotle called practical wisdom and President Bush ... called his "gut" - in making the decision about whether and when and for how long and in what ways to deviate from what is normally right in order to "preserve the mere existence or independence of society" against its mortal enemies.

We all know what President Bush and his advisors decided. In the wake of 9/11, they (along with writers such as Charles Krauthammer) judged militant Islam to be an existential threat to the United States. And an existential threat is perhaps the clearest example of a case in which normal justice has to give way to the preservation of the common good at all costs. If we were truly confronting an existential threat -- a perpetual undetected ticking time bomb -- then it would have been immoral for those responsible for defending the common good of the United States not to torture a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative such as Abu Zubaydah in order to extract every last bit of information from him. (Even if torture rarely works, the fact that it sometimes does would be quite enough to justify its use in a genuinely dire situation.) Judging the justice of the Bush administration's policies on torture thus requires answering a single (extremely difficult) question: Was the administration right to believe that militant Islam posed (and perhaps still poses) an existential threat to the United States? If the answer is yes, then its policies may very well have been justified and even demanded by the circumstances. If the answer is no, then its leading officials may well have been guilty of bending or breaking the law for no good reason -- most likely out of a combination of ignorance, fear, and paranoia.

So what's the answer?

Linker confesses that he doesn't know the answer to his question. This is an honest and well-thought out essay by a liberal writer, and I agree with much of what he says. I agree, for instance, with the basic point of his piece that torture is almost always a moral crime, but that it's not absolutely wrong. There are circumstances under which it would not only be right, but would, in fact, be a moral duty, and to decline that duty would itself be morally criminal.

One thing he states about which I have my doubts, though, is his claim that torture rarely works. It may have worked more often than some opponents think and much to our good fortune at that if this article by Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post is correct:

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently false.

The proof is in the memos Obama made public -- in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media. Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that "the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." The memo continues: "Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, 'Soon you will find out.' " Once the techniques were applied, "interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates."

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast.

Both of these columns should be read by anyone serious about grasping the moral difficulties surrounding the issue of torture and the arguments that have been flying around in the wake of the recent release of the Bush administration memos.

RLC

Unintended Consequences

Prior to the election some well-intentioned folk, like Sojourners editor Jim Wallis, argued that Obama's policies would be better for the poor than would his opponent's, and that therefore the Illinois senator merited the vote of all who care about the underprivileged and destitute. Well, I wonder what Mr. Wallis thinks now after the release of a World Bank report prepared for the G20 summit. First Things (subscription only) reports:

Given the worries expressed in the background paper the World Bank prepared for the March meeting of the G20 finance ministers, there is a plausible case to be made that the huge expansion of the U.S. government is about to suck the globe dry of available credit, leaving the third world stalled for years in the murderous effects of the current financial situation. "Preliminary analysis shows that...infant deaths in developing countries may be 200,000 to 400,000 per year higher on average between 2010 and ...2015 than they would have been in the absence of the crisis," the World Bank reported. "Unless reversed, this corresponds to a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million excess deaths during the period."

Because of the need to borrow to pay the massive debt into which President Obama and Congress have plunged us, there will be very little money available for third world borrowers who need money to buy necessities like food and medicine for their people, and, as usual, the children of those countries will bear the brunt of the financial famine.

There's an irony in this tragedy. People like Wallis made the argument during the campaign that Obama's economic policies would benefit the poor and thus reduce the felt need among poor women for abortions. Obama would thus do more, substantively speaking, to reduce the incidence of abortion than would John McCain who could be expected to only appoint Supreme Court Justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade. This seemed like a peculiar argument at the time, but I wonder what Wallis thinks of it now that those very policies that he was so enthusiastic about may result in the deaths of almost three million born children in a span of only five years.

RLC

The Demographics of Depression

The current issue of First Things (not yet available online) features a most interesting article by new associate editor David Goldman on the current economic crisis. While a lot of blame for our woes is rightly being placed on greedy Wall Streeters and corrupt and/or incompetent politicians Goldman casts his eye elsewhere. He makes a compelling case that our fundamental problem is demographic and that it's not going to be solved by the kinds of remedies Washington is prescribing.

The root of the problem, he notes, is the housing crisis. People borrow money to buy homes. This fuels the economy because the construction, purchase, and maintenance of houses create a multitude of jobs.

Two-parent families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. They buy bigger, more expensive homes and spend more on their maintenance. Single-parent families tend to be poorer and often live in apartments or smaller houses. Thus, buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children, but this cohort is in serious decline in the Western world, including the U.S.

Since 1970 our population has risen from 200 to 300 million, but the number of two-parent families is the same as it was in the early 70's - 25 million - while the number of one-parent families with children has tripled.

In 1960 dependent children made up half the population, but today they're only 30%. Meanwhile, the dependent elderly have gone from 15% of the population in 1960 to 30% today. As a result we are getting poorer. There are fewer couples with children to borrow and spend on housing and more and more elderly whose savings are being eaten up by the stock market slide.

According to Goldman, by 2025 households with children will decrease from half of all households to less than a quarter. There will be fewer people with children which means a lower demand for housing. Large lot single-family homes will slump from 56 million today to 34 million by 2025, a 40% reduction.

With a diminished demand for housing the boomers' savings will be sitting in the banks collecting very little interest because no one will be borrowing. The economy will turn to mush. Goldman says that we'll be poorer than we are now for at least a generation. Workers on the tail of the baby boom will work five to ten years longer before retiring and they'll retire with less income than they had planned. Young people will work for less money at duller jobs than did their parents and grandparents.

He argues that we must do what we can to encourage family growth and offers several recommendations toward this end:

• Cut taxes on families (Obama's Cap and Trade would be devastating since it would raise the cost of energy on families which is the equivalent of imposing a tax. His spending policies have already put future generations in debt to the tune of about $30,000 per person before they've even been born).
• Shift part of the Social Security burden to the childless by reducing payroll taxes (FICA) on those who have raised children (Those who have raised children have done their part to create the next generation. Those who haven't, haven't. Those, Goldman says, who have made the effort and paid the cost of raising children are seeing their savings erode because too many others have chosen not to. Those who avoid the effort and cost of children should be asked to pay more to fund social security than those who have raised them.)
• Make child-related expenses deductible.
• Change immigration laws to let in more highly skilled, productive individuals and fewer poor, uneducated immigrants. What we need right now are people who will generate wealth, not people who will demand services paid for by the already strapped public.

There's much else that Goldman offers in this essay that's worth reading. I would urge anyone, especially those between the ages of 18 and 40, to visit their local library, or any place that sells magazines, and read the entire article.

RLC

The UnChurchill

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's finest, most prescient moments:

Senator Reid hasn't had much to say about the war lately, for which we can be thankful. We can also be grateful that the people responsible for making the strategic decisions about the conflict in Iraq didn't pay any attention to him two years ago.

RLC

Romancing the Jihadis

Clifford May remarks on the odd yet fond attraction some Western Leftists have for Islamic jihadists:

Ask those on the Left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning Left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the Left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. The author Paul Berman, unambiguously and unashamedly a man of the Left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications such as The New Republic have not been apologists for radical jihadists.

But The Nation has been soft on Islamism for decades. Back in 1979, editorial-board member Richard Falk welcomed the Iranian revolution, saying it "may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country." Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, longtime Nation contributor Robert Fisk complained that "terrorism" is a "racist" term.

It is no exaggeration to call groups such as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with both Islamists and the Stalinist regime in North Korea - which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Ch�vez, the Bolivarian-socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran's ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy.

In a new book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror, Jamie Glazov takes a hard look at this unholy alliance. A historian by training, Glazov is the son of dissidents who fled the Soviet Union only to find that, on American campuses, they were not welcomed by the liberal/Left lumpen professoriate.

Glazov's book indicts artists and intellectuals of the Left - e.g. George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Susan Sontag - for having "venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming Americans and even the victims for their crimes."

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left spent several years wandering in the wilderness. Many of them, Glazov suggests, looked upon the terrorist attacks of 9/11 less as an atrocity than as an opportunity to revive a moribund revolutionary movement.

Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Lynne Stewart, and Stanley Cohen are among the luminaries of the Left Glazov accuses of having found common ground with Islamists.

Glazov concludes that the Left's "romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America's foes. . . . The Left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow it - and must be supported." On that basis, militant Islamism is regarded as a "valiant form of 'resistance' against American imperialism and oppression."

If such values as equality, tolerance, and human rights are crushed in the process, that's a price many on the Left are willing to pay. Those on the Left who disagree should perhaps speak up more loudly and more often.

There's more to May's essay at the link, but I might mention that another value of the Left that makes their alliance with Islamists even more bizarre is religious freedom. The Left is predominately secular and atheistic and they prize the freedom to remain that way. Surely they must realize, though, that if the Islamists were ever successful in toppling a Western country, the atheists would be the first to be relieved of their heads. Or, being hard Leftists, maybe they don't realize it.

RLC

Ambush

C. J. Chivers describes in the New York Times an army ambush of some 26 Taliban in Afghanistan:

Only the lead insurgents were disciplined as they walked along the ridge. They moved carefully, with weapons ready and at least five yards between each man, the soldiers who surprised them said.

Behind them, a knot of Taliban fighters walked in a denser group, some with rifles slung on their shoulders - "pretty much exactly the way we tell soldiers not to do it," said Specialist Robert Soto, the radio operator for the American patrol.

If these insurgents came close enough, the soldiers knew, the patrol could kill them in a batch.

Fight by fight, the infantryman's war in Afghanistan is often waged on the Taliban's terms. Insurgents ambush convoys and patrols from high ridges or long ranges and slip away as the Americans, weighed down by equipment, return fire and call for air and artillery support. Last week a patrol from the First Infantry Division reversed the routine.

Go to the article to read Chivers' description of the fight. The quick summary is that it was a bad night for the Taliban.

RLC

More 'Redistribution'

Here's a piece by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner in economics, Ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank, Professor of Columbia University, etc., etc. Among other things, Stiglitz says:

The people who designed the [bailout] plans are "either in the pocket of the banks or they're incompetent."

Perhaps what I find most alarming is that the bad news is no longer coming from only those once considered to be "fringe". Now the news is coming from notable scholars and well-known experts in economics and finance. And it's coming rather frequently.

Dr. Doom

Whenever I see something from Nouriel Roubini, I check it out for several reasons; he's rather brilliant, he's a professor of economics at the Stern Business School at New York University and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, and his background is extremely impressive.

But, perhaps most of all, his ability to foresee the likely outcome of all things economic has been uncanny for at least the last couple of years. Given that he was warning of the economic circumstances we find ourselves in today several years ago, it's no wonder he has earned the nick-name "Dr. Doom", and rightly so.

Having said that, I don't agree with all of what he says regarding his prescription to fix our economic problems because I gather he's of the Keynesian School of Economics but if not, then perhaps he's simply speaking from a perspective that our government will be able to understand. In other words, I believe the Keynesian philosophy of economics is flawed but it's the current economic philosophy our government embraces*. And Roubini speaks in terms they understand.

At any rate, Roubini is refreshing because he tells it like he sees it and he doesn't seem to care if anyone's offended. Here is a recent article from Roubini that shows he doesn't have favorites and, perhaps what I find most encouraging is, he puts much of the responsibility for the present dilemma squarely where it belongs. Advocating that those who are responsible take responsibility is certainly not politically correct these days but I never said Roubini cared about such silliness.

Check out some of his other articles here.

* Note that Keynes's idea's became less influential in the 1970s, after attacks from Milton Friedman and other economists who were less optimistic than Keynes about the potential for interventionist government policy to complement the free market. But in 2008, high level policy makers in the world's modern economies have shown a renewed interest in implementing economic solutions in accordance with the recommendations of Keynesian economics - such as the fiscal stimulus and far-reaching government intervention behind the plans of President Barack Obama and other global leaders to rescue the economy.

Editor's note: So we would solve our current economic crisis that has been caused by excessive borrowing and spending by more borrowing and spending??? If they are wrong, all of this printing of money and spending will end very, very badly.

Murray Rothbard considered Keynes an intellectual lightweight, fixated on simple short-term solutions to complex long-term problems, obsessed with his own ego and influence, and one of the most destructive statist intellectuals of the 20th century.

For a better treatment on John Maynard Keynes, see this link.

Before the Cock Crows Thrice

By now you've probably heard that our President spoke recently at Georgetown - a Catholic university, need I remind you - but not before insisting that the Latin letters IHS on the pediment behind the podium be covered up. The President evidently wished not to give offense to any viewers of the speech who might suffer an attack of the vapors at the sight of the Latin symbol of Christ, which makes me wonder whether the next time he visits a mosque if he'll insist that any symbols of Islam be concealed.

James Schall at The Catholic Thing has similar musings:

What interests me here is this: If this president speaks at a Jewish Synagogue, or a Baptist church, or the Crystal Cathedral, or the Muslim Mosque on Massachusetts Avenue, the Ravens Stadium, the George Washington University, the headquarters of Planned Parenthood, or the hall of the local Atheist Society, will the same policy be followed? Will all signs of what the place actually is and stands for be covered over? If so, it represents equitable treatment, but is it wise? Is the president never to appear in any venue with obvious particular commitments, and why choose religious and not secular signs? Should, say, a university seal be exempted, but a crucifix not?

Will presidents be able to appear anywhere outside government buildings if the rules are really equally applied to both religious and secular? And this raises a real question: Is it American? George Washington once talked before our New North Hall, so did President Clinton. I guess a porch does not need much cover-up. But is the American understanding of state and religion designed to hide any religious or cultural sign whatsoever? If a president is buried at a local church, as President Woodrow Wilson is, must the funeral be covered over so that no signs of a church are seen?

This country does not hide its religious presence. If a president does not want to speak in a given place, fine. Don't ask. But if he does, it should not be on condition of the place's ceasing to present what it historically is.

I don't know which is more disgraceful, that the White House insisted that the Christian symbol be covered up or that a putatively Catholic university acquiesced to the demand. Georgetown's willingness to go along with this repudiation of their identity recalls to mind the story of Peter who, when challenged by the crowd to own up to his friendship with Jesus, chose instead to deny that friendship. It's a story of shame, betrayal and cowardice not unlike the events at Georgetown.

The cock is crowing for Georgetown just as it did for Peter.

At the above link Mary Eberstadt follows Schall's post with an amusing letter to the Vatican from the White house expressing its concerns about Mr. Obama's upcoming visit. It's a hoot.

RLC

Financial Oligarchs

Bill caught this outstanding article in The Atlantic, authored by former IMF bigwig Simon Johnson, and passed it on to ruin our day.

Here's The Atlantic's lede:

The [economic] crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

The difficulty is that the people who control the financial empire are so inextricably intertwined with our political class that it's almost impossible to separate them.

The article's a little lengthy, but it's very enlightening. Unfortunately, by the time you're finished reading it you'll probably have become a Marxist.

RLC