Oink

To illustrate the rank dishonesty of our political class, I offer the following tale of shame: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, Nevada) needed all sixty Democrat senators on board to begin debate on the health care reform bill. Several members of his caucus, still capable of glimmers of conscience, were balking. Among these was Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisianna. What to do? Needing her vote, Senator Reid did what any venal politician would do. He bribed her with an offer of $100 million to $300 million dollars in Medicaid.

Now, of course, he couldn't just write a check to the senator, so he had to put the bribe into the bill and make it look like it wasn't a bribe. Here's the language he inserted that won Landrieu's support. I don't expect anyone to read more than just a couple of lines of this travesty, and that's the point. I doubt if most of the senators who voted to proceed with debate Saturday night have read it either, a dereliction which seems pretty close to criminal malfeasance, given the stakes.

In case you're wondering, there's only one state to which all this gobbledygook applies: Lousianna:

''(aa)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (b), beginning January 1, 2011, the Federal medical assistance percentage for a fiscal year for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State shall be equal to the following:

'(A) In the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), increased by 50 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5.

''(B) In the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection for the State, increased by 25 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection.

''(2) In this subsection, the term 'disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State' means a State that is one of the 50 States or the District of Columbia, for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster under section 401 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government under such Act and for which- ''(A) in the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5, by at least 3 percentage points; and ''(B) in the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection by at least 3 percentage points.

''(3) The Federal medical assistance percentage determined for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State under paragraph (1) shall apply for purposes of this title (other than with respect to disproportionate share hospital payments described in section 1923 and payments under this title that are based on the enhanced FMAP described in 2105(b)) and shall not apply with respect to payments under title IV (other than under part E of title IV) or payments under title XXI.''(via Uncommon Descent)

Senator Landrieu beamed as she announced that she'd been bought off:

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote -- and to trumpet the financial "fix" she had arranged for Louisiana. "I am not going to be defensive," she declared. "And it's not a $100 million fix. It's a $300 million fix."

If the bill was so bad that she would have voted not to bring it to debate before she was bribed it was certainly no better after the bribe. The only thing that changed was that after the bribe Louisianna would get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. No doubt there are many other senators out there eager, like Senator Landrieu, to sell both their votes and their souls, and to sell the rest of us down the river. Open your wallets citizens. The congressional hogs are lining up at the trough and they're very hungry.

RLC

How Not to Foster Empathy

This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that the contemporary emphasis on "celebrating diversity" actually leads us to dehumanize those who are different from ourselves and makes it easier for us to ignore their suffering.

We are moved to want to help others primarily by a feeling of empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling when they hurt. It's much easier to persuade oneself, or one's associates, to help hungry, orphaned children in the third world if we have empathy for them than if we don't.

We have empathy for people primarily because we are able to project our responses to life's challenges onto them. We assume that the way we feel when we are insulted, when we've lost a loved one, when we are threatened, when we suffer, is very much the same as others feel in similar situations. This intuition, however, is based on the assumption we hold that others are "put together" pretty much just like us - that we all think alike, feel alike, and see life much the same way.

Since the 1960s, however, there has been an effort on the part of some to eradicate this confidence that we are all very much alike. We've been told that if we are a man we don't know what it's like to be a woman, if we're white we don't know what it's like to be black, if we're economically comfortable we don't know what it's like to be poor. We're told that others are fundamentally different from us, they see the world differently, they don't share our perspectives, values, or feelings about things, and so on.

Very well, but the problem is that from here it is but a short step to thinking that the other doesn't really feel the way I feel, doesn't really respond to the blows that life delivers the way I do.

When we start to think this way, our empathy for the other begins to evaporate and our sympathy begins to diminish. It becomes easier to turn our back on his suffering because, we rationalize, his suffering is not what we would experience were we in similar circumstances. When we reach the point where it becomes easier to minimize the other's pain in our own mind then we have essentially dehumanized him.

So far from celebrating the things that make us different we need to affirm over and over the things that make us alike. We need to celebrate not our differences but our commonalities. We should focus on strengthening the bonds of empathy that we should feel for all of God's creatures but which are weakened by the social balkanization that results from emphasizing our differences. Cultural variety is colorful and enriching. Dividing people into "us" and "them," however, is corrosive to our ability to experience empathy.

RLC

Palin Fixation

I admit that I'm baffled by the media's obsession with Sarah Palin and their determination to smack her every chance they get. You can't turn on the television without seeing some talking head snidely remarking on Palin's various alleged inadequacies. It has gotten to the point where I think Palin is almost the media's Emmanuel Goldstein toward whom the feel duty-bound to direct their daily Five Minutes Hate (see Orwell's 1984). It's like a kind of liberal Tourette's syndrome that compels them to feel contempt and blurt out disparagements whether there's any rational reason for them or not. It'd be amusing were it not so pathetic since Palin is not a candidate, she holds no elective office, she's not an "extremist," she doesn't hate anyone and yet the lefty media never pass up an opportunity to throw a pie in her face with a sneer on theirs.

Some, though, are breaking out of this apparent mob psychology and are scratching their heads wondering what on earth has precipitated the hostility and personal venom that, like a nest of spitting cobras, so many commentators direct her way.

One such is David Harsanyi of the Denver Post. writes:

...believe it or not, one can (as I do) admire Palin's charisma and roots, appreciate her dissent on the policy experiments brainy folks in Washington are cooking up and at the same time believe she has no business running for president in 2012.

In fact, all you haters out there force me to root for her.

There's nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin's book, "Going Rogue" (HarperCollins, November 2009) for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking was applied to President Barack Obama's two self-aggrandizing tomes - or even the health care or cap and trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to non-existent congressional districts - which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one's nose demands a constant struggle, I guess.

And it's not just bloggers. What choice do media outlets have but to provide comprehensive coverage of pistachio salesman and Playgirl-posing Levi Johnston, doltish erstwhile father of Palin's grandchild, a man whose only discernible talent is the possession of operational sperm and the ability to humiliate the former vice presidential nominee?

And how could a major magazine like Newsweek be expected to use a cover photo of Palin campaigning or spending time with her Down syndrome child when editors could simply borrow a shot of the 45-year-old mother of five decked out in her exercise tights - nudge nudge, wink wink - from a Runners World piece and slap the headline "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?" onto it?

There's more on the Left's Palin fixation at the link. Meanwhile, all you psychology majors out there who are looking for an idea for a research project might want to consider examining what it is about Sarah Palin that drives liberals into a frenzy that serves only to make them look simultaneously both mean and stupid.

RLC

Re: Chinese Exports

A student of mine, a native of Beijing, offers an interesting observation regarding our post on the influx of students from China. He writes:

I think there is another reason for a lot of Chinese students trying to come over here to study - it is the freedom to pick your own major. [In China]Unless you are a really good student, it's hard to major in something you love. But here, you can pick your major, and switch your major anytime. In the US people are studying the things they love, but in China a lot of people are studying something they are not even interested in.

I wonder what goes through the mind of a student who realizes he must spend the rest of his life doing something he has no interest in whatsoever and who realizes, too, that there's no way out.

I bet prozac sales are booming in China.

Anyway, in the post I was pretty enthusiastic about having the best and the brightest from India and China come here to study. For a less sanguine view read the submission from Emily on the Feedback page.

RLC

Fading Glory

President Obama seems to be rapidly approaching the point that Machiavelli warned rulers to avoid at all costs, i.e. the point at which the people no longer respect or fear the prince. This week, in the midst of a feckless trip to China in which he seemed more like a third world mendicant than the leader of the free world, both the President and his attorney general gave utterly incoherent and risible justifications for moving the 9/11 trials to New York. This embarrassing episode followed on the heels of plummeting approval ratings that have him under 50% for the first time in his presidency and an apparent inability to decide what he wants to do in Afghanistan despite the fact that he's had over three months since General McChrystal's request - during which time our troops have been dying and morale has declined - to mull it over. Mr. Obama has also done himself no favors by surrounding himself with a motley collection of tax cheats, Maoists, and sundry other extremists, and revealing himself, in the Gates/Crowley affair, to be rather intemperate and to hold views about race that most people in this country have found distasteful for at least two decades.

To add to this tale of woe the State Department, and thus the President whose policy it carries out, has looked foolish in its clumsy handling of the matter of Honduras; Iran proceeds merrily on its way toward procuring nuclear weapons with which to atomize Israelis; signature legislation (health care reform, cap and trade, card check) limp through Congress having engendered the antipathy of a majority of Americans; jobless numbers are at the highest level in decades; mortgage defaults are increasing alarmingly, and our debt has soared to such heights that we'll never be able to pay it off. To add insult to economic injury, the President was embarrassingly rebuffed in Copenhagen when he journeyed there to plead for the Olympics.

He and his team have appeared inept in running the Cash-for-Clunkers program, as well as in their mystifying accounting of where the stimulus money has gone, and in claiming to have "saved or created" 650,000 jobs that seem to exist nowhere but in their own imaginations. He has reneged on so many campaign promises and has said so many things that seem prima facie to be at variance with the truth that few still trust him to do or mean what he says.

It's no exaggeration to note that Mr. Obama's only accomplishment thus far has been to win a Nobel Prize that he didn't deserve.

If he doesn't quickly start turning things around, and I don't see how he can, he'll soon become a laughingstock on the television comedy shows. Once that happens his approval numbers will sink further to Nixonian depths, and the media will slowly begin to replace adulation with bitter criticism - bitter because they'll have been deply mortified by the failure of the man they touted only a few months ago as a godsend (Perhaps it has already started.). At this point congressional Democrats will begin tending to their own political futures which they'll reckon to be contingent upon putting distance between themselves and the head of their party. When this happens, and it may happen soon, Mr. Obama will be a lame duck.

All of this is astonishing given the enormous good will with which Mr. Obama was greeted by the world community upon his election, and given the extraordinary political advantages enjoyed by any president who is favored by the press and whose party controls both houses of Congress.

In light of all this one wonders what the ramifications would be, both domestically and abroad, of a severely crippled president with three years left in his tenure. It seems to me that it can never be good for the U.S. to have a weak chief executive, but, on the other hand, I believe Obama's agenda, were he able to enact it, would be quite calamitous for the nation. We thus seem to be in deep trouble regardless whether our president is weak or strong.

Perhaps our only hope is that Mr. Obama follows the example of President Clinton who moved toward the center when he found himself politically debilitated, but such a migration is not likely from Mr. Obama. Clinton was a pragmatist, Obama is an ideologue. He can no more abandon his radical vision for America than he can change his eye color. What he is now is what he will be a year from now.

And for that reason, among others, we're in for an interesting twelve-month.

RLC

Greatest Show on Earth

Joel, a former student, sends along his thoughts on a review in the New York Times of Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth. I thought it worth putting on our Main page rather than the Feedback page. Here's what he says:

The recent book review published by New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade on Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth has received an unusual flood of attention. The basic premise of Wade's review is not to discredit evolution or even call the authority of its claims into question. Rather, a generous portion of the article affirms Dawkins' claims in an energetic and robust manner.

Wade's introductory comments place him squarely on Dawkins' side of the Evolution/Creationism debate saying, "It is a source of amazement and embarrassment that many Americans repudiate Darwin's theory and that some even espouse counter theories like creationism or intelligent design." He then goes on to praise Dawkins as a prolific writer who has devoted his latest book to demonstrating the explanatory power of evolutionary ideas while hammering the creationists at every turn.

So, where does the flood of criticism that the New York Times received in the past several weeks come from? Unfortunately for his own popularity, Wade went on to critique Dawkins' statement that evolution is fact and not simply a theory. This simple statement has brought philosophy professors, scientists, and even Daniel Dennett himself up in arms. In all reality Wade has barely ruffled the feathers of the contemporary biological claims of Darwinism.

If evolution really is such a bulletproof logical fact then why does it require such a determined defense? If Dennett is correct in proposing that such articles no more deserve space in the Times than the opinions of flat-earthers could not history reveal to us that they will bite the dust on their own?

JM

The End of Secularism

I recently finished a fine book by a professor of political science named Hunter Baker who titles his work The End of Secularism. The problem Baker addresses is the largely successful attempt in the latter part of the 20th century to purge religious sentiments from the public square and to instill in our everyday life an assumption of, or bias toward, secularism.

The main argument in his book is that politics simply cannot be separated from religion, that the secularist alternative is neither neutral nor desirable, and that it will ultimately fail. Secularism should be seen not as the only reasonable occupant of the public square but rather as one competitor among others jockeying to be heard in the marketplace of ideas.

Secularism is not to be confused with the separation of church and state. The latter refers to institutional independence. The former refers to the separation of religion from public life. Separation of church and state is a good thing for everyone involved. The separation of religion from public life is not.

Baker argues persuasively that the courts have erred in seeing the First Amendment as a prohibition of religious expression in taxpayer subsidized spaces. The establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...") was not about religious freedom at all. It was about who had jurisdiction in church/state matters. The Founders were saying that the role of religion would be a matter for the several states to resolve each for themselves, and that the federal government had no business injecting itself into what was a state matter. Each state was to be free to develop its own relationship with religion in whatever way it chose without the federal government telling it what it could or couldn't do.

Of course, that's not how our courts have chosen to interpret the Amendment. They've ruled, in effect, that the First Amendment is a mandate for secularism, which actually privileges one religious view - secularism - above all others.

Baker traces the uneasy history of church state relations from the early Roman church to the present and attributes the rise of secularism in the West to three main 19th century developments: The emergence of German higher criticism, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and the schisms wrought by the Civil War and slavery in both the nation and the church. The clincher, though, was the Scopes Trial in 1926 and its aftermath. The trial was a humiliation of Christian fundamentalism and launched secularism on a trail of victories for the next sixty years that made it seem invincible.

Today, however, the picture is much different. Since the latter part of the 20th century secularism has come under intense scrutiny by "its own advocates, conservative Christians, other conservative religionists, and postmoderns." The critique of secularism includes the irony that secularists have absorbed as their own the values of our common Christian heritage even as they claim that secular thinking is actually the source of these values.

Baker spends several pages on Stanley Fish's critique of the secularist project and why it is doomed to fail. For example, "Bracketing off religion does not solve the problem of toleration. It just disadvantages one set of orthodoxies from interacting with the many secular orthodoxies roaming free in a liberal society." This is true. It also privileges the secularist orthodoxies by essentially insulating them from criticism by banning the opponents most likely to present the most powerful critiques - religious opponents - from the public square.

We must exclude religious reasons and motivations from our public discourse, the secularist argues, because we need to allow only viewpoints that are accessible to everyone and held by everyone in the public arena. The assumption, however, that secular viewpoints are somehow metaphysically neutral is a fraud. The secularist is no more disinterested than is the religious citizen and for him to claim that he should be allowed to judge what passes for legitimate discourse is like permitting a baseball pitcher the prerogative of calling the balls and strikes.

All public discourse reduces to two fundamental visions of reality. One maintains that the universe is the product of a rational, personal, and good creator and the other holds that everything is a result of chance and impersonal forces. The secularist wants to rule the former out of court and allow only the latter in the public square, but conveniently, the latter view happens to be his own. Postmodern thinkers like Fish have been particularly adept at pointing out the self-serving nature of the attempt to establish a monopoly for one's own view while maintaining the pretense of neutrality.

Baker makes the interesting observation that although secularism serves essentially the same role in the Democratic party that religion serves in the GOP, the media, though eager to report on the influence religion has among Republicans, rarely reports on the influence secularism has among Democrats. One never hears, for instance, how the Democrats have "shored up their base among the unchurched, atheists, and agnostics."

We're often reminded that schools must not teach religious values, but secularist values like environmental attitudes and fads, tolerance, opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia are all deemed perfectly legitimate topics for taxpayer-funded schools. In other words, taking Judeo-Christian religion out of the public square does not leave the square religion-free. Rather, it leaves secularism as the only religion to be allowed a voice in our public deliberations.

There's much more in Baker's relatively short (194 pages) book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Church/State issues and the role of religion in public life.

RLC

Economic Creativity

The White House blithely claims to have "created or saved" 650,000 jobs. The conservative right holds the claim in derision, and the liberal left chooses, amidst its embarrassment, to pretend this audacious bit of mendacity had not been uttered by their President. As even the sympathetic media have pointed out, the only jobs that have been created by the administration are in government, and there's absolutely no way to determine how many jobs, if any, have been saved. The assertion that jobs have been saved is utterly meaningless, but the White House stands by it notwithstanding their inability to explain how they arrive at such an extraordinary datum, especially given the current jobless numbers.

To make it even more embarrassing for the President's supporters the congressional districts that the White House claims these jobs have been created in don't even exist. If the districts are being fabricated why should anyone think the job numbers aren't? Reading about these claims one feels as if the "facts" are just being manufactured as we go along. Is there anything they tell us that we can believe?

RLC

Chinese Exports

This could be welcome news for colleges and universities desperate for students:

American universities are enrolling a new wave of Chinese undergraduates, according to the annual Open Doors report.

While India was, for the eighth consecutive year, the leading country of origin for international students - sending 103,260 students, a 9 percent increase over the previous year - China is rapidly catching up, sending 98,510 last year, a 21 percent increase.

"I think we're going to be seeing 100,000 students from each for years to come, with an increasing share of them being undergraduates," said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the Institute of International Education, which publishes the report with support from the State Department.

Why the increase?

"There's growing disposable income in China, and not enough good universities to meet the demand," he said. "And in China, especially, studying in the United States is a great differentiator, because when students get home, they speak English."

It's also a great way to tear down walls between societies. As China grows and continues to accumulate an excess male population it will be tempted to flex its muscle in the Pacific. The more educated Chinese who have made friends in the U.S. the more hopeful we can be that tensions between us will be kept at a minimum.

The type of student that China is sending is changing as well:

"It used to be that they were all in the graduate science departments, but now, with the one-child policy, more and more Chinese parents are taking their considerable wealth and investing it in that one child getting an American college education," she said. "There's a book getting huge play in China right now explaining liberal arts education."

The book, "A True Liberal Arts Education," by three Chinese undergraduates from Bowdoin College, Franklin & Marshall College and Bucknell University, describes the education available at small liberal arts colleges, and the concept of liberal arts, both relatively unknown in China.

Foreign students have given a welcome push to local economies:

"International education is domestic economic development," Mr. Goodman said. "International students shop at the local Wal-Mart, rent rooms and buy food. Foreign students bring $17.8 billion to this country. A lot of campuses this year are increasing their international recruitment, trying to keep their programs whole by recruiting international students to fill their spaces."

Another advantage is that some Chinese may wish to remain in the U.S. to work and raise a family. If so, it would of mutual benefit as they contribute their native industriousness, intelligence, and virtue to our local communities.

If China and India wish to send us their best and brightest, I for one say send us all you want.

RLC

Don't Listen to Rush

Lloyd Marcus is a black American. I mention this only because it gives context to a little piece he writes for American Thinker. It's ostensibly about Rush Limbaugh, but one could substitute "read Conservative thought" for "listen to Rush Limbaugh" and the message would be the same. Here's what Marcus says:

I am a black man who, since 1993, has been a regular listener of the Rush Limbaugh radio program. I must caution black America. Be afraid, be very afraid of this powerful white man. Regular listening to him could be devastating to the psyche of the 96% of black Americans who voted for Obama. I have compiled the following Top Ten list of reasons why.

10. If you want to believe blacks are eternal victims in America, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

9. If you do not want to take responsibility for your life, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

8. If you are a dead beat loser who voted for Obama in hope of him redistributing what others worked for to you, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

7. If you believe blacks can not achieve without lowered standards and intervention by government and liberals, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

6. If you believe blacks who speak English correctly and are self sufficient are traitors, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

5. If you believe black liberal Democrats (Sharpton, Jackson, Waters & Co.) are your friends rather than your slave masters, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

4. If you do not believe self respect, pride and true self esteem comes from personal achievement, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

3. If you want to hate your country and believe it is the greatest source of evil in the world, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

2. If you want to believe rich white racist Republicans are burning the midnight oil thinking of ways to keep black America down, do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.

And the number one reason black America should fear regularly listening to Rush Limbaugh; they will become ditto heads.

Actually, I think the black Americans most likely to become disenchanted with the Democrat party that Rush is so critical of are those in the black middle and upper classes. These are people who have worked hard to get where they are. They have a stake in their communities. They pay taxes and care about the quality of their schools and neighborhoods, and eventually they're going to realize that the Democrats are doing nothing to make these things better.

The Democrats have a lock, however, on many among the chronically poor, whether white, black, or brown. These people pay very little in taxes, they live off the largesse and productivity of the greater society, their poverty is often a consequence of their own bad habits and choices in life, and they tend to vote for anyone who promises them that they'll get more goodies from the government if they do.

They're entitled to vote, of course, and everyone else is entitled to take comfort and hope in the fact that they usually don't.

RLC

Re: The Day the Music Died

We recently posted a piece on the problems faced by the music industry, and a student has replied with a fairly scathing critique of our entertainment industry in general. Her response is on our Feedback Page and is worth checking out.

RLC

Time-Travel Sabotage

I admire scientists who are willing to entertain ideas that seem crazy but which just might be true. You find such people treading outside the boundary lines in every field of science - except perhaps, in evolutionary biology, which seems populated by individuals who lack the gene for being able to consider any hypothesis for apparent design that actually implies a Designer - and it's fun to speculate along with them.

Even so, I think this latest theory in physics is a bit much. According to a New York Times story, the problems besetting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which was built to recreate conditions approximating the Big Bang and which, it is hoped, will produce evidence of a sub-atomic particle called the Higgs Boson, are due to the Higgs actually traveling back in time to sabotage the LHC. The theory has it that the Higgs doesn't want to be discovered (it's not clear how a subatomic particle could actually "want" anything) and has "decided" (ditto) to travel back in time to sabotage the device that would discover it, or something.

You'll have to read about it at the link. Maybe the NYT writer can make it sound more plausible than I can. It's true that the LHC has had problems getting going, and it's true that the people who proffer this hypothesis are serious and accomplished physicists, so we shouldn't dismiss their idea out of hand, but still - intentionality among sub-atomic particles? Does this mean that they have minds?

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip on the article.

RLC

The Bow Seen 'Round the World

There's been a lot of fuss about the President's very odd bow to the emperor of Japan just as there was following his bow to the Saudi king. I think the bows make him look a bit like a doofus, sort of like John Cleese doing a Fawlty Towers skit, but otherwise I guess they're harmless:

I wonder, though, how he decides which world leader to whom he will bow and which with whom he'll just shake hands? If you're an important poobah and you are favored with a mere handshake from the President of the United States after the emperor of Japan has just had a perfect jacknife executed right in front of him, should you feel slighted? Has the President been insufficiently and thus insultingly deferential toward you? If bowing is deemed appropriate when greeting royalty can genuflecting be far behind? These are weighty questions for which I have no answers.

I did come across this power point presentation, however, which was smuggled out of a top secret White House meeting of aides strategizing about how to counter GOP criticism of the President's embarrassing spasms when in the presence of foreign dignitaries:

RLC

Complicity and Sympathy

Several readers wrote to remind us that most Muslims only want peace and that we should be careful not to implicate the majority in the crimes of the minority, even if it's quite a large minority. This is true, of course, although it could've been said about Germans under the Nazis that most of them only wanted peace even as they worked to impose the will of the power-mad minority on the rest of the world.

In any event, the problem isn't just with the violent minority, it's also with a majority that doesn't raise a loud voice against the minority, but rather seeks to excuse or ignore the actions of the extremists. I'm reminded of a quote I came across recently:

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

The words are those of Martin Luther King and came from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. King was lamenting the failure of churches, particularly white churches, to speak out against the injustice of racial segregation. Substitute "Muslims" for "people" and I think his words perfectly fit the present situation. If Muslims are not going to demand that their co-religionists stop the madness, then it'll be difficult for them to avoid the charge of complicity and sympathy with acts of Islamic terrorism just as the white church could not escape similar charges of complicity and sympathy with the injustice of forced segregation in the 1960s.

RLC

Is This Really the Reason?

Andy McCarthy was the prosecutor who got Sheik Abdul Rahman convicted in the first World Trade Tower bombing. He also is of the opinion that the decision to bring the 9/11 terrorists to New York is really a ploy to embarrass Bush and both destroy his legacy and the CIA. He writes:

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder - and his boss - had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign.

It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses - intelligence sources - must expose themselves and their secrets.

There's more at the link where McCarthy explains that the terrorists have already confessed, they have no defense, and that the only purpose of going through a highly public trial is to produce an ideological coup against the hated Bushies and the CIA. It's pretty depressing to reflect on the possibility that a man with such antipathies occupies the highest office in the land.

RLC

Debating Aid

Although the media hasn't done much to bring it to our attention there's a very interesting debate going on in think tanks, churches, and government agencies today over the extent and nature of the aid we send to alleviate the suffering of the poor in third-world countries. That we should in some way be helping these people few would deny. Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, has a fine book out on the moral imperative to exercise compassion toward the world's suffering poor (The book is titled The Hole in Our Gospel).

At the same time, most people agree that just sending money, goods, and food to dysfunctional states is wasteful and unproductive (It's interesting, parenthetically, that almost everyone recognizes that throwing money at third-world poverty does nothing to mitigate the misery of the poor, but some think that the answer to poverty in this country is to do exactly what we realize is futile when done for the poor in other countries). So the debate focuses on what form our aid should take, and if it would actually be more helpful to stop giving aid altogether.

Two fascinating books have been published recently on this topic. One is by Paul Collier whose book The Bottom Billion (see our discussion of it here) is an excellent analysis of why third world poverty persists despite our best efforts to eradicate it, and what has to be done to alleviate it. Another is titled Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo who argues that aid, no matter how well-intentioned, is counterproductive and should be ended.

I recommend all three books to anyone interested in how we should approach the question of what the wisest, most effective way to really do something to help people is, but if you don't have time to read you may want to catch Collier and Moyo (along with two associates) debate these issues as part of the Munk debate series. You can either watch the debate or read the transcript, but in either case I think it's interesting that Collier and Moyo seem to agree more than they disagree that, as Moyo says, "Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower."

Thanks to Byron for the link to the debate.

RLC

Civil Rights Are Unconstitutional

Those law school professors sure are a caution, aren't they? They sometimes say the zaniest things. A professor by the name of Marci Hamilton, for example, claims that the Stupak amendment to the House Healthcare Reform Bill is unconstitutional. The Stupak amendment effectively rules out the use of taxpayer money to subsidize abortions. Professor Hamilton offers the following as one reason for thinking that this measure violates the Constitution:

First, the [Stupak] Amendment violates the Constitution's separation of church and state. The anti-abortion movement is plainly religious in motivation, and its lobbyists and spokespersons represent religious groups, as is illustrated by the fact that the most visible lobbyists in the Stupak Amendment's favor have been the Catholic Bishops. This is a brazen and frank attempt to impose a minority's religious worldview on the entirety of American healthcare. (A majority of Americans have favored a woman's right to choose for many years.)

Set aside the dubiety of the parenthetical remark. What she says in the rest of the quote could also be said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as John Pitney reminds us at National Review Online:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with other religious leaders and groups, led the fight for [the Civil Rights Act's] enactment. "We needed the help of the clergy, and this was assiduously encouraged," said Senator Hubert Humphrey. "I have said a number of times, and I repeat it now, that without the clergy, we couldn't have possibly passed this bill."

Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia, a segregationist, agreed with Humphrey that the clergy were the bill's most visible lobbyists, but he was not happy about it. He complained that the clergy were using "powers of the Federal Government to coerce the people into accepting their views under threat of dire punishment" - a "philosophy of coercion" that he compared to the doctrines of Torquemada "in the infamous days of the Spanish Inquisition."

Now, let's ask Ms Hamilton whether anyone in her circle of friends and colleagues thinks the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional. I doubt that she could find anyone who does, yet the logic of her objection to Stupak certainly leads to that conclusion. Pitney goes on to quote another constitutional lawyer who vigorously disagrees with the position staked out by Ms Hamilton:

[S]ecularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This is exactly right. The lawyer who wrote it was Barack Obama.

RLC

Why?

In all of the talk that we've heard so far about what an awful decision it was to bring the 9/11 terrorists to trial in New York City - a decision which certainly baffles me - there's one concern that I haven't yet heard raised. Among the reasons for thinking that this decision was among the most inept of this administration's remarkably rich record of ineptitude are:

1. The fear it would provoke another terrorist attack against New York,
   
2. It's likely there'd be attempts by terrorists to free the Gitmo Five,
   
3. The fact that these are not American citizens but rather enemies of this country and should not be afforded the same rights and protections an American citizen would be given,
   
4. The extraordinary cost to taxpayers paying for security and a trial that may last for years,
   
5. The probability that the trial will be turned into a circus by the defendants,
   
6. The very real possibility that one or several of the terrorists might actually be acquitted because they weren't mirandized or because the evidence against them is deemed inadmissable.
   

Parenthetically, if this last were to happen I think national outrage at Obama would be such that he would be finished as president. He would either be compelled to resign or limp along until the next election in which he would suffer the worst defeat in American presidential history. Mr. Holder assured reporters at a press conference yesterday that these men will be convicted, but I don't know how he knows that unless they plan to somehow rig the jury.

At any rate, all of the above are certainly legitimate concerns, but the question I had was who do the courts expect to get to serve on the jury? Once the trial begins it may prove very hard to keep the jurors' identities secret which means that they and their families may well be targets of terrorist reprisals. Knowing that, how can Messers Obama and Holder in good conscience put people in such a dangerous position when there's no need for it? They can promise the jurors anonymity, I suppose, but they certainly can't guarantee it. Indeed, I wonder if they've even given the matter any thought.

So why are they doing this if it's all unnecessary? The only explanation I've heard that makes any sense, alas, is that what they really want to do is use this trial to put the Bush administration and our intelligence agencies in the dock and thoroughly discredit both. If this is indeed what their goal is then they really are playing a dangerous and contemptible game. They know full well that intelligence agency personnel will be deposed on their secret intelligence gathering and interrogation methods and procedures. Not only will this mean that successful techniques will become known to those who wish to do us harm but also a lot of identities of informants and operatives will become available to the terrorists' allies around the world, which will at best cancel their usefulness and at worst place the lives of these individuals and their families in grave danger.

If the reason the administration has decided to try these men in a civilian court rather than by military tribunal is because they see a public trial as a political opportunity to destroy the people who kept us safe for eight years then the American people should be outraged. Perhaps there is some other reason that makes more sense and is a lot more noble but, if so, I haven't heard it yet.

RLC

Ideas Have Consequences

The Times Online has an excellent article by David Sewell on the moral implications of a Darwinian worldview. It's fascinating stuff, but I'm a little surprised that it passed editorial scrutiny. Perhaps the Brits are more open-minded about such things, but I can't imagine an article like this appearing in, say, The New York Times.

Sewell starts off by noting the eerie and strangely underreported fact that overt Darwinian tropes recur among serial killers. Eric Harris wore a t-shirt that extolled natural selection as he gunned down classmates at Columbine High School, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finn, murdered his teacher and a number of his fellow students on the basis of their lack of "evolutionary fitness."

Although Darwin himself would have been appalled by such horrors, they are the logical consequence of his ideas. Sewell writes:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved - a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang "Randomness is good enough for me, If there's no design it means I'm free" - lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The American conservative controversialist Ann Coulter is one of Darwin's fiercest critics, lambasting him in her book Godless and via cable TV. Coulter claims she is not surprised that psychopaths gravitate towards Darwin's ideas. "Instead of enshrining moral values," she says, Darwin "enshrined biological instincts." Coulter believes Darwin's theory appeals to liberals because it "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing - screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child - Darwin says it will benefit humanity".

Today's evolutionary scientists go some way towards Coulter's view when they describe ethics as merely an illusion produced by genes. From a Darwinian perspective, there is nothing objectively wrong with shooting your classmates; it's just that most of us have an inherited tendency to kid ourselves that it's wrong - and that's something that helps our species in the longer run by keeping playground massacres to an acceptable minimum.

Not only does a Darwinian worldview lead to the conclusion that life is ultimately pointless and that morality is an illusion "fobbed off on us by our genes" as E.O. Wilson puts it, but Darwin himself believed that his ideas led to racial purification:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed "savages". Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur "between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla". He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. "Looking to the world at no very distant date," he wrote to a friend in 1881, "what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."

For many years after his death, Darwin's racial theories remained the consensus position of the international scientific community. In 1906, the director of the Bronx Zoo decided to give New Yorkers an object lesson in human evolution by putting a 23-year-old Congolese pygmy on public display in his monkey house. The pygmy, Ota Benga, shared his cage with an orang-utan. The spectacle drew enormous crowds. Before long, they were asking the questions the exhibitors hoped they would: was Ota Benga an ape or a man? Or, as the zoo-keeper himself speculated, was this perhaps a transitional form between the two, the elusive missing link?

When a group of African-American clergymen objected to a human being being put on show, they were told that Darwin's theories were now accepted scientific facts, that the "lower races" were psychologically closer to pigs and dogs than to human beings, and that a different value should be put on their lives. Truths that the founders of the United States had held to be self-evident - that all men are created equal and had certain inalienable rights - were being denied by the promoters of Darwinian science. By the end of the first world war, it was not only blacks who were deemed genetically inferior by many of America's top geneticists and biologists, but Italian, Greek and Jewish immigrants too.

Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man who believed neither in God nor an afterlife could "only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him". Darwinian ideas - eugenics and its corollary, eugenic euthanasia - were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions, but also by many of the educated elite in the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century. It wasn't until the ghastly crimes of the Nazis came to light in the mid-1940s that eugenics acquired a bad odor among American progressives.

Ideas have consequences, and when we no longer hold fast to the idea that man is made in the image of God then no longer will we find anything about us that has any intrinsic worth. Man thus devalues himself, losing his dignity in the process and reducing himself to a simple brute, a mass of mere protoplasm. What almost inevitably follows are genocidal holocausts such as those of the 20th century in atheistic regimes in Germany, the USSR, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Darwin's theory was a powerful impetus to the spread of atheism and a powerful justification, or rationalization, for those seeking scientific warrant for the depersonalization of their victims. The 20th century was simply Columbine High School writ large.

RLC

The Real Victim at Fort Hood

David Brooks at The New York Times puts his finger on a quirk of American psychology:

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan [murdered and maimed dozens of helpless victims] in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn't want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people's stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It's important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn't carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan - before the real evidence was in - of his responsibility. He didn't have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn't the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Indeed. One might have gotten the impression, listening to some of the commentary on this atrocity, that Nidal Hasan was an unfortunate victim of forces beyond his control. The excuses and rationalizations that were being offered for his heinous act almost made me think that the people I should be angry with in this incident were the cops that shot this poor, pathetic man.

Such are the times in which we live.

RLC