Confusion and Paradox

The Gallup organization has found something very puzzling:

According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states--including President Obama's home state of Illinois--even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.

"In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4," said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.

What are we to conclude from this paradox? Perhaps people either don't understand what it means to be conservative/liberal or they don't understand what it means to be Republican/Democrat. In any case, I think it shows that any politician who thinks that because he won an election he has a mandate to implement an ideological agenda is making a big mistake. Chances are, people voted for him because he was taller or better looking or more charming or a better speaker than his opponent or maybe because their friends were voting for the guy. I'm guessing, of course, but I doubt that very many people, even among those who take the trouble to vote, really have any idea who a candidate is or what he's going to do once elected.

That may be why, when President Obama sought to implement pretty much what he promised in the campaign that he'd do, he was reportedly taken by surprise at the public reaction and resistance. He thought people voted for him to do what he's doing, but many people voted for him for reasons completely unrelated to policy.

It's very discouraging.

RLC

Re: The Heavens Declare

Mike writes regarding yesterday's post titled The Heavens Declare to share with us a quote from C.S. Lewis:

It's hard to imagine a more fitting response to the writer of the article you posted on Hubble Telescope than the words of C.S. Lewis in Miracles:

"If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, then small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain...

To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the universe would be simply unintelligible. It is therefore from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. Men of sensibility look upon the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not...For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them."

Good stuff.

RLC

Ruse on the New Atheists

Philosopher Michael Ruse takes the "New Atheists" to the woodshed and gives them a good thrashing in a short essay at Belief.Net. Ruse is himself an atheist but he holds the quaint idea that atheists and believers can still respect each other and even like each other even as they disagree with each other's ideas. He also argues that the new atheists are hurting the cause of science in America. Here are a couple of paragraphs to give you the gist:

Let me say that I believe the new atheists do the side of science a grave disservice. I will defend to the death the right of them to say what they do - as one who is English-born one of the things I admire most about the USA is the First Amendment. But I think first that these people do a disservice to scholarship. Their treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant. (He was just this when, thirty years ago, Mary Midgeley went after the selfish gene concept without the slightest knowledge of genetics.) Conversely, I am indignant at the poor quality of the argumentation in Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and all of the others in that group.

Secondly, I think that the new atheists are doing terrible political damage to the cause of Creationism fighting. Americans are religious people. You may not like this fact. But they are. Not all are fanatics. Survey after survey shows that most American Christians (and Jews and others) fall in the middle on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as well as on science. They want to be science-friendly, although it is certainly true that many have been seduced by the Creationists. We evolutionists have got to speak to these people. We have got to show them that Darwinism is their friend not their enemy. We have got to get them onside when it comes to science in the classroom. And criticizing good men like Francis Collins, accusing them of fanaticism, is just not going to do the job. Nor is criticizing everyone, like me, who wants to build a bridge to believers - not accepting the beliefs, but willing to respect someone who does have them....

Most importantly, the new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of the schools. The First Amendment does not ban the teaching of bad science in publicly funded schools. It bans the teaching of religion. That is why it is crucial to argue that Creationism, including its side kick IDT, is religion and not just bad science. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If teaching "God exists" is teaching religion - and it is - then why is teaching "God does not exist" not teaching religion? Obviously it is teaching religion. But if science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment. Perhaps indeed teaching Darwinism is implicitly teaching atheism. This is the claim of the new atheists. If this is so, then we shall have to live with it and rethink our strategy about Creationism and the schools. The point is however that the new atheists have lamentably failed to prove their point, and excoriating people like me who show the failure is (again) not very helpful.

....I have written elsewhere that The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.

I think Ruse is wrong about Intelligent Design, of course, but he's a good man, a lapsed Quaker who still retains much that is admirable about the Quaker people, and I appreciate and admire his tone and openness.

RLC

We're Right Because You're an Idiot

It's getting tiresome hearing political hit-men like Paul Begala and others mocking Sarah Palin for suggesting on her website that the Democrats' health reform proposals would include "death panels" that would decide whether people suffering from severe disabilities, terminal illness, or advanced age would be eligible for major medical care.

Yesterday morning our Sunday paper carried a piece by a staff columnist calling people who believed such things "bat-guano insane," "charlatans," "nuts," and "lunatics." According to this writer the idea of death panels is "idiocy," and Sarah Palin is suffering from a "paranoid delusion rattling around in her empty skull." Of course, the only counter he offered to Palin's claim, when he wasn't shooting off personal insults like a fireworks finale, was to cite a minor error of fact by a misinformed writer at Investor's Business Daily and one or two fuzzy questions and accusations that emerged among the many town hall meetings held over the last couple of weeks. In other words, our columnist denied vehemently and viciously that the proposed legislation really provided for Palin's "death panels," but he never gave his readers any reason to believe that it didn't.

Maybe this was because the fear that the legislation would allow for such panels is grounded not in paranoia but in the President's own words. In an interview last April with the New York Times the President was talking about the story of his terminally ill grandmother who had hip replacement surgery so that she would not be bed-ridden for the last year of her life. Here's what he said:

PRESIDENT: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

NYT: So how do you - how do we deal with it?

PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

As of last April the President certainly seemed to be talking about some sort of group (Okay. He didn't use the words "death panel") which would make the kind of decisions that Ms Palin was concerned about. Why is it "bat-guano insane" to think that the President meant what he said?

Other commentators, no friends of Sarah Palin in particular or conservatives in general, have come to the same conclusion:

Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast, Charles Lane, editor of The Washington Post, and columnist Eugene Robinson at the WaPo have all held their noses and acknowledged that Palin was right. Are they also insane?

Indeed, the writers of the bill were so concerned that the language of the legislation was compatible with Palin's interpretation that they decided to strike it from the original bill. Were they crazy?

It would be helpful in this very important matter if the defenders of the current health reform legislation would just answer the many incisive questions that are being asked about it and address the problems being raised by it. It's harder than just calling them names, it requires more effort, but it'd also be a lot more instructive and persuasive.

RLC

The Heavens Declare

Bradlaugh at Secular Right posts this marvelous video based on the Hubble Deep Field photo, but he draws from it an odd conclusion:

He writes:

I have heard Heather (MacDonald) say that she has never been afflicted with any musings about the significance of human consciousness, or the place of humanity in the universe. (I hope I am not misquoting her.) I can't say the same. Images like this fill me with wonder, with something quite close to terror, and with something considerably closer to despair.

They also of course make the notion of a loving god with a particular interest in humanity, seem pretty darn ridiculous.

Just how does the fact that the universe is huge make the idea of a personal God who cares about us ridiculous? Is God's concern for humanity somehow contingent upon the size of the universe? Does your love for your children depend on the size of your house?

Cosmologists have demonstrated that in order for life to appear anywhere in the universe - given that the universe began in a big bang - the universe has to be about as old as it is and thus as big as it is (since it's been expanding since its origin).

It also has to have about the precise amount of mass/energy that it does, in fact, contain. More or less matter and the universe would have either collapsed or blown itself apart long ago.

In other words, if God created the universe as a home for humans, and did so along the lines that modern cosmology has elucidated, then in order for us to exist on this tiny speck, everything else must be almost exactly as it is to a breathtakingly precise order of magnitude. In order to create us God had to create the whole universe, all 100 billion galaxies. They are there so that we can be here.

Like Bradlaugh, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer size of the world, but unlike him I feel the opposite of terror and despair. The thought that God cares so much for us that, like a man who lavishes everything He can upon His beloved, He fills the whole of space with marvels beyond our imagining fills me with a sense of confidence and awe.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Wind Turbine Mortality

As the Obama administration pushes for clean energy one possible source would be wind farms with dozens or even hundreds of wind turbines. These might be thought to be environmentally friendly, although they're aesthetic eyesores, since they don't have any perceptible impact on the land and don't generate any pollution. They do have an important downside, though, as this article from the American Bird Conservancy explains:

Recent U.S. studies indicate that bird mortality at wind turbine projects varies from less than one bird/turbine/year to as high as 7.5 birds/per turbine/year. This means that between 10,000 and 40,000 birds may be killed each year at wind farms across the country - about 80% of which are songbirds, and 10% may be birds of prey. While not a large figure, local or regional impacts may be significant, and the rate of increase in turbine construction has conservationists concerned that new generators be built to standards that minimize the potential for bird kills. Bats are also subject to high mortality at wind farms frequently at considerably higher rates than birds.

The increasing number of proposals for new projects has stimulated discussion on the need for proper siting, operation, and monitoring guidelines or regulations to prevent, or at least keep to a minimum, avian and bat mortality.

Before construction of new wind farms, detailed studies should be conducted to assess the potential impact on birds, bats, and other wildlife. Sites known to be used by birds and bats listed under the Endangered Species Act should be avoided if the construction and operation of wind plants might adversely affect these species, as should locating turbines in known local bird migration pathways, in areas where birds are highly concentrated, or in areas or landscape features known to attract large numbers of raptors.

So I wonder if the following isn't a plausible scenario. President Obama gets cap and trade and wipes out the coal industry as he admitted his policy would do (see here). Entrepreneuers then try to get into the wind farm business, but they find that because of the effect of turbines on wildlife few of their siting proposals can pass EPA muster. So now we have no coal generated electricity and no wind generated electricity. Then what? Relax EPA standards? Build nuclear plants? Fat chance of that as long as the Democrats control the approval process.

What's most likely, it seems to me, is that electricity will get rationed just like medical care. You'll only be able to use it during certain hours of the day and in certain amounts. Kiss that air-conditioner good-bye, hope and change are cool enough all by themselves.

RLC

Interesting Disparity

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a study of scientists and their religious beliefs. Some of the results were expected and some were a bit surprising.

Whereas most Americans (83%) profess a belief in God, just a third (33%) of scientists say they hold such a belief. There's nothing unexpected there since those figures have been around for a while. What was a surprise, though, was the finding that younger scientists are substantially more likely than their older counterparts to say they believe in God. Forty two percent of scientists (or students studying to be scientists) between the ages of 18 and 34 claim to be theists, but only 28% of those over 65 make that claim.

I don't know what this portends for the future of theistic belief among the nation's scholars, but I would like to see if these numbers are similar across other disciplines. Assuming these survey results accurately reflect the state of theistic belief among contemporary scientists, I'd also like to know what's happening in the culture that's responsible for the disparity between the younger generation of scientists and their elders. Any ideas?

RLC

Does She Or Doesn't She?

Does Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appreciate disrupters or does she not? I guess it all depends on who's doing the disrupting (via Hot Air):

Since Speaker Pelosi also seemed shocked that someone was sporting a swastika at one recent town meeting, although this was never confirmed, I'll bet she was apoplectic at the demonstrations against President Bush that took place throughout his presidency in her very own district. I seem to remember, in fact, her fiery speeches denouncing the protestors whose photos appear here. I think I recall her outrage that people in her district would resort to such despicable tactics and ugly rhetoric. Or maybe I'm just hallucinating from being up too late and awake too long.

RLC

Why No Supermarkets?

An article at CNN raises disturbing questions. The piece addresses the predicament those who live in Detroit face as unemployment in the state continues to rise and fewer families have the money to buy food. It goes on to talk about how social agencies and volunteers from churches and parachurch organizations are working to meet the need (I didn't see any mention of the help being offered by the local secular humanist society, but, I hasten to add, that doesn't mean they're not doing anything.).

Anyway, the disturbing part was this paragraph:

"In this recession-racked town, the lack of food is a serious problem. It's a theme that comes up again and again in conversations in Detroit. There isn't a single major chain supermarket in the city, forcing residents to buy food from corner stores. Often less healthy and more expensive food."

Now why is that? Why would supermarket chains not exploit a market niche that they exploit in every other city and suburb in the nation? I'm sure someone will say that it must be racism, but of course that's absurd. Why Detroit and not Chicago? Or is the lack of supermarkets in cities more widespread than the article indicates?

Whatever the case, the urban poor are caught in a vicious cycle. They are poor, sometimes, because they can't find jobs. Because they're impoverished their communities are subject to all the dysfunctions often associated with poverty, including lousy education, crime, and feral fatherhood. Because their communities are ridden with crime and populated by uneducated, unskilled workers, businesses don't want to operate there. Because businesses don't locate in poor neighborhoods, the residents can't find employment and thus are poor.

What's the solution? The strongest predictor that a person will have weak education, turn to crime, and be economically poor is not having a father. When urban communities realize that fatherlessness is a blight on their neighborhoods and a curse upon their children perhaps pressure will mount on women to hold off having children until they're married and men will realize that if they want what women can give they have to be committed to a monogamous relationship. Until that day comes we'll not solve the problem of poverty in America no matter how much the government redistributes the nation's wealth.

RLC

New National Park

Some people think I never say anything nice about liberalism, but that's not true. I might not be able to remember when the last time was that I said anything nice about it, but I'm sure I did. One area, for instance, in which I think liberalism has it all over conservatism (although it really shouldn't be this way), is, ironically enough, the matter of conservation. I applaud President Clinton for preserving vast tracts of the southwest, President Bush for preserving vast tracts of ocean habitat, and now Senator Carper and Vice-President Biden for working to preserve Delaware's historical and natural heritage in a new National Park:

It's been a long time since tiny Delaware distinguished itself as it did way back in 1787 when state fathers huddling at Dover's Golden Fleece Tavern became the first to ratify the Constitution. Now, more than two centuries later, Delaware is back as the state of firsts. And not just because Joe Biden is the first vice president from Delaware. The mid-Atlantic coastal state could finally get its first national park, a goal championed by Biden in the 1990s. And he's now in a position to make sure it happens.

Delaware doesn't have what most national parks do-vast acreage. But at the suggestion of First State citizens, Interior is looking at a unique model that would connect historical and cultural landmarks in a collection of spoke and hub patterns, like a bike. "A hub with spokes leading to maybe the Golden Fleece Tavern where the Constitution was first debated and ratified in 1787," suggests Senator Tom Carper. "Or the spokes could lead to stops on the Underground Railroad."

Legislation is required, but with the support of Biden and [Secretary of the Interior] Salazar, says Carper, "I like our chances."

Details of the Park's unique design can be read here. Kudos to both Joe Biden and Tom Carper for their contribution to this effort. Why is it that more conservatives aren't interested in conserving our natural and historical treasures?

RLC

Materialism Isn't Science

There's a piece, in the LA Times, written by atheists, taking their fellow atheists to task for trying so strenuously to persuade people that science and religious belief are not only incompatible, but that science has shown religious belief to be empty:

This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution," as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins' new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America's anti-evolutionists. These religious adherents often view science itself as an assault on their faith and doggedly refuse to accept evolution because they fear it so utterly denies God that it will lead them, and their children, straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness. An in-your-face atheist touting evolution, like Dawkins, is probably the last messenger they'll heed.

Dawkins will, however, be championed by many scientists, especially the most secular -- those who were galvanized by "The God Delusion" and inspired by it to take a newly confrontational approach toward America's religious majority. They will help ensure Dawkins another literary success. It's certainly valuable to have the case for evolution articulated prominently and often, but what this unending polarization around evolution and religion does for the standing of science in the U.S. is a very different matter.

It often appears as though Dawkins and his followers -- often dubbed the New Atheists, though some object to the term -- want to change the country's science community in a lasting way. They'd have scientists and defenders of reason be far more confrontational and blunt: No more coddling the faithful, no tolerating nonscientific beliefs. Scientific institutions, in their view, ought to stop putting out politic PR about science and religion being compatible.

What people like Dawkins are doing is actually intellectually dishonest for at least two reasons. First, in The God Delusion Dawkins argues that the proposition God exists is a scientifically testable claim. If so, how can he now argue that propositions about ultimate reality are not scientific? Secondly, some of the "New Atheists" confuse people about what science is by conflating the practice of science with a metaphysical position held by many atheistic scientists called materialism.

Science is a search for truth that relies on testing theories about the physical world by observing how well those hypothetical explanations conform to the empirical evidence. As such, science, ironically perhaps, can provide us reasons for thinking that the universe is in fact the product of a transcendent mind, but no matter how much we learn about the cosmos, science will never be able to conclude that God does not, or even probably does not, exist. Once a scientist starts making claims like that he's no longer doing science, he's doing metaphysics.

Scientists, qua scientists, simply cannot say that there is no Creator or that miracles are impossible. On questions like these scientists must follow Wittgenstein's dictum that "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should be silent." Scientists assume in their day to day work that physical phenomena will have physical, natural, proximal causes just as everyone assumes that the events that occur in their everyday lives have causes that could, in principle, at least, be observed. This is called methodological or procedural materialism. It's simply the assumption that, in general, things in our experience can be expected to follow physical laws. This procedural assumption has nothing to do with whether God exists or whether metaphysical materialism is true.

Atheists, however, are metaphysical materialists. That is, they believe that matter is the fundamental reality and that nature is all there is (also called naturalism). There is no room in their worldview for a supernatural reality. Now both materialism and naturalism are incompatible with theism, so what people like Dawkins do, is conflate metaphysical materialism with methodological materialism so that the unwary reader doesn't realize that a bait and switch has occurred. In other words, they piggyback their metaphysical materialism onto science and argue that because science has shown that many phenomena have material proximal explanations that therefore there are no immaterial ultimate explanations. At this point he's no longer speaking as a scientist but as a philosopher, even though he's using his standing as a scientist to authorize his metaphysics.

It's a kind of shell game that they play, they know they're playing it, and it's fundamentally disingenuous.

RLC

Ugly Protests

This is just insane. Ed Schultz says on national television that he thinks conservative talk show hosts want to see Barack Obama shot. Why does he say such a horrible thing? Is it because conservatives believe he's destroying the country's economic foundations? For liberals like Schultz it is apparently nothing short of a hate crime to disagree with the President on policy. Schultz is far from alone. Nancy Pelosi calls dissenters Nazis and UnAmerican. Others have called them "mobs" and racists.

What short memories these people have. As Bill Sammon at Fox News reminds us nothing that any opponent of the Democrats' health care plans has said or done is anywhere near what the left did during the Bush years. Sammon refreshes our memories about some of what went on during the Bush presidency that neither the Democrats nor the media at the time deemed deserving of even a mention, let alone censure:

News outlets that are focusing on the incendiary rhetoric of conservatives outside President Obama's town hall meeting Tuesday ignored the incendiary rhetoric -- and even violence -- of liberals outside an appearance by former President George W. Bush in 2002.

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting "Bush is a terrorist!", the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush's assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

"BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE," read the placard, which had an X over the word "ALIVE."

Another poster showed Bush's face with the words: "F--- YOU, MOTHERF---ER!"

A third sign urged motorists to "HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH." A fourth declared: "CHRISTIAN FASCISM," with a swastika in place of the letter S in each word.

Although reporters from numerous national news organizations were traveling with Bush and witnessed the protest, none reported that protesters were shrieking at Republican donors epithets like "Slut!" "Whore!" and "Fascists!"

Frank Dulcich, president and CEO of Pacific Seafood Group, had a cup of liquid thrown into his face, and then was surrounded by a group of menacing protesters, including several who wore masks. Donald Tykeson, 75, who had multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair, was blocked by a thug who threatened him.

Protesters slashed the tires of several state patrol cruisers and leapt onto an occupied police car, slamming the hood and blocking the windshield with placards. A female police officer was knocked to the street by advancing protesters, badly injuring her wrist.

The angry protest grew so violent that the Secret Service was forced to take the highly unusual step of using a backup route for Bush's motorcade because the primary route had been compromised by protesters, one of whom pounded his fist on the president's moving limousine.

All the while, angry demonstrators brandished signs with incendiary rhetoric, such as "9/11 - YOU LET IT HAPPEN, SHRUB," and "BUSH: BASTARD CHILD OF THE SUPREME COURT." One sign read: "IMPEACH THE COURT-APPOINTED JUNTA AND THE FASCIST, EGOMANIACAL, BLOOD-SWILLING BEAST!"

Yet none of these signs were cited in the national media's coverage of the event. By contrast, the press focused extensively on over-the-top signs held by Obama critics at the president's town hall event held Tuesday in New Hampshire.

There's more at the link. It's very difficult to respect people, whether politicians or journalists, who are so self-serving that they loudly condemn behavior that is orders of magnitude less offensive than behavior they were totally silent about just a few years ago.

RLC

Eleven Questions

If you get the chance you might wish to ask your congressperson a few questions about the health care reform bill he or she will be voting on this fall:

1. Has the congressman (or woman) actually read and studied the bill?
   
2. Will the bill result in a single payer system?
   
3. Will the bill result in rationing of care and longer wait times?
   
4. Will the bill reduce medicare benefits?
   
5. Does the bill open the door for the elderly and infirm to be pressured into accepting death?
   
6. Will the bill pay for health care for illegal aliens?
   
7. Will the bill pay for abortions?
   
8. Will the bill require that abortions be provided by objector institutions like Catholic hospitals?
   
9. Will the bill vastly increase the deficit?
   
10. Will the bill require congressmen (and women) to participate in the same program as the rest of us?
    
11. Will the bill cause our taxes to go up?
    

The fact is that for most of our elected representatives the answer to the first question is "no," and according to almost everyone who has read the bill the answer to the other ten questions is "yes." It's no wonder people are irate about it.

RLC

Re: The Volt

Jason emails us to clarify something in yesterday's post titled 230 mpg! He writes:

I just think everyone needs to recognize that a for-profit business (i.e., General Motors before the takeover) invented and innovated the vehicle. A government-owned entity may have been at the helm when the car was issued, but not when it was first created. An important distinction that must be made, I think.

He's correct, of course. My lament in the last line of the original post was due not to thinking that a government- owned company had produced such an innovative vehicle but rather due to the fact that when GM accepted a public bailout and then began closing down dealerships which were not well-connected to the Democrat party, I decided that I personally wouldn't buy any more of their products.

Now they tempt me to violate my pledge with the Volt. Luckily, there will be other models coming out from other manufacturers that I'm sure will be just as attractive.

RLC

Expelled

Author and actor Ben Stein who, you may recall, figured prominently in the documentary movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has been let go from his job as a business columnist for the New York Times. Stein writes about being expelled by the Times in a piece at The American Spectator. It's only his side of the story, of course, but it sounds like he got fired for being critical of President Obama's policies. This wouldn't be so bad if the Times were at least honest that he was released for ideological reasons, but apparently they weren't.

Check out Stein's account at The Spectator. It's an interesting story.

RLC

Nudging the Old Folks

Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast is an Obamaphile who can't resist an opportunity to discredit conservatives, but even he can't go along with those who are trying to pooh-pooh conservative concerns that the Democrats' health care plans would push the elderly toward euthanasia:

[O]n one point the plan's critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under consideration-which can be read as expressing sympathy for limitations on end-of-life care-is morally revolting. And it's helping to kill the plan itself.

Make no mistake about it. Determining which treatments are "cost effective" at the end of a person's life and which are not is one of Obama's priorities. It's one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal healthcare affordable.

Siegel then goes on to wonder why a good guy like Obama would be sold on a provision that would in a dozen subtle ways, "nudge" older people toward declining care which would use up resources that might be better spent on younger people with more years to live:

Where is Obama coming from? Why is such an apparently humane man not more strongly condemning a utilitarian initiative straight out of Victorian England? A good part of the explanation has to do with the University of Chicago Law School milieu that Obama comes out of. By far, the most influential figure in that world is Judge Richard Posner, who teaches law at Chicago and publishes streams of pompous, robotically written books that are much praised and little read.

Judge Posner is both an enthusiastic advocate of euthanasia and an energetic eugenicist. He once wrote of Oliver Wendell Holmes' ideas about eugenics-Holmes believed that a just society "prevents continuance of the unfit"-that "we may yet find [Holmes'] enthusiasms prescient rather than depraved."

Cass Sunstein, who is Obama's nominee for regulatory czar, is a disciple of Posner and believes in what Time magazine describes as "the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating a regulation." In other words, Sunstein believes that the lives of younger people have a greater value than those of the elderly. This, obviously, would have a radical bearing on end-of-life considerations.

This is interesting. We have on several occasions (see here and here) pointed out that President Obama has surrounded himself with progressive eugenicist/euthanasists. His science czar and at least two of his closest medical advisors each favors culling the weak, whether passively or actively isn't clear, from the population. Now we see that this position is even more widespread in his administration than we thought. Cass Sunstein was on Obama's list of possible nominees for the Supreme Court and Judge Posner surely exerted influence on the President in his days as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

It's alarming that eugenic ideas are suddenly becoming respectable again. They were commonly held among progressives back in the early decades of the 20th century but fell into social and political odium because of their association with the Nazis in the thirties and early forties. Progressives found it in their interests to mask their affinities for fascist enthusiasms and to seek to convince people that fascism was an ideology of the right whereas they, the progressives, were men and women of the left. The fact is, however, that the fascists were all leftists and that the holocaust grew out of a German eugenics movement that included in its orbit Americans like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger.

Now with the emergence of the Obama presidency, the advocates of eugenic policies feel safe to reemerge from their closets and speak openly about their vision of an America where people who are elderly should be expected to get out of the way of the younger generation. How much longer will it be before those who suffer mental retardation and other serious debilities will also be expected, for the common good, to be euthanized? How long will it be before we slide down the slippery slope right back to the Germany of the 1930s? It's no wonder the older folks at those town halls are so angry.

People scoff at such a suggestion and say that couldn't happen here. That's simply false. What will happen here is whatever is logically entailed by the worldview of those who have the power to impose their will on the rest of us. Secular utilitarians see nothing special about human beings. We're not, in their view, created in the image of God, and we're not persons who possess inherent rights and dignity by virtue of our possession of the imago dei. In the eyes of such men as the President is surrounding himself with, we're resource consumers whose value to the collective, and thus our indispensibility, is determined by the value of the contribution we're able to make to the whole. Eugenicists see humanity in much the same way as a farmer sees livestock. The herd is there to be bred, managed, milked, sold and slaughtered to suit the needs of the moment.

When the government takes it upon itself to "nudge" the elderly toward death we're well on our way toward the world of Lois Lowery (The Giver), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and George Orwell (1984). If you haven't read any of these works you really should. Start with Orwell.

RLC

Post Offices and Public Options

One of the general arguments opponents of President Obama's health care reform plans have been making is that government-run enterprises rarely perform efficiently or profitably. At his recent town hall meeting the President himself inadvertently pressed this very argument into service without recognizing that he was agreeing with a major objection to his own proposals. It was pretty funny:

Perhaps by now Mr. Obama realizes his blunder, but if so, why does he not also recognize the reason the postal service has problems that UPS and Fed Ex don't have? Privately-owned companies, subject to market forces, often do well; publicly-owned companies usually don't. One wishes the President would at least appear concerned that when the government manages health care it will in fact be just as troubled as the postal service, maybe moreso.

I say perhaps he realizes his blunder because unlike the Bush years when the media could be counted on to be all over a bungle like this if it embarrassed Mr. Bush and made him look stupid, I don't think we'll hear anything at all about this one from the major media. So it could be that no one has pointed out to the President that this wasn't his finest performance.

RLC

230 mpg!

Allahpundit throws some cold water on the excitement being generated by the new Chevy hybrid the Volt before he gives us his take on the upside:

.... If it's true, then you're looking at the first car with triple-digit gas mileage, fully four times the amount of its nearest competitor. Actually, it's even better than that: It can run on electricity alone for up to 40 miles, so if your round-trip commute's within that range, you don't need gas at all. Thrilling news, not because the Volt's going to solve America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil overnight but because the baseline technology's now not only available but almost cost-effective.

Why do I say almost? Let's do the math. Initial sticker-price estimates are $40,000; assume it'll be a bit more than that, then deduct $7,500 for the federal tax credit you'll get for buying one. Let's say that leaves us with a cost of $35,000. Figure a new car with standard fuel efficiency will get 20 mpg and run you $18,000. Now assume gas prices of $3 per gallon. Buying the cheaper car will save you enough money to afford 5,667 gallons of gas, which, at 20 mpg, means it would be a better deal than the Volt for the first ... 113,000 miles. That also doesn't account for (a) the (comparatively tiny) cost of electricity to charge the battery, (b) the headaches for apartment-dwellers in finding a place to charge the thing, (c) the possibility of higher maintenance costs as the Volt's new technology suffers glitches, and (d) the strain on urban electrical grids a decade or two down the road when these suckers become popular.

There are, of course, some definite positives to cars like the Volt and some of these are mentioned at the link. I just wish it wasn't government-owned GM that's come out with the darn thing.

RLC

Iranian Prisons

You doubtless remember the revelations about how terrorists were treated at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. As bad as the detainees were, the treatment some of the received at the hands of a few American Guardsmen was unconscionable and illegal, and at least most of the persons responsible have been held to account.

You've also heard that the prison at Guantanamo Bay is scheduled to be closed in January because it fails to meet the exacting standards of American penology even though it's apparently a model penal institution whose detainees live better than do many inmates in our civilian penitentiaries.

In any event, amidst all the talk of prisoner mistreatment in American detention camps what's often omitted is any insight into how political prisoners are treated in most countries around the world.

Alexander Sohlzenitsyn was imprisoned in the former Soviet Union during the late forties and early fifties and survived to write an extraordinary book, titled The Gulag Archipelago, about the ghastly horrors of communist "justice."

Richard Wurmbrand was imprisoned behind the iron curtain because he was a Christian minister. His book titled Tortured for Christ describes the incredible cruelty of which men hostile to God are capable.

Armando Valladares was a Cuban who was deemed a political enemy of the Castro regime and was imprisoned in a system Dantesque in its hellishness. He wrote about his experience in Against All Hope.

In the aftermath of the war in Iraq we read of the unspeakable tortures perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his henchmen. We read about the horrible manner in which people who opposed them or stood in their way were tortured, mutilated, run through wood chippers, and suffered other grisly torments to the amusement of the Baathist psychopaths.

Some of the victims of these governments lived to tell their stories. Millions of others around the globe, especially in communist and Islamic countries, have not been so fortunate. The tortures they've suffered, and are suffering today, for no reason other than that they are political or religious liabilities are unimaginable.

Now word is beginning to leak out about the prisons in Iran and the brutalities to which hundreds of dissidents rounded up in the wake of the recent political protests there have been subjected. If the reports are accurate, they should be mailed to every person who applauded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his visit to New York City and Columbia University last year. If the reports are accurate this man and his political patrons among the mullahs are as demonic as Saddam Hussein, and they deserve the same fate.

Here's part of the report:

Until the defeated Iranian presidential contender Mehdi Karroubi broke the wall of silence surrounding the Islamic Republic's prisons to demand an investigation into allegations of rape, little attention was paid to the abuses meted out to protestors who dared to claim that the June 12 election was rigged.

These abuses are inflicted routinely and systematically in seven secret prisons where political detainees are held at the behest of the revolutionary Islamic regime. Those prisons are described by DEBKAfile's Iranian sources as inhuman hellholes:

Kahrizak

This is the jail which supreme leader Ayatallah Ali Khamenei wanted razed to the ground to conceal the outrages committed there against scores of reform-seeking protesters who had the cruel fortune to be dumped there. Kahrizak on the southern outskirts of Tehran was notorious as the penal facility for Iran's most violent thugs and gangsters. Those inmates were let loose on the political prisoners who were incarcerated in cells ten meters square. An unknown number suffered rape and bloody beatings, which not all survived.

The commander of Iran's internal security forces Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said Sunday, Aug. 9, that he would not deny his share in the blame for the "terrible things that took place in Kahrizak" where two protesters were admittedly found dead. He claimed that two of the security officials responsible for "widespread prisoner abuse" had been fired and awaited trial.

The prison remains open and our sources doubt those responsible for the outrages will be brought to trial.

Six more jails and detentions centers operate in the Tehran area.

Ghamar prison

A low, inconspicuous door behind the Ghamar Bani Hashem Hospital on Resaalat Street near the security ministry leads into a top-secret holding facility for interrogating political prisoners. It is closely guarded by Iran's intelligence ministry.

It has two floors and a yard, containing four interrogation rooms, eight isolation cells and eight holding cells in which dozens of detainees are crammed, allowed access to showers once a week and toilets three times a day. Here, the detainees undergo their first inquisition and beatings before they are transferred to other prisons. Their eyes and mouths are bound with leather straps to prevent them from identifying their tormentors. Their agony ends when they sign written confessions.

Most of the victims' families do not know their whereabouts.

Esharat-Abad prison

Several hundred political prisoners are crowded into this facility for drug offenders which is designed for 250 to 350 inmates. It is situated in the Narcotic Unit's headquarters in central Tehran.

The building consists of three large units broken up into cells of 1.5 x 2 meters, into each of which up to five detainees are squeezed for an agonizing three to seven days. Under interrogation, their arms and legs are broken to make them confess and give up information. Accustomed to beating and humiliating dope traffickers, the wardens carry on abusing the political detainees.

Sanitary conditions are appalling and the inmates are fed scraps from the prison staff canteens. The stench of vomit and sweat in the unventilated cells is unbearable. Whenever a detainee dies of torture or disease, prison authorities file a fictitious report. After the questioning finishes, those who survive are transferred to the central prison at Evin. No one has been brought to book for their deaths.

There's more at the link. Abu Ghraib was abominable, but I suspect that if prisoners in almost any jail in the communist or Islamic worlds were offered the opportunity to be transferred there, they'd accept without a moment's hesitation.

RLC

You Know You're a Racist If ...

There are legitimate grounds for criticizing some of the antics of the people who attend the town halls. Some of them have been rude and discourteous, and worst of all, a few of them have acted as if they worked for ACORN, but these people are frustrated and they have legitimate concerns. Thus, it's as insulting as it is weird to have someone like Chris Matthews even raise the question of whether these people are motivated by racism, but the answer he receives from nationally syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker is even worse:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Put 100 of these people in a room. Strap them into gurneys. Inject them with sodium pentathol. How many of them would say "I don't like the idea of having a black president"? What percentage?

CYNTHIA TUCKER: Oh, I'm just guessing. This is just off the cuff. I think 45 to 65% of the people who appear at these groups are people who will never be comfortable with the idea of a black president.

Tucker admits she has no idea, but she's willing to aver on national tv that about half of the people who show up at these meetings are racists. Why? What evidence does she have of this? In the strange and febrile imaginations of liberal progressives most white people (except them) are racists, and if they're pressed to support this self-righteous assumption they point to the widespread opposition to a government takeover of our economy. How does this opposition demonstrate that whites are racists? Well, people like Tucker and Matthews will tell you, it must be motivated by racism since, after all, it's a black man who's leading the takeover.

Paul Krugman strikes the same chord in the New York Times where he argues that because some of the angry town hall attendees are a little confused on some of the implications of health care reform they're probably racists:

[P]eople who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading ... But they're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they've heard about what he's doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the "birther" movement, which denies Mr. Obama's citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don't know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's a substantial fraction.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it's a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Krugman's implication here is that no objection to our headlong rush over the economic cliff can possibly be legitimate. It must instead be grounded in white distaste for a black man as President.

And here's an MSNBC anchor suggesting that perhaps the word socialism has become the new "n-word." He doesn't come right out and say it, but he seems to be laying the predicate for the idea that if you call President Obama a socialist or call his policies socialist, you might just be a closet racist:

Here's what appears to be happening. Racism is anathema in this country, so the left, in order to get its agenda passed, sees an opportunity to weaken the opposition to it by identifying opponents, in the public mind, with racism. Pretty soon, if you're a Republican you'll be assumed to be a racist. If you don't have an Obama sticker on your car it'll be assumed you're a racist. If you don't accept the President's vision of what America should be it will be perceived as an indication that you're a racist, and if you call a black man a socialist it's the same as calling him a "nigger."

This is the state to which the left has reduced our public discourse.

RLC