Questions for Libya Interventionists

Demands for the President to back up his ill-advised assertion that "Qaddafi must go" continue to arise on both the left and the right. People on both sides are strenuously insisting that we intervene in the Libyan civil war to stop Qaddafi from defeating and slaughtering the rebels in Libya. Before we do that, however, I think we must insist on answers to some very important questions from the folks who are calling for war:

• If we decide to get overtly involved in Libya what justification do we have for not also attacking Iran and North Korea? What are the essential distinctions in the three cases? Surely both of these nations are a greater threat to us and to the world than is Libya.
• If Mubarak had resisted the Egyptian demonstrators with force should we have gone into Egypt? What about Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Bahrain all of which are or may soon be shooting demonstrators?
• Why should we stop Qaddafi from killing rebels but not stop Ahmadinejad from building nuclear weapons that he will surely use. Why not stop Kim Jong Il who murders his people in North Korea every day? Indeed, why not launch an attack on China which is led by Hu Jintao whom President Obama honored with a lavish state dinner despite the fact that he was partly responsible for the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square?
• If we use military aircraft to impose a no-fly zone we have to destroy anti-aircraft and radar systems. This means that we will be killing Libyans on the ground. Should we do that? Why? What happens when one of our bombs goes awry and kills a family of innocent civilians and the Arab world is incensed at us (again)? Is that a risk we should take? Why?
• When the rebellion began Libyans were displaying signs saying Foreigners Keep Out and threatening to turn their guns on our aircraft if we intervened on their behalf. Now they're pleading for help. Which of these messages should we heed?
• Even if we clear the skies, Qaddafi's forces on the ground will continue to drive the rebels back and possibly slaughter them. Should we attack his ground forces? Should we insert ground troops of our own if that's what's necessary to stop Qaddafi? Exactly how far should we go to stop him?
• How long should we stay in Libya once we manage to halt Qaddafi's advance? What is our exit strategy?

There is much for which to criticize Mr. Obama in the way he has handled the Middle East and North Africa, but unless one has answers to these questions why criticize him for not going to war with Qaddafi? So far I haven't heard many answers, and I've heard none that are persuasive.

Sickening

The story is horrific enough (see also here). Five members of an Israeli family, including three children, had their throats slit by an unknown assailant or assailants.

The level of degeneracy to which one must sink to do this to a child is hard to fathom, but to actually celebrate the brutal murders of little children puts one outside the community of civilized humanity altogether. These people are simply savages:

Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy "is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank."

What sort of people are these who take joy in the murder of helpless children? The words of John Calvin leap to mind: "Total depravity".

Japanese Tsunami

Dramatic video of the moment the tsunami struck a fishing village along the Japanese coast:

The death toll is expected to exceed 10,000. They need our prayers and our help.

Dumbing Down America

No one wants dumb cops working their neighborhoods, but that's what they're likely to get in Dayton, Ohio according to this story:

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits. It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

“It becomes a safety issue for the people of our community,” said Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President, Randy Beane. “It becomes a safety issue to have an incompetent officer next to you in a life and death situation."

Not even the NAACP supports the DOJ decision:

“The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed,” agreed Dayton NAACP President Derrick Forward. “If you lower the score for any group of people, you're not getting the best qualified people for the job,” Forward said.

This case is a window into how the liberal mind works and how they solve problems. If there are too few minorities passing the test, just lower the score needed to pass and the problem is solved. If crime is too high all we need do is decriminalize a few things like assault and battery and the crime statistics will plummet. If poverty is a problem just lower the income level below which someone is considered poor and, presto!, poverty is reduced, or even eliminated. If we followed this policy with enough resolve we could pretty soon be living in a crime and poverty-free utopia.

Wouldn't it seem more sensible, even to the folks at the DOJ, to make the police force applicant pool smarter, to insist that young men get a good education so they can qualify for good jobs, than to just water down the eligibility standards for service on the force?

Consider the message that the DOJ is sending young black males: They're telling them that they don't really need a good education to get a decent job. They're telling them that school isn't all that important, and if young black men aren't as well-educated as others applying for the same position, that's okay. We'll just lower the bar for them so that pretty much anyone can jump over it.

Come to think of it, maybe somebody lowered the bar for employment at the DOJ, too.

The King Hearings

Paul Berman is a scholar and writer. He's also a man of the left which makes his book Terror and Liberalism all the more remarkable. In it Berman traces the strange enchantment liberalism has had for terrorists over the last several decades. In Berman's telling the left has been inexplicably blind to the threat posed by Islamic extremists and much too willing to form alliances with those extremists in order to achieve mutual political goals.

I thought of Berman's book when I read about the reaction of the Democrats to the investigation being launched by Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, into the threat posed by Muslim extremism. King is conducting hearings on domestic terrorism arising out of the Muslim community, and, predictably, the left is having a hissy fit. The Democrats on the committee are registering every complaint they (and the Muslim Brotherhood) can think of to discredit the hearings.

Their objections are intellectually vacuous or incoherent, so much so that one would think they'd be embarrassed to make them, but some of our elected representatives, like Sheila Jackson Lee for instance, seem to have an exceptionally high threshold for intellectual embarrassment:

Rep. Al Green (D, TX) objected that King is investigating Muslims but not the KKK, but how many acts of mass murder has the Klan committed in the last fifty years? The Klan has been so compromised by law enforcement that it has long ago ceased to be a significant threat in this country. To waste resources investigating a minimal danger when Islamic extremists plot catastrophic acts of murder is simply asinine.

Perhaps Ms Lee, Mr. Green and their colleagues wish to maintain that attempts by young Muslim men to commit horrifying acts of mayhem are not a serious problem in this country. If they don't think this then what's their objection to holding hearings to learn more about the milieu in which people who want to kill our children are being spawned? If, however, they do think that Muslim terrorism is not a serious threat then they're certainly out of synch with their party's chief law enforcement officer.

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. once acknowledged that the threat of Islamic terrorism keeps him awake at night. As Rep. King notes, Holder "is not saying he's staying awake at night because of what's coming from anti-abortion demonstrators or environmental extremists or from Neo-Nazis. It's the radicalization right now in the Muslim community" that has him worried.

Certainly no one thinks all Muslims are domestic terrorists, as the lachrymose Rep. Keith Ellison implies (see below), but it is surely the case that almost all domestic terrorists, at least those who have attempted large scale terrorist acts in the last decade, have been Muslims. Let's try to learn why that is and what must be done to stop it, and let's take the problem more seriously than does Mr. Ellison:

The Absolute Madness of Biofuels

Robert Bryce at the Washington Times explains why the President needs to get over his infatuation with biofuels. All that this short-sighted policy is accomplishing is to make life harder for those who are already hungry, and to provoke food riots around the world. But aren't biofuels good for the environment? What's the connection between biofuels and food?

Mr. Bryce explains:

Last month, Peter Brabeck, the chairman of the Swiss food giant Nestle, declared that using food crops to make biofuels was “absolute madness.” The epicenter of that madness is the U.S. corn-ethanol sector. This year, it will consume 40 percent of all U.S. corn - that’s about 15 percent of global corn production or 5 percent of all global grain - in order to produce a volume of motor fuel with the energy equivalent of about 0.6 percent of global oil needs.

Congress lavishes about $7 billion in annual subsidies, mandates and tariff protections upon an industry that is helping push global food prices to all-time highs and shrink grain reserves at the very same time that global grain production is faltering and protests over food prices are becoming common.

The quantity of grain to be consumed this year for ethanol production - 4.9 billion bushels - boggles the mind. That’s more than twice as much as all the corn produced in Brazil and more than six times as much as is grown in India. Put another way, that’s more corn than the output of the European Union, Mexico, Argentina and India combined.

All that food is being used for fuel, and as the the demand for corn rises, it increases the demand for, and thus the price of, other grains as well. This makes grain-fed meat more expensive, and makes it very difficult for poor people to buy food:

Despite these facts, President Obama said last month in his State of the Union speech, “We can break our dependence on oil with biofuels.”

Soaring food prices led to violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia. Worries about adequate food stocks led several countries to ban food exports.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen food price increases and protests that are reminiscent of 2008. There have been food riots in Algeria and Mozambique. Last month, about 8,000 Jordanians protested in the streets of Amman and other cities over rising food prices. In Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, wheat prices are up by 30 percent over the past 12 months. Those higher wheat prices are being stoked by rising corn prices, which have doubled over the past six months and are at about $7 per bushel. “Higher corn prices always means higher wheat prices,” says Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, an Omaha-based commodity consulting firm.

In December, a study by two U.S. agriculture economists, Thomas Elam and Steve Meyer, found that corn prices are being directly stoked by demand from the ethanol sector. Mr. Elam and Mr. Meyer, who have done consulting work for the meat industry, found that without the ethanol mandates, the average price of corn would be lower by more than $2 per bushel. They also conclude that “biofuels policy has caused significant cost increases for all users of feedgrains.”

Bryce has more details about how the demand for corn for use in biofuel diminishes the amount of corn available for food and raises the price of most of the food we buy. For many of us it's just a matter of tightening our belt but for people who live everyday on the edge of starvation it's a calamity.

An unnecessary calamity at that. In the name of reducing pollution we're increasing starvation. Perhaps this makes sense to Mr. Obama, but I doubt that it makes sense to an Ethiopian mother who spends most of her waking hours trying to scrounge together enough grain to feed her hungry children a single pancake each day.

Ugly Americans

Frenzied mob scenes in the capitol building, death threats directed to GOP lawmakers, mobs trying to break the windows of lawmakers' cars, recall petitions being circulated to force GOP lawmakers out of office. This is the modern progressive left. Either the taxpayers and their representatives let them have their way or they'll throw a tantrum in the streets.

The Republican legislators have been called cowards for passing this bill, but that's simply, and typically, absurd. These men and women have been exceedingly brave to stand up to the mobs of people screaming at them, thugs trying to intimidate them, and the threats against themselves, their families, and their homes. On the other hand, if you want to see cowardice consider the Democratic senators who fled the state rather than stand and fight.

In light of the fact that I've not heard a single criticism of the Madison demonstrators' behavior on any mainstream news media outlet, I hope the people in the major media have a sufficient sense of shame to never again talk about incivility among the tea-partiers. If they do they deserve to be treated with utter scorn and derision.

One last thought: I wonder how many of the protestors in the Wisconsin capitol were university students and public employee union members. It seems from the pics that it could be a sizable majority. That means that most of the people demanding that the taxpayers continue to fork over their cash are people who either pay no taxes themselves or live off the taxes paid by others. Swell.

Hot Air has a good summary of events.

Baptists and Muslims

Most people who have commented on the Snyder v. Phelps case agree that the behavior and views of Mr. Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are contemptible and not deserving of the respect of decent people. Many commentators and cartoonists have reviled and mocked them in print, not just for their awful behavior at funerals, but for the beliefs they hold about homosexuality and American decadence.

But here's an interesting thing. The Westboro baptists are on the fringe of American Christianity, but they're roundly condemned for holding views that are actually in the mainstream of American Islam.

Whether it's their conviction that God hates homosexuals, or that God rejoices in the deaths of American soldiers, or that America is a fundamentally decadent society which deserves to be destroyed, there are a lot of devout Muslims in this country who would fervently assent to all of these.

So why do the media and others, if they find the views of the Westboro baptists so revolting, bend over backward to extend the palm of good will, understanding, and tolerance to other Americans who believe the same thing, but do so under the aegis of a different religion?

It might be replied that Muslims don't declare their beliefs at soldiers' funerals, but is this restraint due to the dictates of decorum or of prudence. Is it that Muslims simply have more sense than the Westboro folks and realize that there's no point in alienating the entire population of non-Muslim America, or is it that Muslims have a stronger sense of propriety and don't wish to offend the families of the soldiers who have died in combat against other Muslims?

Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I'll bet it's more often the former than the latter. At any rate, I wish those inclined to mock and despise Fred Phelps and his clan would ask themselves how they would respond if it wasn't the Westboro Baptist church they were ridiculing, but rather members of the local mosque. If their response would be different, if they'd probably not draw that cartoon if it were Muslims holding those placards, maybe they should ask themselves why.

Here's a video of one of Fred Phelps' daughters on Fox News Sunday last weekend. She's a lawyer and she seems very bright, but I can't imagine that she says very much here that, mutatis mutandis, many devout Muslims in this country wouldn't agree with.

As a postscript I wonder whether the Supreme Court majority in Snyder v. Phelps would have ruled the same way had people stood outside a Muslim funeral with signs that instead of saying Thank God for Dead Soldiers read Thank God for Dead Muslims. I suspect the Supreme Court would have found that intolerable, as they should, but then why is it not intolerable when the funeral is for a Marine?

The Über-Bush

For those who supported George W. Bush's treatment of foreign tyrants and terrorists it's hard to criticize President Obama's treatment of the same, except for his hypocrisy. After campaigning as the anti-Bush and blaming the "failed policies of the past", i.e. Bush's policies, for America's diminished standing in the world, Mr. Obama has pretty much transformed himself from the anti-Bush into the über-Bush.

He stayed with Bush's plan in Iraq, ramped up the predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan and surged troop strength in Afghanistan. He has retained both the Patriot act and, as far as I know, Bush's policy of prisoner rendition. He has refused to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and has recently resumed military tribunals for terrorists there. Next we'll be reading, perhaps, that he's given the go-ahead for "enhanced interrogations".

There's rich irony in all this. Having persuaded over 50% of American voters in 2008 that he was the avatar of hope and change, American families are less hopeful after two years of Mr. Obama than they've been in thirty five years, and the only change we've seen is in our national debt, the unemployment numbers, and the cost of fuel. Everything else, including our forays into the Middle East, seems to have remained the same.

One wonders where the anti-war left is now that Mr. Obama appears to be preparing to wage war against Libya. If George W. Bush had no justification for going to war with Iraq, as most on the left claimed, surely President Obama has far less justification for going to war with Libya. Who does Libya threaten other than the rebels who are seeking to depose Moammar Qaddafi?

Perhaps the justice of a war, in the eyes of the left, is a matter not of the actual circumstances leading up to a conflict but rather of who is in the White House giving the order to commence hostilities. I suppose we'll soon find out if that's true.

Premarital Sex and Monogamy

Russ Douthat has a fine column on "premarital" sexual behavior at the New York Times. I put premarital in quotes because Douthat makes an important distinction between different kinds of premarital sexual behavior. I'll let him explain:

[T]here are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill-considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

There's more to reflect upon in Douthat's column, particularly the trends that are showing up in studies of teenage sexuality as well as why so many social conservatives find the underlying philosophy of organizations like Planned Parenthood to be antithetical to women's long-term mental well-being. Check it out.

Interview with Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is one of the most prolific of our contemporary historians. He's written numerous books, big books on big themes. Modern Times, a history of most of the twentieth century, is perhaps his most well-known. Wall Street Journal editor Brian Carney caught up with the 82 year-old scholar in his London home recently where they sat down for an interview. Here's a sample of some of the interesting things Johnson says:

"Of course I worry about America," he says. "The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America—a marvelous country. But in a sense I don't worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths—particularly its freedom of thought and expression—that it's going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world."

Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America's decline "since the 18th century." But whenever things are looking bad, America "suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That's cheered me up no end. Because it's done more for women in politics than anything else—all the feminists? Nuts! It's brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it." Then he deepens his voice for effect and adds: "And I like that lady—Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib."

The former governor of Alaska, he says, "is in the good tradition of America, which this awful political correctness business goes against." Plus: "She's got courage. That's very important in politics. You can have all the right ideas and the ability to express them. But if you haven't got guts, if you haven't got courage the way Margaret Thatcher had courage—and [Ronald] Reagan, come to think of it. Your last president had courage too—if you haven't got courage, all the other virtues are no good at all. It's the central virtue."

Johnson expatiates on a number of other topics including the turmoil in the Middle East:

In 1848, he explains, "Practically every country in Europe, except England of course . . . had a revolution and overthrew the government, at any rate for a time. So that is something which historically is well-attested and the same thing has happened here in the Middle East."

Here he injects a note of caution: "But I notice it's much more likely that a so-called dictatorship will be overthrown if it's not a real dictatorship. The one in Tunisia wasn't very much. Mubarak didn't run a real dictatorship [in Egypt]. Real dictatorships in that part of the world," such as Libya, are a different story.

As for Moammar Gadhafi, "We'll see if he goes or not. I think he's a real baddie, so we hope he will." The Syrian regime, he adds, "not so long ago in Hama . . . killed 33,000 people because they rose up." Then, "above all," there is Iran. "If we can get rid of that horrible regime in Iran," he says, "that will be a major triumph for the world."

If you enjoyed Johnson's books you'll enjoy the rest of this interview. You can find it here.

Thoughts on Libya

There's growing criticism of the Obama administration, especially from conservatives, for not "doing something" in Libya, but I'm not sure exactly what he should do, and, in fact, I'm not convinced that he should do anything.

There've been calls for imposition of a "no-fly" zone to protect the rebels from Qaddafi's air force, but why should we get involved in that? When we established a no-fly zone in Iraq it was to protect the Kurdish people from being slaughtered from the air by Saddam after we had urged them to rise against him. Having failed to support them in their uprising we at least owed them the protection of air cover. We were also technically still in a state of war with Saddam after the first Persian Gulf war, and his use of his air force violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the cease-fire agreement. Moreover, Saddam was directly targeting women and children, killing them not only with rockets and machine gun fire but also with chemicals (that we had provided him during his decade long war with Iran).

Nothing like that is happening in Libya, at least as far as I've been able to glean from news reports. Qaddafi is using his planes against rebel forces, not to commit genocide, but to defeat the rebels. There are civilian casualties, to be sure, but many of those are coming from infantry and artillary fire. If Qaddafi starts to kill civilians with his ground troops should we then go in with ground troops of our own? If so, then what? What happens after we, at great cost, depose Qaddafi? Do we stay and build a democratic state like we've tried to do in Iraq? Can we afford that burden?

A "no-fly zone" is not antiseptic. If we impose one, hundreds of Libyans will die since we would have to attack their anti-aircraft and radar installations and probably their airfields.

I don't see where we have a justification for getting involved, or what national interest we have at stake in Libya. If Qaddafi turns his guns on his people as Saddam did on the Kurds then we have a humanitarian obligation to do what we can, perhaps, to protect them, but failing that we should just stay out of it and root, if we wish, for the rebels.

Some have suggested that the world's oil supply is at risk and that we should protect the oil fields from sabotage, but we get less than 3% of our oil from Libya. If oil is a concern then let China do something about it. They get a lot more of their petroleum from Libya than we do. Why should we expend blood and treasure to protect China's economy?

This is hard for me to say because I despise Qaddafi who was surely behind the Pan Am 103 bombing, but if we are going to punish Qaddafi for Lockerbie then we should say so and go after Qaddafi directly and not his military. Going after him for Lockerbie, however, would be extremely awkward since we largely absolved him of the crime after he renounced his nuclear weapons ambitions.

All things considered, unless Qaddafi unleashes his arms against the Libyan people, then I don't see what business we have getting into that fight other than, perhaps, in a non-combat support role for other Arab or African countries which may wish to come to the aid of the rebels.

Meanwhile, someone needs to ask the Sean Hannitys of the world, the next time they criticize the Obama administration for dithering on Libya, exactly what they propose he should do.

Snyder Family's Legal Costs

The family of Matthew Snyder, which sued the Westboro Baptist church for protesting at Matthew's funeral, has run up legal costs of about $120,000. If you'd like to help defray those costs you can go here and follow the link to make a donation. None of the donated money will go to the Snyders themselves or to their attorneys who are working pro bono.

Tale of Two Cities

Eric Allie illustrates the lopsided struggle that beleagured taxpayers in Madison, Wisconsin have had in trying to defend themselves from powerful public employees unions.

The overwhelming support of the liberal media for the public employees unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere against taxpayers who have heretofore had no one in Madison to fight on their behalf and who finally decided last November to do something about it, has, according to Michael Ramirez, inspired Col. Qaddafi's advisors in Tripoli:

These two cartoons cause us to wonder. Is there not a similarity between the relatively weak Libyan people demanding to be set free from the oppression of those who are bleeding them dry in Tripoli so that they can live in relative security, and the taxpayers of Wisconsin who, through their elected representatives, are demanding the same thing? Why would those who side with the people in Libya side with the public employee unions in Wisconsin?

Progressives

Steve Hayward at No Left Turns draws some distinctions between the very earliest twentieth century liberal progressives and their modern namesakes:

But in other ways today's Progressives depart radically from the Progressives of a hundred years ago. Two come to mind as we approach the 2012 election season. Teddy Roosevelt and his "Bull Moose" Progressive Party saw itself explicitly as a bulwark against socialism, and TR and other leading Progressives rejected the language of class conflict. Most of today's Progressives are stealth socialists, and make class conflict a central organizing principle.

Second, the Progressive movement, and TR's party in 1912, was suffused with the spirit of Protestant evangelical Christianity, as Sid Milkis points out in his fine book on the 1912 election. The conventioneers sang and swayed to Christian hymns including "Onward Christian Soldiers," and TR's famous oration to the convention began with the ringing call that "we stand at Armageddon" ready "to battle for the Lord." That kind of language at a Democratic Party convention today would get you arrested; no group is more estranged from the agenda of today's Progressivism than Protestant evangelical Christians. William Jennings Bryan, were he alive today, would be run out of the Democratic Party faster than you can say "Joe Lieberman."

For a succinct example of the modern progressive/socialist mind listen to Michael Moore sounding like he just walked out of the pages of Orwell's Animal Farm:

There's plenty of cash out there if only we'd just take it from the people who have it. Aside from the sheer injustice of Moore's proposal, the question that someone needs to put to Mr. Moore is, "Then what?". What do we do when there are no more "haves" from whom to take? What do we do when everybody's sitting in the wagon and there's nobody left to pull it?

It really is risible listening to Moore sound like a socialist Mother Teresa. According to Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times, Moore is the same person who is suing the producers of his film Fahrenheit 9/11 for almost three million dollars in unpaid profits that he claims are owed to him. His career is built on denouncing capitalism while he himself makes multimillions through the free market. He travels in a private plane and a fleet of SUVs. He claims to come from working class roots, but in fact grew up in a middle class home and attended a private school. His father was prosperous enough to play golf most every day at a private club. He criticizes middle class whites for fleeing the cities, attributing this to white racism, while he, himself, lives in a swanky mansion in an upscale, almost exclusively white community in Michigan. He neither hires blacks for senior positions in his films nor likes paying union wages for workers on his sets. He also invests in many of the companies he has disparaged and employs accountants to minimize his tax liability to the U.S. Treasury, while demanding, of course, that others pay more.

To the extent that Michael Moore is representative of many on the Left his unprincipled conduct is a serious indictment of the hypocrisy of these people and of the policies that they would foist on everyone else while doing all they can themselves to escape their effects.

Hawking's Hidden Premise

I have no doubt that Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man. He forgets more mathematics in one day than I could learn in my lifetime. But there's an interesting thing about intellectual brilliance. Often, when a very bright scientist seeks to defend a philosophically dubious position, they wind up saying the craziest things.

At about 1:15 in the clip below, Professor Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, states via his synthesizer that, "The life we have on earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe."

Despite the complete lack of any plausible explanation for how life could have generated itself, Hawking assumes that it must have. Notice the hidden premise in what he says. Put into a syllogism his argument seems to be something like:

1) We don't understand how life began.

2) Whatever we don't understand the beginning of must be self-generating.

3) Therefore life must have generated itself.

Premise 2) is implicit in his argument, but it's just nonsense. What grounds does Hawking have for ruling out the possibility that life (or anything else whose beginning we don't understand - e.g. the cosmos) is the product of a purposeful intelligent agent - a mind?

Logically he has none. Psychologically he has only his own metaphysical preference for naturalism. One expects more rigor than this from an intellect as celebrated as is Hawking's.

We can formulate his argument another way:

4) Life exists.

5) Whatever exists was either self-generated (spontaneously organized) or generated by something else.

6) There is no other possible "something else" which could cause life.

7) Therefore, life must be self-generated.

Again, 5) is dubious - there's no evidence that life can self-organize - and 6) is simply false. It's certainly possible that a mind exists capable of creating life. Hawking cannot rationally dismiss the possibility, and as long as it's possible that such a mind created life he cannot rationally assert that life must have self-organized.

Are there good reasons to think that a mind is responsible for life? I think so. Stephen Meyer, in his book Signature in the Cell, suggests a third argument. His formulation is much more rigorous, of course, than my summary of it here, and is certainly more compelling than Professor Hawking's effort:

8) Complex, specified information (CSI) is ubiquitous in, and essential to, living things.

9) We have no experience of CSI being produced by random, natural processes (RNP).

10) We have abundant experience of CSI being produced by minds.

11) The conclusion that CSI in living things is best explained by minds comports better with our experience than does the conclusion that it is best explained by RNP.

12) That which comports with our experience is superior, as a scientific explanation, to explanations based on that of which we have no experience.

13) Therefore, the better scientific explanation for CSI in living things is that it is the product of a mind rather than RNP.

14) We should always believe the better explanation rather than the weaker one.

15) Therefore, we should believe that the CSI in living things is the product of a mind.

Casey Luskin has more on Hawking's logic at Evolution News and Views.

Is George Bush a Modern Lawrence of Arabia?

Charles Krauthammer makes the case at NRO that demands for freedom in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world are largely the fruit of the policies of George W. Bush. It was Bush who, almost alone on the world stage, and certainly without the support of Democrats, including the current president, insisted that residing in every human heart was a desire to be free of oppression and tyranny, whether imposed by mullahs or secular autocrats.

When Mr. Obama ascended to the White House he tried to make it clear that no more would the United States be the champion of such foolish idealistic notions. Indeed, he obsequiously apologized for the very American efforts that have today partly inspired so many to take to the streets to rid themselves of their oppressors.

Here's Krauthammer:

Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, it’s not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed “realism” of years one and two of President Obama’s foreign policy — the “smart power” antidote to Bush’s alleged misty-eyed idealism. It began on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first Asia trip, when she publicly played down human-rights concerns in China. The administration also cut aid for democracy promotion in Egypt by 50 percent. And cut civil-society funds — money for precisely the organizations we now need to help Egyptian democracy — by 70 percent.

This new realism reached its apogee with Obama’s reticence and tardiness in saying anything in support of the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. On the contrary, Obama made clear that nuclear negotiations with the discredited and murderous regime (talks that a child could see would go nowhere) took precedence over the democratic revolutionaries in the street — to the point where demonstrators in Tehran chanted “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them.”

Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman, however, the administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.

Mr. Obama's sprint to catch up to the bandwagon probably won't impress Arabs and Persians who realize that the real inspiration, the real heavy lifting, was supplied by the Bush administration of which Mr. Obama has been unrelentingly critical. Krauthammer finishes with this:

[W]hat’s unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press. Its democracy is fragile and imperfect — last week, security forces cracked down on demonstrators demanding better services — but were Egypt to be as politically developed in, say, a year as Iraq is today, we would think it a great success.

For Libyans, the effect of the Iraq War is even more concrete. However much bloodshed they face, they have been spared the threat of genocide. Qaddafi was so terrified by what we did to Saddam & Sons that he bargained away his weapons of mass destruction. For a rebel in Benghazi, that is no small matter.

Yet we have been told incessantly how Iraq poisoned the Arab mind against America. Really? Where is the rampant anti-Americanism in any of these revolutions? It’s Yemen’s president and the delusional Qaddafi who are railing against American conspiracies to rule and enslave. The demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Iran, and Libya have been straining their eyes for America to help. They are not chanting the antiwar slogans — remember “No blood for oil”? — of the American Left.

Why would they? America is leaving Iraq having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, and having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy. This, after Iraq’s purple-fingered exercises in free elections seen on television everywhere set an example for the entire region.

If things turn out well for the long-suffering people of Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Iran it will be in no small part because the United States, under President Bush, showed them what was possible.

The Camel's Nose

One of the major problems in philosophy, particularly for those of a materialist disposition, is what is called the "hard problem" of consciousness, i.e. how do the material structures of the brain translate physical stimuli into an immaterial sensation (a quale). What, in fact, is a "sensation" anyway? How, for example, does the experience we call "sweet" arise from the interaction of sugar molecules with sensory neurons?

The materialist assumption has been that since the brain is a physical structure, and since everything that happens in the brain can be explained in terms of chemistry, conscious experience must be ultimately explicable in terms of chemical reactions in the cells of the brain. Unfortunately, for materialism this assumption just doesn't seem to be supported by the science.

In a lengthy review of a pair of books on the subject, neuroscientist Raymond Tallis explains why. Here's an appetizer for those who may be interested in the subject:

The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between human life in the library or the operating theatre and animal life in the jungle or the savannah are more apparent than real: at the most, matters of degree rather than kind.

These beliefs are based on elementary errors. Just because neural activity is a necessary condition of consciousness, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of consciousness, still less that it is identical with it. And Darwinising human life confuses the organism Homo sapiens with the human person, biological roots with cultural leaves. Nevertheless, the coupling of neuromania and Darwinitis has given birth to emerging disciplines based on neuro-evolutionary approaches to human psychology, economics, social science, literary criticism, aesthetics, theology and the law.

These pseudo-disciplines are flourishing in academe and are covered extensively in the popular press, in articles usually accompanied by a brain scan (described by the writer Matt Crawford as a "fast-acting solvent of critical faculties"). Only last month, David Brooks asserted in the New Yorker that "brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy".

If one is wedded to the belief that the physical is all there is then, of course, the phenomena we associate with consciousness just have to be ultimately reducible to chemical processes, but what if they're not? That would imply that there's more to reality than just material "stuff", and that would be very unsettling to those who have invested their entire professional careers in trying to provide justification for a materialist or naturalistic worldview.

If there really are immaterial entities like minds which somehow interact with brains in producing the effects of consciousness then what else might there be lurking about "out there"? Immaterial mind is the nose of the supernatural camel pushing its way into the tent of naturalism. It's a very unwelcome camel, and it'll do a lot of damage to the furniture once it gets in.

Surprising Numbers

George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center summarizes a recent report from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research which has published their annual "Status of Global Mission". The report, says Weigel, is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative:

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines "martyrs" as "believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility." The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every twenty-four hours over the past decade, such that "the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately one million." Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33% of world population -- a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7%), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5%). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attenders, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or "worship centers," up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

Compared to the world's 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: as of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every twenty-four hours.

This is indeed interesting. We're often led to believe that atheism is growing, and perhaps it is in America and Europe, but, on the other hand, perhaps those reports of an ascendent atheism are overblown. I wouldn't be surprised. Atheism offers its adherents little more than a hopeless, empty life with no ultimate explanation for the universe, no ground for moral conviction, and no basis for human worth, dignity, or rights. Nothing but the prospect of meaningless life followed by eternal annihilation. Little wonder their numbers are declining.

We're also sometimes given to believe that Islam is burgeoning and will swamp the world in terms of sheer numbers before too long, but if this report is accurate Islam is actually losing ground vis a vis Christianity.

Weigel offers much more detail at the link and readers interested in this report should check it out. He closes with this:

The Big Lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain's famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in western Europe, but it's on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism -- displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict's September 2010 visit to Great Britain -- may have something to do with the shrewder atheists' fear that they're losing, and the clock is running.

All this may be true on a global scale, but it's hard to escape the feeling that here in the United States the trends are less hopeful. Much of the growth of Christianity, at least a Christianity more muscular than the nominal nebulosity of much mainstream religion in America, is occurring in the third world. Perhaps we'll soon be receiving their missionaries here, coming to convert the heathen. Wouldn't that be ironic?

Live Ammo in Madison

Law enforcement authorities discovered dozens of rounds of live ammunition outside the Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin this morning:

Dane County deputies found 11 rounds near the State street entrance Thursday morning, said UW-Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling. Twenty-nine rounds were found near the King Street entrance, and one round was found near the North Hamilton Street entrance, Riseling said.

Well, of course. Wasn't there a group of tea-partiers there a week or so ago? Who else would be bringing firearms to a political protest? Surely not the gentle folks of SEIU or any of the other leftist groups who populated the grounds throughout the last two weeks. Progressives, as we all know, abhor guns and violence.