Money for Nothin'

Here's a story that tells you everything you need to know about why so many people distrust government and its ability to manage anything well. Be sure you've taken you blood pressure meds before watching the video:

 

Seven hundred dollars per card per month. Why is it that this system was not designed to prevent converting benefits into cash? Why are the recipients able to get anything they want with these cards instead of being limited to necessities like food and clothing? Why even ask why? The answer is that it's a government program and one shouldn't expect government programs to actually make sense or be frugal.

Perhaps, though, we're not looking at this correctly. Perhaps these ATM cards are not a symbol of bureaucratic waste and stupidity but rather a reflection of the magnanimity of the taxpayers of California, at least the few who are left, who are eager to do what they can to subsidize the recreational habits of the indigent. This would account for the dismay so many of them feel at Arizona's decision that it can no longer afford the millions of dollars it costs to have hordes of illegal aliens crossing its borders. Such niggardliness would certainly have no place in California, which, despite the fact that it teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, nevertheless feels a moral obligation to facilitate excursions to casinos by those who couldn't afford such visits on their own.

If Arizonans can't pay for their illegals they should send them to California. Californians will gladly turn their state into Zimbabwe, apparently, in order to accommodate them.

RLC

Not Good People

Another Democrat shows that he's either a bigot or lacks a basic understanding of the rules of logical implication. In the video Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D, PA) is holding forth on how his office is helping people get through the recession. The people he's helping, he declares, are not irresponsible, they're not minorities, they're not "defectives." On the contrary, they're average, good American people.

Does Mr. Kanjorski really mean to imply that minorities and "defectives" are not good Americans? Is he unwittingly revealing something about his own underlying racial attitudes that perhaps we should know?

At Hot Air they're wondering if the media will give Mr. Kanjorski's bigotry the same sort of attention they lavished on George Allen's use of the word "macaca." Silly boys. Don't they know that Allen was a Republican and that Kanjorski's a Democrat? Don't they know that Democrats are allowed to say racist things and that only Republicans get punished for their unfortunate breaches of racial etiquette?

RLC

Fundamental Freedoms

I hardly know what to make of this report. I can't believe that the Michigan cops would be so stupid as to arrest a bunch of people just for passing out religious literature. Perhaps there's more to it, but if so, it hasn't yet come to my attention.

Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian explains:

Yesterday I found out friends of mine had been arrested for sharing the gospel in Dearborn, Michigan. I've shared some meals with Nabeel Qureshi, and I spoke at an apologetics conference he organized. I've had some shorter conversations with David Wood, who was also taken away from there in handcuffs. David has been featured and has commented on this blog. (I do not know Negeen and Paul Rezkalla, who were also arrested.)

Their cameras were confiscated for a time. What were they doing to deserve this? They were sharing the love of Jesus Christ at an Arab ethnic festival. The first YouTube video I saw on it when I checked in this morning called them liars, saying they went there to stir things up, and they were more interested in creating a scene than in preaching the gospel. This video tries to support this with a few out-of-context, unreferenced quotes from David Wood. I can assure you emphatically David and Nabeel's heart really is to share the good news of Jesus Christ. So what did they do to deserve a night in jail?

Apparently nothing:

They tell us here they handed out no printed materials, they approached no one, they spoke only with people who approached them. They went out of their way to avoid even the appearance of being disruptive. I've seen no evidence in other news sources to contradict any of this. They had "amicable" conversations and "made friends" with many there. The police took them away just as they were closing up another such amicable discussion. They told the officers they had video to show they had done nothing provocative, and asked them to sit down and watch it with them, but the police refused to look at the evidence.

It's important to note that this was not a Muslim festival. It was not a religious event. It was an ethnic festival...

There's more at the link. Perhaps the young evangelists will sue the Dearborn police for violating their first amendment rights. I hope so. It's apparently the only way this type of harrassment is going to stop.

I can't imagine that the police would have made these arrests had the young people been Muslims talking to the curious at, say, a fourth of July fireworks celebration, or if they had been Young Democrats talking to people at a Tea Party rally. Why does being Christian make them targets for arrest?

Update: Allahpundit has some commentary and video on this travesty at Hot Air.

RLC

Second Opinion

An acquaintance of mine, Dr. Nick Pandelitis, has a blog he calls Dr. Right on which he has posted a series of very thoughtful and well-informed pieces analyzing health care in America and the legislative "reform" signed into law last spring. Dr. Pandelitis is doubtful, to put it mildly, that the legislation is going to accomplish anything by way of solving the most pressing problems, and will instead exacerbate many of those problems.

Anyone interested in this issue is encouraged to visit his site and read his posts. His most recent is #11 in the series. The others can be accessed by scrolling down from that one.

RLC

Charlotte Simmons Redux

Joseph Bottum writes a winsome essay at First Things about a young woman of his acquaintance, a rural girl raised around horses in the American west, who went away to college and lost her innocence. It's a sad story. Here's part of what Bottum has to say:

Even out at a minor western state university, there's no supervision, no moral code, no help. Just the one-hour freshman orientation session that hands out condoms and vaginal dams, with a warning about AIDS. The cowgirl from the ranch-her parents wouldn't have sent her to UC Berkeley or NYU, mostly because old reputations die hard. But they didn't realize they were doing the rough equivalent.

The cost of a small state school's embarrassment, of its hunger to be just like everywhere else, is paid by abortions and the knocked-up, messed-up young women who were thrown to the wolfish boys, unconstrained by either manners or morals.

The bacchanalia of the contemporary American college experience can be resisted, by young people who are strong enough and determined enough to oppose a personal code to the riot all around them. But lots of the young are not that tough. They're weak and silly and susceptible-they're young and uneducated, in other words-and they just want to do what everyone else is doing. In its way, that makes them just like the administrators of those colleges: weak and silly and susceptible.

Sending a child, especially a daughter, to an American college has become a source of deep anxiety for many parents. Colleges have completely abandoned any pretense of supervision of the children we entrust to them. It's frightening for parents to think that Bottum's description of college administrators is pretty much true.

The experience of the young woman in his essay reminds me in so many ways of Tom Wolfe's story of the young woman in I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel I recommend to any parent who'd like to see what his or her daughter is in for when she heads off to college.

RLC

In Defense of Elitism

(Note: Some of the following was taken from a post which appeared on Viewpoint in April of 2008 titled Three Cheers for Elitism.)

In his book To Change the World James Davison Hunter cautions Christians against developing an attitude of elitism that often accompanies a higher socio-economic status.

He never really defines what he means by "elitism," but throughout the concluding chapters of the 3rd essay he seems to assume that the reader shares his disdain for it. I don't think that the assumption, or the disdain, is necessarily warranted.

Like prejudice and discrimination, whether elitism is an undesirable character trait depends a lot on the kind of elitism we're talking about. For many the word "elitism" is a euphemism for racism or a haughty sense of moral superiority and entitlement attaching to one's own socio-economic class. Of course it can be this, but it need not be. Elitism, as I understand the word, is the conviction that some values are better than others, some people are smarter, harder working, more virtuous than others, and some traditions and ways of life are better than others. This, it seems to me, is hard to deny.

Nevertheless, critics will object that in our politically correct post-modern world "everyone knows" that no one's values are any better than anyone else's and that to think otherwise is to be guilty of being a racist, classist, elitist reactionary - to which the appropriate response is: So what.

As William Henry, a liberal Democrat in the Clinton administration once wrote, it's an absurdity to think that all cultures and ways of life are equally admirable. It's scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone through one's nose.

In The Moviegoer, novelist Walker Percy puts it somewhat differently, if no less bluntly, when he has a Louisiana matriarch named Aunt Edna address herself to this matter. Edna declaims:

"I'll make a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people in my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake....Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal....They say out there that we think we're better. You're damn right we're better and don't think they don't know it."

This proud woman wasn't about to apologize for the obvious political incorrectness of her "elitist" sentiments. Neither should anyone else. Elitism based upon moral principle, so far from being some awful sin, is in fact a virtue, a salutary antidote to the infection of moral relativism currently metastasizing throughout our culture. This may scandalize those who feel that nobody should be so chauvinistic as to think his principles to be actually better than the next person's, but the irony needs to be noted that those who feel this way evidently believe their own moral egalitarianism is better than my moral elitism.

Aside from those enumerated by Aunt Edna, though, what exactly are the virtues which distinguish her "better" class of people? Without attempting an exhaustive list, it's probably correct to say for starters that, no matter what their race or socio-economic status, men and women of this elite class take a great deal of pride in their work, their property, and their character. They assume responsibility for their actions. They strive to be cordial, courteous, and considerate of others. They're dependable, trustworthy, and temperate, willing to defer short-term gratification for long-term benefit. They're frugal, faithful to their spouses, and committed to the well-being of their families. They're mindful of the fact that children do not raise themselves very well and that properly ushering a child into adulthood requires an enormous investment of time, energy, and self-sacrifice. They enjoy and appreciate excellence, especially in the arts and other forms of entertainment. They esteem education, especially for their children, and possess at least a modest appreciation for the life of the mind.

Why should anyone shrink from affirming the pre-eminence of these qualities and from regarding those who share them to be of superior moral timber to those who don't? And why should the social levelers among us be allowed to succeed in making people feel there's something wrong with choosing to avoid the society of those whose lives and habits are the antithesis of the values one cherishes?

It must be emphasized that this is not a matter of race or economics. People of all colors and incomes esteem these virtues and feel uncomfortable around those who don't. Indeed, it's perhaps true to say that many people who share them feel more comfortable in each other's company, regardless of their ethnicity or wealth, than they do in the company of those of similar race and economic class who don't share them.

Moreover, when people are made to feel guilty for believing their convictions to be more noble than their contraries, or when substantial numbers of people are persuaded that the precepts one lives by are merely arbitrary preferences, none of which is any better than any other, then, as with money, the worse will inevitably drive out the better. The lowest moral classes will eventually succeed in establishing the behavioral norms of the culture, and the principles, or lack of them, which govern their own lives and which are in large measure responsible for their being lower class in the first place, will eventually percolate upward, like a toxic gas, and permeate the rest of society. The denouement will be a social unraveling, corruption and disintegration that'll substantially diminish the quality of life of everyone.

Three cheers, therefore, for Aunt Edna and for elitism so construed.

RLC

Unsustainable Prejudices

Well, those racist, sexist, redneck, bigoted Tea-Partiers in South Carolina have certainly refused to conform to the stereotypes we keep hearing about them. Yesterday they chose a daughter of Indian immigrant parents, Nikki Haley, to run for governor and a black man, Tim Scott, to run for congress. If Haley is elected, which she's favored to be, she'll be one of two Indian-American governors - Bobby Jindal being the other - and both are Republicans. I wonder how the media is going to fit that irksome development into their Tea Party narrative.

It should be fun to watch. Meanwhile, South Carolina Democrats are still in a swivet over the fact that their primary voters have served up ... Alvin Greene to run against GOP incumbent Jim DeMint for U.S. Senate.

For years we've been lectured about how the Republican party is suspiciously underrepresented by minorities and women and that the Democrats, by contrast, are the party of inclusion and competence. Now the Republicans have selected an Indian-American woman and a black conservative man to serve their political interests, and the Democrats have selected a man with criminal charges pending, no job, and an IQ that seems to hover somewhere on the south side of normal. Add to this, among others, the conservative GOP women running against Harry Reid in Nevada and against Barbara Boxer in California, and all the old liberal prejudices and shibboleths are just getting much, much harder to sustain.

RLC

To Change the World

James Davison Hunter has written a book (To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World) that should be read by every Christian who is concerned about modern America culture, how to change it, and how best to relate to it. The book is built around three essays. In the first, Hunter argues that, contrary to what many might believe, cultural change does not come about by changing the hearts of ordinary people, but by changing the way the cultural elite see the world.

The elite are the creators of culture - the artists, politicians, professors, journalists, novelists, celebrities, and so on. They're the engine (my metaphor, not Hunter's) that pulls the long freight train of society. Ordinary people are just box cars. It doesn't matter how many box cars there are in the train, or how easily they glide along the rails, the train's not going to move unless the locomotives pull it. Unfortunately, for those Christian revanchists on both left and right who wish to see a renascence of a culture more compatible with Christian assumptions, Hunter doesn't think that's something that can be accomplished through conscious effort.

Many readers will perhaps find parts of the book a bit too academic for their tastes, but, if so, they'll be confirming one of Hunter's main points in the first two essays. The reason Christians have had so little impact on modern culture is that they too often fail to appreciate the crucial importance of being among the cultural elite. Christians do not reside at the center of culture either in terms of their institutions, their artifacts, or their intellectual life. Too much of the Church is anti-intellectual, and those who are not too often reside on the cultural margins from whence they can exert little influence. Christians, Hunter notes, are lamentably content to produce culture (books, music, films, etc.) solely for themselves and too infrequently inclined, or able, to speak to the world in terms it can understand. The idioms of Evangelicalism simply have no resonance with the secular world and Christians marginalize themselves further if they cannot speak in accents with which our culture is familiar.

In the second essay Hunter offers an interesting an impartial taxonomic description of the Christian right, the Christian left, and the small but growing neo-anabaptist movement. His treatment is fair, as far as I can tell, and, with regard to Christian progressives, a bit more frank than perhaps they'll appreciate.

There is much to commend in these three essays, but in the third he makes the controversial claim that Christians would do well to content themselves with being a "faithful presence" in the world rather than trying to change it. It's here that he'll probably find many of his readers parting company with him. My problem with this section is not that I disagreed with what he said, so much, indeed, the majority of it was very good. Rather, I didn't think that his notion of faithful presence needed to be seen so much as an alternative to the right or left, but instead as an adjunct to, or reinforcement of, whichever of the other two approaches one is inclined to follow. In other words, nothing he said convinced me that either conservatives or progressives were mistaken in pursuing their vision of culture-change through changing the hearts of ordinary people one heart at a time. His insights, however, do serve the very important purpose of putting those visions into perspective and cautioning us against slipping into the perennial "neo-Constantinian" temptation to lust for, and abuse, political power.

A short post can hardly do Hunter's book justice so I recommend that those who want more of an introduction before tackling To Change the World go to the interview with Hunter at Christianity Today in which he talks about his main themes and which also features replies by Chuck Colson and Andy Crouch, two writers Hunter criticizes in his first essay.

For those who'd like to dive right in, however, To Change the World can be ordered at our favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds. It's a book I feel sure will be referenced and discussed for many years to come.

RLC

General McChrystal

Two quick and perhaps not well-considered thoughts about the General McChrystal contretemps:

1) McChrystal should resign or be fired. The President can no more tolerate public insubordination from his military commanders than the commanders should tolerate it from their underlings. The criticism McChrystal and his staff directed at the administration is quite possibly accurate, but should not have been voiced publicly while he and his staff remain in the military.

2) I can't prove it, but had a general made similar criticisms of George Bush during the Iraq war that officer would have been a media hero. As it is, much of the media is calling for McChrystal's head. In their minds his mistake was not to criticize the Commander in Chief but rather to criticize this Commander in Chief.

RLC

Geological Catastrophism

Uh, oh. Wait till the Young Earth Creationists (YEC) get a hold of this report:

In the summer of 2002, a week of heavy rains in Central Texas caused Canyon Lake -- the reservoir of the Canyon Dam -- to flood over its spillway and down the Guadalupe River Valley in a planned diversion to save the dam from catastrophic failure. The flood, which continued for six weeks, stripped the valley of mesquite, oak trees, and soil; destroyed a bridge; and plucked meter-wide boulders from the ground. And, in a remarkable demonstration of the power of raging waters, the flood excavated a 2.2-kilometer-long, 7-meter-deep canyon in the bedrock.

According to a new analysis of the flood and its aftermath -- performed by Michael Lamb, assistant professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Mark Fonstad of Texas State University -- the canyon formed in just three days.

Our traditional view of deep river canyons, such as the Grand Canyon, is that they are carved slowly, as the regular flow and occasionally moderate rushing of rivers erodes rock over periods of millions of years.

Such is not always the case, however. "We know that some big canyons have been cut by large catastrophic flood events during Earth's history," Lamb says.

I hold no settled position on such questions as the age of the earth and the rate at which geological change has transpired, but the YEC folks do, and this finding confirms a claim that they've been making for sixty years or more that structures like the Grand Canyon were the result, not of gradual wearing away of sediment, but by rapid catastrophic erosion in the wake of the global Noahican flood.

I'm not qualified to venture an opinion on this matter, but I will share an anecdote. About ten years ago I took my wife and daughter on a trip through the national parks in Utah. As I sat and gazed at the rock formations at Arches N.P. and Bryce Canyon N.P. I couldn't help but think that they showed all the signs of having been scoured and sculpted by massive amounts of turbulent water. This isn't the official explanation for these landscapes, of course, but it wasn't hard to imagine, sitting in these Utah parks, how vast amounts of water pounding and swirling from north to south could carve out these canyons and rock arches, and ultimately dig out the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona.

Arches N.P.

Bryce Canyon N.P.

The article above seems to make that layman's interpretation of the visual evidence plausible, and confirm the possibility of a world-wide flood such as is recorded in the Old Testament and other ancient documents, but then, that can't be right. If it is then the age of the earth could perhaps be revised dramatically downward and evolution of the Darwinian sort would become even less likely than it already is. Since Darwinian evolution is as well-established as any fact of science, or so we're often told, it follows that rapid catastrophism on such a scale must be wrong.

QED. Or something.

RLC

Unfounded Fears

You might remember the frequent anxiety attacks suffered by the secular (and Christian) left in the early years of the Bush administration at the prospect of the imminent theocracy they were just sure Bush was planning to impose upon America. Once it was discovered that Bush was an Christian and that evangelical Christians were engaging in politics, the tocsin was sounded, fears were stoked, and the survival of the nation was said to be in serious jeopardy.

Well, like so many other fears that've captured the febrile imaginations of our liberal friends, only to eventually evaporate, the concern that the Christian right was planning a theocratic takeover of the country proved groundless. Indeed, it turns out that political involvement by white evangelical protestants is a relative smidgeon compared to that of Catholics and black protestants whose political activity for some reason causes no concern on the left.

This chart compiled by Mark Chavez provides the data:

Notice that in almost every category the extent of political engagement is greater for black and liberal protestants and Catholics than it is for white evangelicals. So why all the fuss and bed-wetting about an imminent theocracy?

Well, the above chart is based on facts, but facts are helpful only to those interested in rational reflection. Too often the people spreading fear have abandoned rational reflection. Remember the fear in the late sixties that the population bomb was going to produce world-wide famine by 1980, or the fear in 1980 that Reagan would start WWIII, or the fear in 2004 that global warming was destroying the planet? All of these were based on a few tendentiously interpreted facts served up with healthy dollops of prejudice and superstition. None of them proved to be warranted.

As with little children, sometimes we need to shine the light of calm reason under the bed to reassure our friends on the left that there really are no boogeymen there. It saves them the trouble of having to change their pajamas.

RLC

More on the Flotilla Attack

This is video produced by the Israeli government giving some important details about the Gaza blockade and the assault on the Mavi Marmara:

The following video contains footage of leaders of the Islamists addressing their cadres as the Mavi Marmara set sail. It seems pretty clear they were looking for a confrontation and were not much concerned with delivering aid to Gazans.

Of course, there will be those who'll say that since the Israelis killed more of their attackers than the attackers killed Israelis the Israeli response was "disproportionate." Maybe these critics have a point. Maybe in the future the Israelis should just allow themselves to be beaten to death with pipes and clubs and stabbed to death with knives and thereby prove to the world that they're not such bad guys after all. Why haven't they tried that, I wonder.

Thanks to National Review Online for the videos.

RLC

A Parody of Himself

Lori Ziganto of Hot Air watched the Chris Matthews special on the rise of "The New Right" the other night and found it, well, typical of the sort of intellectual fare that Chris serves his audience every night at MSNBC.

Here's Ziganto's lede:

Last night, MSNBC aired a Chris Matthews special, labeled a documentary, called The Rise of the New Right. I decided to take a quick break from my radical right wing extremist acts like bitterly clinging to my guns and my Bible, whilst fiendishly drawing Hitler moustaches on Obama photos, to watch it. I know. Apparently, I'm a glutton for punishment.

However, while absolutely infuriating, it was simultaneously hilarious and almost took my mind off the distressing shortage of windmills in this country. Almost immediately, two things became rather apparent. Firstly, MSNBC's NewSpeak definition of "documentary" is evidently "blatant fallacies and pure propaganda".

Secondly, it's quite clear that Chris Matthews' leg 'tingle' has moved into his brain, or what passes for some semblance of one. Either that, or he's merely decided to embrace his cuckoo pants. Plus, he's a big, fat liar. I feel no qualms about saying that, since Matthews spent a full hour demonizing me and people like me as violent, irrational racists. In fact, the entire show could be summed up like this:

Racists. Birthers. Guns! Evil scary militia groups that have the same "Don't Tread on Me" flag!!! Chanting "USA, USA" and being fond of the Constitution and, you know, liberty is super scary and ominous. Also, racist. And violence fomenting. Plus, racist.

You see, now Community Organizing is evil and dissent is no longer Patriotic. Instead, that now signifies some sort of marauding mob of nefarious radicals who are doubleplusungood. President Obama said "I want you to talk to your friends and neighbors; I want you to argue with them and get in their faces", but that was okay because George Bush. Or something.

It's not okay when the right peaceably assembles, voicing opinions articulately, in full and coherent sentences and using facts and rational thought, because we aren't supposed to even know how to read! Plus, we don't base things on feel-goody Utopian ideas of kitten whiskers, fairy dust and magical windmills. We sneaky right wing-nuts embrace real world ideas like individual success is a good thing and that people do not need the government to run every aspect of their lives and businesses. Oh, the horror.

If you think her words a little strong you should see the stuff she quotes from Matthews. Anyway, read the rest of her review. It's very good, especially where she rebuts Matthews' fear of right-wing violence.

At one point she quotes a tweet she received that she says sums up the whole show:

JennQPublic summed it up best when she tweeted "If I was writing a parody of a Chris Matthews special, it would sound just like this Chris Matthews special." Exactly. It was almost a self-parody and included every tired, lame, outright false and, frankly, insanely delusional leftist narrative regarding conservatives.

When people have no ideas to offer against their opposition they sometimes seek, by smear and innuendo, to discredit them, and then they complain, as Matthews often does, about our debased political discourse. Perhaps it's time for Chris Matthews to follow Helen Thomas off into the journalistic sunset. What he has left to say that's true is not particularly important or interesting, and what he says that's important or interesting is not particularly true.

RLC

Hey, Let's Build More Nuclear Plants

Yet another Green icon has wandered onto the Damascus Road, and the scales that had blinded him to the importance of nuclear power have fallen from his eyes. In this case the icon is Stewart Brand, founder and editor for sixteen years of Whole Earth Catalog. Peter Huber tells the story of Brand's better-late-than-never partial conversion at City Journal.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts from Huber's account:

"The question I ask myself now," Brand tells us when he gets to nuclear power, is: "What took me so long? I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren't so lazy."

When he got over his nuclear sloth, here's what Brand learned. (Most of the words quoted here are Brand's own, but some are Brand quoting others approvingly.) "Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself." "Reactor safety is a problem already solved," and the new reactors are even safer than the old. Waste isn't a problem; we need the $10 billion Yucca mountain disposal site "about as much as we need a facility for imprisoning dangerous extraterrestrials."

Nuclear power isn't just the cheapest practical carbon-free option around, but the cheapest, period, when not snarled up in green tape. Scientists "invariably poll high in support of nuclear." The people so pragmatic that they actually keep the lights lit, he might have added, have polled that way for 40 years, on the strength of reams of data and analyses, as well as the operating experience of our nuclear navy and a wide range of commercial reactors scattered across the planet.

It's an indubitable historical fact that the developed world was poised to break free from a carbon-centered energy economy 30 years ago. Greens locked us back into it. By demonizing nukes so effectively, they boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. We would instantly cut our coal consumption in half if we could simply conjure back into existence the 100-plus nuclear plants that were in the pipeline three decades ago. If global warming is a problem, Brand and his ex-friends own it.

Yes, indeed. The fear of nuclear power, a fear that was in many ways founded, as many irrational fears are, upon ignorance, has deprived us of an excellent source of clean energy that would have made us much less dependent upon coal to produce electricity.

Now the Greens are pushing for cap and trade, legislation which, by some accounts, will be enormously expensive for the country and the main motivation for which, global warming, has lost its credibility as an imminent danger. When will we learn not to take these people so seriously?

Anyway, on the bright side, the Damascus Road is getting crowded.

RLC

The Strange Case of Alvin Greene

By now you're probably familiar with the controversy swirling around the South Carolina Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate in which a completely unknown candidate named Alvin Greene who, in the words of Ann Coulter:

...beat Vic Rawl, a former state representative and judge, with a whopping 60 percent of the vote in last Tuesday's primary, despite Greene's having no job, no house, no campaign website, no campaign headquarters -- indeed, no campaign. Other than paying the $10,000 filing fee, Greene seems to have put no effort into the race whatsoever.

Moreover, Greene has a felony record for showing obscene pictures to college girls.

The left is in a tizzy, alleging everything from GOP dirty tricks to faulty voting machines to explain Greene's win. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Greene was not a "legitimate" candidate and called his victory "a mysterious deal."

I don't know why there's such consternation over this. The obvious explanation is probably the correct one, to wit, in any given election most Democrat voters have no idea who or what they're voting for. They just pull the lever for whichever name sounds most fetching and go have a beer. In the present case, Greene is black so word of mouth probably spread through black communities that he's the guy to vote for, so they did.

That may not be what happened, but it makes a lot more sense than that the guy is a Republican plant (even if he is that doesn't explain why 60% of Democrats voted for him) or that, in an election for the privilege of being clobbered in November by the GOP incumbent, Jim DeMint, Republicans would risk scandal by somehow tinkering with the voting machines.

It really is a shame because when you hear Mr. Greene talk he sounds like a man who is marginally retarded, but the Democrats are stuck with him. They really can't take the nomination away from a poor black man and give it to an upper class white guy like Rawls without getting hammered for the implicit "racism" in such a tactic.

Anyway, as Coulter suggests, it's not the first time it has happened that a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history came out of nowhere to win an election.

RLC

Blaming the Victim

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most courageous women on the planet. An outspoken critic of Islamic treatment of women she lives everyday under the threat of death. Indeed, her co-producer of a movie on Islam, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim and a note was pinned by a knife to his chest threatening Ali with the same fate.

Ali is a secular humanist feminist which, you might think, would have Western liberals rallying to her support, but alas, she's also critical of Islam, and there's the problem, as Mark Steyn explains:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's great cause is women's liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that [you can] say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on "speaking truth to power," the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat.

The latest is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Reviewing Ayaan's new book Nomad, he begins:

"She has managed to outrage more people-in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her-in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir." That's his opening pitch: if there are those who wish to kill her, it's her fault because she's a provocateuse who's found a lucrative shtick in "working on antagonizing" people.

The Left used to scoff at the "blame the victim" folks who would minimize brutality against women by saying that they must have somehow brought it upon themselves, but that was when the women were white Westerners and the offenders were white males.

Steyn continues:

In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings "produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world." In other words, it has to be about "poverty" or "social justice" because the alternative-that they want to kill us merely because we are the other-undermines the hyper-rationalist's entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal's determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities-"There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews."

Oh, for crying out loud. In the Muslim world, Christians and Jews have been on the receiving end of a remorseless ethno-religious cleansing for decades. Christian churches get burned, along with their congregations, from Nigeria to Pakistan. Egypt is considering stripping men who marry Jewesses of their citizenship. Saudi Arabia won't let 'em in the country. In the 1920s, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. Gee, I wonder where they all went. Maybe that non-stop "warm hospitality" wears you down after a while . . .

Imagine that Christians put out fatwas on those who criticize and demean Christianity. How many secular liberals, do you suppose, would be praising the "warm hospitality" of Christianity? How many secular liberals find anything to praise in Christianity as it is? Yet they have no trouble finding things to commend about those committed to a religion which advocates destroying by the sword not only Christianity and Judaism, but the entire Western value system and anyone, like Ali, who criticizes their faith and culture.

To praise for their "warm hospitality" those who embrace a religion that allows clerics to call for the murder of someone like Ali, is something like praising the Nazis, in the midst of a discussion of their attempt to exterminate the Jews, because they cultivated an appreciation for classical music. It may be true that the Nazis had refined aesthetic tastes, but it's a fact that seems hardly significant, or redemptive, in the context of that discussion.

RLC

Who's in Charge?

Earlier today we remarked on the unbelievable bureaucratic dunderheadedness on display in the Gulf oil cleanup project. Now Jason calls our attention to this video from an ABC news report on this subject that reveals that the Obama administration's assurances that they're doing everything they can notwithstanding, they're clearly not. Or, if they are doing everything they can, then they're clearly incompetent:

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I wonder if there's any connection between the lack of White House responsiveness to the pleas of the two governors in this report and the fact that both governors are Republicans. Surely Mr. Obama couldn't be that petty, but the alternative is that he is utterly inadequate to the office to which he was elected.

I guess we can expect more of this sort of commentary in the weeks ahead:

Billboard in Texas

RLC

You-Have-To-Be-Kidding

Forgive me, but this is just nuts:

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state's oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor's wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

"It's the most frustrating thing," the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. "Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges."

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP's oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

"These barges work. You've seen them work. You've seen them suck oil out of the water," said Jindal.

So why stop now?

"The Coast Guard came and shut them down," Jindal said. "You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, 'Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'"

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

"We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Doesn't this take your breath away? What is it about authority and boneheadedness that makes the two so often go together? If the Coast Guard Commander is serious about the enemy being the oil why is he so enthralled by the "rules" that he can't set them aside or work around them until the marshes are cleaned up? If he's in charge then just suspend the rules until the crisis is over.

This is like the bureaucratic insanity that kept BP from burning off the oil in the early days of the leak because of concerns about air pollution, or the refusal of the EPA to allow Louisianna to build sand berms to protect their coasts because an environmental impact study hadn't been done, or the refusal of the Obama administration to accept foreign assistance to skim the oil, or the refusal to send boom that "may" have been substandard to Louisianna. There is something in the nature of government bureaucracies, evidently, that inclines them toward imbecility.

If a nuclear weapon were ever set to go off in a major American city some government flunky would prohibit disarming it until it was estanlished that the nuclear materials could be disposed of safely.

Can't wait for the government to take over our health care.

RLC

Suppressing Freedom

Freedom of speech is one of our most valuable rights, but it's under increasing assault today by politicians who, according to this article, don't like that the internet makes it possible for you to know too much about them.

Currently, Senator Joe Lieberman is pushing a bill that would essentially give the president the ability to shut down the internet in the event of a national emergency. Of course, what constitutes a national emergency may well be in the eye of the beholder:

As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence.

We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away.

The government has been searching for any avenue possible through which to regulate free speech on the Internet and strangle alternative media outlets, with the FTC recently proposing a "Drudge Tax" that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers.

Similar legislation aimed at imposing Chinese-style censorship of the Internet and giving the state the power to shut down networks has already been passed globally, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted "internet 2″ system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID's and government permission would be required simply to operate a website.

In the last five years politicians accustomed to working in relative secrecy have found themselves and their questionable behavior broadcast across the world by vehicles such as the Drudge Report, blogs, and You Tube. The internet has in many ways been a political blessing to the common folk because it facilitates the rapid dissemination of knowledge and allows for instant communication. Moreover, the internet frees the public from being held captive to the ideological predilections of the major media outlets. That liberal politicians want to control this resource is not surprising, but that's a power that they must never be given. They can't be trusted with it.

On the other hand, MSNBC's Ed Schultz is happy to give them all the power they want:

It's hard to believe that it would ever cross the lips of an American that the president should act like a dictator, but I guess freedom isn't as important to liberals as it used to be back when Bush was president.

RLC

Sexual Obesity

Mary Eberstadt weighs in at First Things with an outstanding essay on what she calls, following psychiatrist Mary Ann Laydon, an epidemic of "sexual obesity," i.e. the widespread gorging on pornography in our culture.

Here's an excerpt:

Pornography today, in short, is much like obesity was yesterday-a social problem increasing over time, with especially worrisome results among its youngest consumers, and one whose harms are only beginning to be studied with the seriousness they clearly deserve.

Parallels between the two epidemics are striking. Much like the more commonly understood obesity, the phenomenon of sexual obesity permeates the population-though unlike regular obesity, of course, pornography consumption is mostly (though not entirely) a male thing. At the same time, evidence also shows that sexual obesity does share with its counterpart this critical common denominator: It afflicts the subset of human beings who form the first generation immersed in this consumption, many of whom have never known a world without it-the young.

The data about the immersion of young Americans in pornography are startling and disturbing. One 2008 study focused on undergraduate and graduate students ages 18 to 26 across the country found that more than two-thirds of men-and one out of every ten women in the sample-viewed pornography more than once a month. Another study showed that first-year college students using sexually explicit material exhibited these troubling features: increased tolerance, resulting in a turn toward more bizarre and esoteric material; increased risk of body-image problems, especially among girls; and erroneous and exaggerated conceptions of how prevalent certain sexual behaviors, including risky and even dangerous behaviors, actually are.

In the essay Eberstadt tackles several commonly repeated myths about pornography use:

• That it's use is a merely private matter.
• That it only affects men.
• That it only involves consenting adults.

Eberstadt explodes each of these myths in turn and in doing so provides a great service. There are simply too few articles like her's that encourage men who are drawn to pornography to stop rationalizing their behavior and stop deceiving themselves into thinking that it's harmless.

We didn't have to ban alcohol or tobacco in order to convince most people of the harm done to themselves and others by smoking and drinking. Perhaps it's time to mount a similar campaign against pornography to persuade society that this stuff is the psychological and spiritual equivalent (or worse) of cigarettes and alcohol. We don't have to prohibit it in order to make people realize the harm it does to themselves and others. What we can not afford to do, though, is ignore the epidemic.

Read the whole article and read the comments as well.

RLC