The Company We Keep

Imagine, if you will, that Laura Bush invited to the White House a celebrity who had praised people who had murdered blacks and whose writings and utterances contained veiled references to the merits of assassinating President Clinton. Do you not think that the nation would be appalled and that the outrage would be so incandescent as to force Mrs. Bush to rescind the invitation?

Now imagine that so far from the First Lady revoking the invitation the White House Press Secretary actually defended it by asserting that the overall body of work of this celebrity includes many positive messages and that he shouldn't be judged on the basis of a few unfortunate artistic flourishes. Do you think that would fly? Should it?

Surely not, but if it wasn't Laura Bush who brought this celebrity into the White House, but rather Michelle Obama, and the invited guest was a rapper who praised a cop-killer and suggested that George Bush be "burned", well, then, judging by the left's indifference to Ms Obama's invitation to this gentleman, that's apparently no big deal.

It really is enlightening to see the sorts of people the Obamas consort with and how the left reacts to their associations. It tells us much about who they are.

Another guest at Ms Obama's soiree was a black female writer named Jill Scott who acknowledged in a column at Essence that she "winced" when she learned that a black male friend had married a Caucasian woman. "Winced"? Aren't we past that? Would a white poet receive a hearing in the White House if she had admitted that she winced when she learned that a white male friend had married a black woman?

Ms Scott denies that her comment was motivated by racism and she gives, I think, a reasonable explanation for why she said what she did, but how many white people have had their careers ruined for remarks that were just as innocent? Remember Trent Lott saying on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday that he would have made a fine president? No one has heard from Lott since. Indeed, how many people have been called racist for no other reason than that they opposed Mr. Obama's profligacy?

Apparently, what's considered racism when a white person says it is considered unexceptional when a black person says it. At least that seems to be the case in the Obama White House.

The Epidemic of Sex-Trafficking

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has built quite a legacy, but it's not the legacy that most people will talk about when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. His real legacy can be found in an article by Chuck Neubauer in The Washington Times. Neubauer never mentions Hefner nor anything that's usually associated with the man who more than any other single person gave the sexual revolution its impetus and its intellectual justification, but his legacy is implicit in every paragraph of Neubauer's column.

Neubauer writes about the epidemic of sex-trafficking in the United States and the stories he tells and the statistics he cites are truly shocking. The whole article should be read, but meanwhile here are a few facts he cites about sex abuse, not in Thailand or Africa, but in the U.S.:

1.6 million children younger than 18 — native and foreign-born — have been caught up in this country’s sex trade.

Analysts say the number of children sexually exploited in the U.S. or at risk of being exploited is between 100,000 and 300,000.

The average age of entry into the sex trafficking industry in the U.S. is between 12 and 14 years old.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the lead agency in trafficking investigations, has estimated that 800,000 people are trafficked into sex and forced-labor situations throughout the world every year.

The story of "Jane" is typical:

Jane’s fall into the world of sex trafficking began in May 2008, just before her 15th birthday. Jackson, her pimp, forced her to work as a prostitute in Portland. When she protested, he beat her. “He made me believe I was not human and I was just for one thing — to make money for him,” she said, calling her life a nightmare and suffering bruises and scars from many beatings.

Asked why she didn’t leave, she said, “I had nowhere to go. I didn’t know anybody. Where was I to go? He threatened to kill me all the time.”

On one occasion when he got mad because she had not made enough money, she said, he pushed her down and punched her in the face, saying, “You are going to die tonight.” She said she pleaded for her life and promised to do whatever he said: “Just don’t kill me. I thought I was going to die.”

Of that beating, the FBI later said, “She awoke to find Jackson holding a firearm at her head and swearing on his mother’s life that he would kill her.” The bureau said that “several times a week,” Jackson choked her, pulled her hair, pushed her and struck her with his hands, a belt and a coffee pot, and that he “tried to bite off her finger.”

“I trusted him even after all this stuff. After he abused me, I still thought it was love — I thought that this is how it was supposed to be. … Most of our arguments were about money,” she said, adding that she had sex with six men a day, sometimes eight or nine. “I was bringing him $600 a day, but he wanted more.”

Jane got out of that life when she was arrested in October 2008 and an FBI agent asked her whether she wanted to go to Children of the Night, where she now lives. She said it was the first time she was treated like a victim instead of a criminal. “I had the FBI on my side. I could actually tell they were trying to help me,” she said.

So what does any of this have to do with Hugh Hefner? Hefner never advocated this kind of thing, did he? He was big on consensual, uncoerced, recreational sex with no strings attached, wasn't he? Yes, but.

Hefner's Playboy empire gave Americans and others a big push out on to a hedonistic slippery slope. He persuaded the post-war generation to detach sex from morality and thus from marriage. When sex is detached from marriage it is perforce detached from commitment. When sex no longer entails a commitment then marriage as an institution is gravely weakened. When that happens millions of girls grow up either without a father or in the same house as their mother's live-in boyfriend.

Fatherless girls become easy prey for male sexual abuse. The most dangerous place for a young girl is in a home where there are adult males who are not her biological father, and the number of such homes exploded in the 1970s as marriages fell apart. The increase in fatherless homes was due largely to three interrelated phenomena: easy divorce, easy contraception, and the belief that sex had little, if anything, to do with marriage, a belief that was central to Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy".

Today that "philosophy" is bearing its tragic fruit in the epidemic of sex-trafficking which ensnares and ruins the lives of countless thousands of girls every year. These girls by the tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands are sexually abused, forced into prostitution, or forced into pornography, or, commonly, all three. A "never-ending stream" of abused girls, as one who works with these girls put it. That's the legacy of the sexual revolution. That's the legacy of the Playboy Philosophy.

Way to go Hef.

Tracking Down the FOOLs

A piece at Strategy Page explains the significance of the data seized in the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. Here's the crux of it:

It works like this. In the last five years, counter-terror operations in Iraq were increasingly concentrating on chasing down specific terrorists and their organizations. The amount of intelligence residing in databases, plus the daily flow of new information made it possible to track terrorist cells and chase after them with high confidence that they would be caught. There were a lot of Islamic terrorists out there in Iraq, but by 2007 they had to spend most of their time on OpSec (operational security, making sure that they, or their bomb making workshops, are not discovered.)

For years, every night in Iraq, about a dozen known bad guys were hauled in. Some of these men gave up their buddies, or incriminating documents or other evidence (often fingerprints) would do it. Since about 2005, U.S. troops were fingerprinting every suspicious character they came across. The guy they turned loose several years earlier for lack of evidence, may end up on a wanted list today because his prints were now found all over some warm weapons or bomb making materials. Prints can even be lifted off some fragments of exploded bombs.

The army and marines have been doing the same thing police forces and corporations have been doing for over a decade; taking data from many different sources and quickly sorting out what all the pieces mean. It's called fusion and data mining, and it's a weapon that is having a dramatic impact on what many thought was an unwinnable war.

The final factor in this trend was the parallel growth of raiding and command techniques. American troops developed organizations, equipment and tactics that enabled them to rapidly and safely (for both the raiders and the arrested) go after suspects in dense residential areas (or farms in rural areas). You didn't hear much about this, because these raids did not generate casualties or the kind of violence that grabs headlines.

American commanders and headquarters also learned how to plan and execute these raids very quickly (sometimes within minutes of new information being discovered.) This meant that, after a terrorist hideout was raided, information found there could generate additional raids in less than an hour. The new raids often caught terrorists who had not yet heard of the earlier raid that turned up the data putting them on the American radar. Speed was a weapon, and it took years to develop a superior amount of it.

The same techniques were applied in Afghanistan, and to the war on terror in general. Thus seizing all that data in bin Laden's house provided thousands of links, and data on who did what for who and when. Added to existing data, and using the specialized software and databases, will provide sufficient information to launch more raids.

They are probably already underway. But you won't hear about it until somewhat later, because more valuable information, and suspects, will be picked up and lead to still more raids. After weeks, or months, the names of "most wanted" suspects that were arrested or killed will get out. But the big damage is done to the organization of these terrorist groups, and the confidence they once had in their communications, and the people they once trusted.

What I don't understand is why we announced to the world that we had all the data. Why not concoct a story that our SEAL team had to evacuate too quickly to gather up all the computers and thumb drives and so forth? Why not put out a story that we were surprised by how little stuff OBL had on the premises and disappointed that the raid yielded so little information on other terrorists? At least this may have created some uncertainty.

As it is, if all the potential targets the new intelligence helps us find know we have information on them they're bound to hop in their SUVs and head for the nearest cave, but if they were uncertain that we had the information they may have taken the chance that we didn't and stayed in their comfy air-conditioned hideouts.

Anyway, it looks like there'll be some anxious days ahead for the FOOLs (Friends of Osama bin Laden). Come to think of it, I wonder how many of those FOOLs are in the U.S.

Islam Will Dominate the World

Several hundred Muslims protested in London the other day promising death to America and other tedious banalities as they voiced their outrage at the killing of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, it must be remembered, has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, not just on 9/11 but throughout the 1990s, but according to the perverse logic by which extremist Muslims live America had no right to hold him accountable. Osama was a Muslim and, in their febrile minds, it's an intolerable outrage for infidels to avenge themselves against a Muslim. Thankfully, the majority of London Muslims think that the protesters were "nuts", a trenchant assessment to be sure, but the protest still raises questions nonetheless.

For example, the demonstrators displayed signs saying that "Islam Will Dominate the World" which suggests that the demonstrators see the attack on bin Laden as an attack on Islam. Yet many Muslims have insisted that bin Laden is not a true Muslim, so why do the London Muslims view his death as an affront to Islam? Or do these extremists just believe that anyone who is a terrorist and murders innocent Westerners is a quintessential Muslim hero? Is this what Islam has become, at least for them - a religion for terrorists?

I saw a statistic today that said that the population of U.S. Muslims will double by 2030. It's expected that their demographic will rise from the current .8% of the population to 1.7% of the population within twenty years.

This should be cause for some concern given the experience of other countries around the globe with disaffected Muslim populations, and given that many Muslims tend to hold America and our traditional freedoms in very low esteem.

In a book titled Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat, Dr. Peter Hammond writes that (I'm paraphrasing) Islam in its fullest form is a complete, total, 100% system of life. It has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a beard for all the other components. Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their religious privileges. When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the other components tend to creep in as well.

Hammond goes on to observe that as long as the Muslim share of the population is around 2% they live peacefully in their communities, but as their percentage of the population grows they become increasingly fractious.

When they achieve about 5% of the population they begin to demand that the larger society bend to their will, particularly by allowing them to have their own laws and their own courts based on the Koran.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, Hammond claims, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris, we already see car-burnings, riots, and murders. Any insult by a non-Muslim results in violence and threats, such as in Amsterdam where cartoonists have been threatened with death over their depiction of Mohammed in cartoons and Theo Van Gogh was murdered and Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to flee for her life after making a film critical of Islam.

Nations in which the Muslim population reaches 20% have experienced severe social turmoil and conflict with burnings of churches and synagogues, and as the population climbs so does the conflict until bloodletting becomes commonplace.

As Leon Uris has a Muslim character say in The Haj:

"Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel."

Frankly, I don't know what Mr. Choudary is talking about when he says that Islam has so much to offer the West. Looking at the nations where Islam has ruled for over a thousand years it's hard to find one that even Muslims want to live in, which is why, I suppose, there's so much emigration from these countries to the West.

Perhaps as Muslims grow in numbers in the U.S. they'll follow the pattern of so many immigrant groups before them and lay aside the ways of the old country and assimilate into their new home, developing as they do a deeper sensitivity to the rights of those who don't share their beliefs and a deeper appreciation for the value of religious, economic and political freedom. The experience of European Muslims does not give much hope that this will be the case, unfortunately, but then America is not Europe.

Satisfaction and the Nanny State

A couple of things about this piece at Science Daily puzzled me. The article discusses a study that purports to show that people living in countries where there are a lot of government social service programs are generally more satisfied with life than those who live in countries where government is less involved in providing such programs:

Dr. Patrick Flavin, assistant professor of political science at Baylor, said the effect of state intervention into the economy equaled or exceeded marriage when it came to satisfaction. The study is published in the spring issue of the journal Politics & Policy.

The study measured government intervention into the economy in four ways: government tax revenue as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP), government consumption of GDP, generosity of unemployment benefits and a country's welfare expenditures as a percentage of GDP.

"In many cases, less government intervention can allow for a more efficient economy, but greater economic efficiency doesn't necessarily translate into greater contentment with one's life," Flavin said. "If you get sick and can't work or lose your job and there are few social protections in place, you're more likely to be anxious and less satisfied."

Well, I guess so. People who don't have to worry about making a living are probably going to be a lot more content than those who do. They'll also doubtless be more content than those who are making a living and paying for the contentment of those who aren't.

Flavin said the research is focused only on the link between government intervention and life satisfaction and not whether intervention achieves economic growth or such goals as reducing poverty or violent crime. But "to the extent that it is a primary task of democratic governments to secure the well-being of their citizens, studying what government activities make citizens happier helps inform the 'politics vs. markets' debate,'" he said.

This raises an important question. Is it really the primary task of government to "secure the well-being of its citizens"? I don't think so. The primary task of government is to guarantee that citizens are free to pursue their own well-being. When the well-being of citizens is elevated by the state above the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. we usually wind up with some form of totalitarianism.

That government is best which protects our borders, protects our citizens from crime, and protects the rights of citizens to pursue their own dreams. To the extent that government moves beyond these proper functions it inevitably becomes more oppressive.

In any event, I wonder how significant this study is. Just because one can establish a statistical correlation between two variables it doesn't follow that therefore there's a causal connection between them. In other words, the fact, if it is a fact, that those who happen to live in social welfare states are somewhat more content than those who don't doesn't mean that the social welfare state is what's causing the contentment.

God, Science and Atheism

William West at Mercatornet reviews a book by Oxford mathematician John Lennox. Lennox's book, God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God?, is, evidently, a powerful summation of why modern atheism has degenerated into an intellectual zombie. It's still walking around scaring people, but for all intents and purposes, the life is gone out of it. In every arena of public debate atheism is showing itself bereft of the philosophical vigor, vitality and conviction it enjoyed during its prime in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Despite the great success of books written by the New Atheists - or maybe because of that success - more people are experiencing a dawning awareness that atheism simply has few good arguments left in its arsenal and has none that are actually compelling. Atheism has become the naked emperor of modern intellectual life.

Here are a few paragraphs from the first half of West's review:

While “new atheists” Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been grabbing headlines with their bold claims that modern science has killed off God, an Oxford professor has been quietly chipping away at the ground they stand on. John C Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford’s Green Templeton College, has been popping up at debates around the globe to take issue with the most prominent new atheists.

Lennox’s arguments are outlined in his book, God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God? As The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips has written, Lennox’s book provides an “excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion”.

The brilliance of Lennox’s approach is that it does not just concentrate on one academic discipline, like biology. It spans all of the most relevant fields, including cosmology, physics, philosophy, theology and mathematics, offering a compelling case for the view that scientific knowledge, rather than killing God off, actually makes a divine creator necessary.

Drawing on his own discipline, mathematics, Lennox calculates the odds of life arising by chance and concludes that anyone who would bet on those odds must be either deluded or just plain mad. Of course, in the best academic traditions, Dawkins refrains from using such colourful language, but the force of his arguments leaves no room for any other conclusion.

Beginning with the big picture of the universe and planet earth’s place in it, he notes that the ruling view in science is that the universe is not eternal but began with the “big bang” – a view that had not always been accepted by the scientific community.

“The remarkable picture that is gradually emerging from modern physics and cosmology is one of a universe whose fundamental forces are amazingly, intricately, and delicately balanced or ‘fine tuned’ in order for the universe to be able to sustain life,” he writes. “Recent research has shown that many of the fundamental constants of nature, from the energy levels in the carbon atom to the rate at which the universe is expanding, have just the right values for life to exist. Change any of them just a little, and the universe would become hostile to life and incapable of supporting it.”

Here are a few examples Lennox gives of the exquisite precision of the universe's physical structure:

As theoretical physicist Paul Davies confirms, if the ratio of the nuclear strong force to the electromagnetic force had been different by one part in 1016 (that's ten to the sixteenth power) no stars could have formed.

The ratio of the electromagnetic force-constant to the gravitational force-constant must be equally delicately balanced to produce the right size of star to sustain a planet with life. A variation here of only 1 part in 1040 and life becomes impossible. (Davies has commented that this feat is akin to a marksman hitting a coin at the far side of the observable universe, 20 billion light years away.)

An alteration in the ratio of the expansion and contraction forces of the big bang by as little as one part in 1055 at the Planck time (just 10-43 seconds after the origin of the universe) would have led to either too rapid an expansion of the universe with no galaxies forming or to too slow an expansion with consequent rapid collapse.

Lennox goes on to list even more mind-boggling examples of precision-tuning in the universe. Such features of cosmic design were what led Sir Fred Hoyle to state that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about”, and Paul Davies to conclude, simply, “ the impression of design is overwhelming”.

Of course, an atheist could abandon his commitment to science and posit the existence of an infinitude of different universes among which, the laws of probability tell us, there'd have to be at least one just like ours, but then the atheist would have to explain why believing in an infinitude of other universes for which there's no real evidence is not an irrational leap of faith. He'd have to explain why his belief is not more irrational, in fact, than believing that there's an intelligent mind which has engineered the cosmos, a belief for which there is considerable evidence.

It's a whole lot easier to just pretend the problem doesn't exist or to obscure it by going on, as the New Atheists like to do, about the horrors of religious fanaticism, as if that had anything at all to do with the question of whether God exists.

Re: The Gathering Storm

On April 19th and 20th we ran a couple of posts that gave my brother Bill's view of the nation's near-term economic future. Bill is pessimistic that it will work out well. A reader named D.P. who works in the financial sector wrote a response to Bill to which Bill then replied. We give D.P the last word:

Frankly, I was again disappointed in Bill's response, as it included quotes used out of context, and some references that were downright misleading or confusing. For instance, after responding to my "expertise" quote, Bill says "you don't have to be an expert", and immediately references Bill Gross, whom I presume he considers an expert. But, while this retort was confusing, it was also blatantly disingenuous in that I could list a whole cadre of "experts" who have moved the exact opposite of Mr. Gross. It seems Bill missed my general point, which is that no one knows with any certainty what will come tomorrow, and that those sounding off with certainty serve to alarm folks.

Bill's next rebut is aimed at my observations regarding inflation, to which he offers a definition. I searched the web for a definition consistent with his and couldn't find it. Most definitions of inflation were along the lines of this one which I found in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: "a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services". Of course, as I mentioned in my original note, the government’s actions are intentionally inflationary, but so far inflation itself, the broad increase of prices for goods and services, has been very low for a long time. As evidence of inflation Bill focuses on a very narrow example of commodity prices over a very brief period of time (3 months).

This is, of course, not very scientific (and totally, purposefully misleading). I could just as easily reference housing prices or technology or average wages, and for significantly longer periods, to argue for disinflation. My ultimate point is, Bill doesn't know; in fact, industry academics are generally split on what the future holds for prices.

Next, Bill makes a flippant and vapid retort to my critique of his observation that gold is cheap. Come on, Bill, is that the best you could do? I look at the COMEX pricing of gold every day and have yet to see them post it as follows: CHEAP!

As for the dollar's fall, "the point", as Bill says, is to protect one's self from dollar devaluation RELATIVE TO GOODS AND SERVICES PURCHASED! See broad inflation data and previous definitions for reference.

In Bill's next two challenges he attempts to defend himself from my critiques of his use of absolute statements (he should know better!) The first is his reference to a "zero-risk investment". I am dumbfounded that he took issue, as I rightly pointed out that there was, in fact, risk involved. His defense was just as confounding, as he argued, it seems, that the time value of money risk I rightly referenced was minimal (note that he DID NOT argue that it was ZERO!), then his example was no less minimal. Next, he observed that "no entity" was interested in U S debt.

Of course, the US debt is the single largest daily volume security class in the world, but let's not let the facts get in the way. As for his concerns about the FED's involvement, I agree and share his concerns. If this had been his original argument I would not have had anything to critique. Again, confusing.

As for my hope, while I agree it is not a strategy (nor did I present it as such), I stand behind my argument that the future of economic success lies with the individual and one’s drive to live a better life for one's self and one's family. Of course Bill can find narrow examples of human failure, like his Katrina example, but the broader examples in human history, in fact OF human history as a whole, support my argument, and my hope. When faced with an economic doomsday virtually NO ONE I KNOW will curl up in a corner and wither. Rather, they will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to deliver a better life for themselves and their families. Consider everyone you know and see if you don't come to the same conclusion!

Whether D.P. or Bill is correct about the economic future is, as D.P. says, something no one knows. It's my untutored opinion that Bill is surely correct that the FED can't keep printing money, and the government can't keep spending it, without driving us over the cliff. Until the FED and Congress put the brakes on, and until fuel prices stop climbing, I don't see how we can avoid a calamitous outcome. Even so, I hope D.P. is right that things aren't as dire as Bill forecasts and I fear.

Tortured Logic

Christopher Tollefson weighs in on the debate over whether information gleaned from "enhanced" interrogation methods, even if that information led to finding bin Laden, justifies those methods. His essay can be found at First Things.

I wish I could agree with his main point about the absolute immorality of torture, but I can't. I just don't think he makes a compelling case. Here's the heart of his argument:

Given the information that we have to this point, it would be false to claim that enhanced interrogation was responsible for our success in this [the bin Laden] case.

But even if it were, it is imperative that we remember that this is not enough to justify the continued use of such techniques. As I and others have argued, enhanced interrogation techniques claim the greatest potential for success when employed to break down the subject, to damage his bodily and mental integrity to the point at which he has no choice but to talk (a reply often made to this is that in such a condition, men will say anything, thus calling into question the value of their testimony).

Degrees of discomfort and even perhaps pain that are short of this disintegrating level can be permissible to provide inducements—like rewards for good behavior—and some disincentives for non-compliance can be rightly applied. But hardened terrorists are likely to resist such efforts, and the temptation, as evidenced at Guantanamo and elsewhere, is to go further in forcing the compliance of the interrogation subject.

This sort of approach to the problem of interrogation, whether it is effective or not, is profoundly disrespectful to the person being interrogated or, more accurately, to the person whose treatment now approaches outright torture. Euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation” or the somewhat more honest “torture lite” seek to conceal the fundamental similarity of such approaches with what would be recognized by anyone as torture: the attempt, through debilitating pain, physical mutilation, or unendurable psychic pressure to destroy the unity, identity, and integrity of the living human subject.

But the human person — every human person — is a rational being, a child of God, and a being possessed of that radical inalienable dignity that is shared by all members of the species. To attempt to break down any person — even if only “up to a point” — is to fail to respect their personal nature in a deep way.

I agree with everything Tollefson says here until the last paragraph. From whence does he get the notion that we have an inalienable dignity? And why is it absolutely wrong (wrong under all circumstances) to fail to respect the personal nature of a man who is plotting to kill thousands, perhaps millions? How do we respect their personal nature if we don't do everything we can to stop their murder?

I've posed this scenario in the past, but it might be useful to pose it again: Suppose Mr. Tollefson's family is in a city in which a terrorist cell has planted a nuclear device. It is set to go off in five hours. Millions will be killed, including Mr. Tollefson's wife and children. The authorities have captured one of the terrorists who acknowledges that the bomb is in the city and about to go off, but he will not reveal its exact whereabouts. The authorities, in violation of the law, resort to subjecting the man to "unendurable psychic pressure" and pain until the man talks. The bomb is found and disarmed.

Mr. Tollefson is now in the following position: He has to say to his wife and children, in so many words, that although he's glad they're alive, he would rather they had been incinerated in the nuclear blast than that the terrorist have his "personal nature" disrespected. He also has to be prepared to say that the authorities who saved his children did something very wrong and should be prosecuted.

I submit that any man who could say that to his family not only doesn't deserve that family, but is moreover much like the Pharisees in Jesus' day who turned mere rules into inviolable principles. To preserve the "unity, identity, and integrity" of the man's person at the cost of allowing him to horribly murder one's own family and thousands of others strikes me as deeply and utterly perverse.

Priestly Post-Modern

I agree with Father Edward Beck in this appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show when he talks about the unseemliness of celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden. It is, in my opinion, a very inappropriate response to what was a morally justifiable and necessary act.

But Fr. Beck runs off the rails toward the end of the discussion when he argues that because we don't know someone's heart we cannot therefore declare them to be an evil person:

Fr. Beck is saying that bin Laden's deeds were evil, but we don't know whether he himself was evil. But what does it mean to say that someone is evil? It simply means that they do evil things. To the extent one does evil deeds he is an evil man.

All of us at some point in our lives do things which hurt others. We're all sinners, but the person who seeks to deliberately hurt others and does so repeatedly, willfully, and perhaps takes pleasure in doing it, is evil. If the good Father doesn't understand that then maybe Catholic seminaries ought to scrutinize what's being taught in their ethics departments.

If one who intentionally and repeatedly causes grievous harm and hurt to others is not evil then there's no such thing as evil. I can understand an atheist coming to this conclusion. Indeed, it follows logically from atheism, but I can't understand a Catholic priest believing this.

All of us at some point in our lives do things which hurt others. We're all sinners, but the person who seeks to deliberately hurt others and does so repeatedly, willfully, and takes pleasure in doing it, is evil. If the good Father doesn't understand that then maybe Catholic seminaries ought to scrutinize what's being taught in their ethics departments.

If one who intentionally and repeatedly causes grievous harm and suffering to others is not evil then there's no such thing as evil. I can understand an atheist coming to this conclusion because it follows logically from atheism, but I can't understand a Catholic priest believing this.

Awesome Leadership

When Pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran a month or so ago, driving a mob of outraged Muslims into a homicidal frenzy resulting in the deaths of nine U.N. workers, there were condemnations aplenty, not of the Muslims, but of Jones. He just shouldn't have done something so incendiary and disrespectful, we were told by media opinionators. To mistreat something so revered by Muslims was inexcusably irresponsible, and there was even talk of limiting freedom of speech so that no one could in the future use the First Amendment to offend Muslims.

Now President Obama has had one of the most revered figures in the Muslim world killed, reprisals are almost inevitable, but the media, or at least that segment of it represented by Chris Matthews and his soulmates at MSNBC, is treating the event as the occasion for the beatification of President Obama.

What, we might ask, is the salient difference between burning the Koran and killing bin Laden?

In one case a man demonstrates his displeasure with a book that he believes inspires murder and terrorism by burning a copy. In the other case a President demonstrates our national displeasure with a man who, inspired by that book, has actually committed mass murder, by having him killed. In the former case the media condemned the man who in fact hurt no one by burning the Koran. In the second case the media is calling the murder of a man and his wives and associates a "gutsy" decision and proof of Mr. Obama's greatness.

Indeed the encomiums tossed at Mr. Obama by some in the media have been so fulsome one might think that he himself rappelled into the compound, braving enemy fire, and throttled bin Laden with his bare hands.

Yet all the president actually did was give the go-ahead to an operation that was planned and carried out by others and which he could not have halted in any event without committing political suicide.

Had the public learned that we had bin Laden in our sights but refused to take him out, the president's political career would have been over. Had he ordered a missile strike instead of an assault on the compound there was the chance that bin Laden would have survived (as Qaddafi did recently) and that even had he not survived the intelligence "trove" seized by the assault team would have been destroyed or inaccessible.

There really was no choice but to order the attack and to do it with troops rather than with missiles.

Nor, I'm quite convinced, was the killing of bin Laden anything other than deliberate. Had the man been taken alive what would we have done with him? Where would we have kept him? Would we have put him on trial? How much turmoil would there be in the Middle East and around the world as long as bin Laden was alive and held in jail? I'm reasonably sure that the SEALs had orders to kill him whether he surrendered peacefully or not.

All of this, I imagine, was planned and presented to Mr. Obama months ago, and he really had very little choice in the end but to take the advice he was given and approve the plan. Even so, at MSNBC tingles are running up everyone's legs at such awe-inspiring presidential leadership.

Funny, though, when Saddam was captured it didn't make those folks feel any better about Mr. Bush's leadership. But, of course, that was different.

The Scale of the Universe

Cary Huang has developed a very impressive interactive model for demonstrating exactly how small the very small actually is and how big the really big really is. You can check it out here. Just move the slider. It's fascinating.

Do Americans Hate Atheists?

A pair of writers at the Washington Post ask why Americans don't like atheists. I don't know if it's true that Americans don't like atheists, although, given the hostility of anti-theistic books like those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al., I think the question could certainly be asked why atheists don't like theists.

Anyway, the WaPo article is replete with misunderstandings, misconceptions, and falsities of sundry kinds. Take as an example this sentence in their lede:

[N]onbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

This is patently ridiculous. There's no constitutional right to make people vote for you. Citizens are free to withhold their vote for any reason they please. Certainly atheists withhold their votes from Christians, Pro-choicers withhold their votes from pro-lifers, and blacks withhold their votes from whites, and vice-versa. To make it seem as though atheists are being denied some constitutional right because people don't vote for them is absurd.

There are a number of other problematic passages in the article. Here's one:

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Who in this country is a second class citizen because they're an atheist? I doubt anyone could point to any atheist who is denied any rights simply because he's an unbeliever, and to suggest that atheists are victims or an oppressed minority is risible. Indeed, if there's a group in this country which is in danger of losing it's rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, it's Christians. If there's a religious group that is the object of more derision and contempt from entertainers, artists, and journalists than are Christians, I can't imagine who it would be.

Here's another strange claim:

On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

In order to say that one group is more ethical than another we have to know what the ethical position is on these issues, but what is the ethical view on, say, the use of torture or the death penalty? If one is opposed to the death penalty is that more ethical or less ethical than being in favor of it? How can an atheist decide this question other than by simply pronouncing his own feelings on the matter? What answer does the atheist give to one who asks why it's wrong or unethical to execute criminals or to torture terrorists for information, or, for that matter, to be a racist? On atheism, none of these are really wrong, they're just unpopular, perhaps, or distasteful.

The writers then offer this peculiar assertion:

Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

This is straight out of Richard Dawkins' God Delusion and it's so fallacious it's a surprise that someone didn't take the writers aside and counsel them not to make such fools of themselves as to include it in their essay. The implication is that church attendance doesn't seem to exert much positive influence on behavior, but this argument would only make sense if it were shown that the population of church-goers was identical with the population of murderers, which is, of course, never demonstrated. Presumably church attendance only meliorates the behavior of those who go to church, not those who don't. There are a number of plausible explanations for the higher murder rates in these states, but a correlation with church attendance is hardly one of them.

Finally, there's this:

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

They do? Then why are atheists at such pains to keep their children from being exposed in school to the possibility that the universe is the product of intentional engineering? Or that life is more likely to be the result of intelligent agency than of random chance? Why are they so fearful of a teacher presenting arguments both pro and con for Darwinism? Evidently freedom of thought means something like the freedom to be sheltered from any challenges to naturalism. How does that teach them to "solve problems rationally"?

And why is the Golden Rule something that children should be taught to obey? Why not let them make up their own minds whether they want to adopt an arbitrary rule that in fact demands behavior that's counter to both human reason and human nature? This doesn't sound much like freedom of thought to me.

The essay goes on in this vein trying to convince the reader that atheism and atheists are reasonable, virtuous, and harmless, and that Christianity is the source of many social ills. It's an argument distinguished, if by nothing else, by its philosophical, social and historical illiteracy.

On the Death of bin Laden

I know I sound like a spoil-sport, but I have mixed feelings about celebrating bin Laden's, or anyone's, death. On the one hand it's comforting to know that he is no more. On the other hand the celebrations remind me too much of the sickening spectacle of Palestinians dancing in the streets in the wake of 9/11. There's something about rejoicing at the death of others, even those like Hitler or bin Laden, that strikes me as uncivilized, unAmerican, and unChristian.

Let's take satisfaction in the fact that a necessary task has been accomplished. Let's admire the courage and skill of the men and women who were responsible for finding this awful man and killing him.

But let's not celebrate. Let's view it as a job that needed to be done, like executing a serial killer, but one that gives us no delight. Let's not act like those barbaric Palestinians who rejoiced at the deaths of Americans a decade ago.

Instead, maybe we'd do better to keep in mind two admonitions from the Book of Proverbs. The first applies to Osama bin Laden, the second applies to us:

"A man who is laden with guilt of human blood will be a fugitive until his death." Prov. 28:17

"Do not rejoice when your enemy falls and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles." Prov. 24:17

Re: Criminal Aliens

A couple of weeks ago we did a post titled Criminal Aliens which elicited this comment from Jason:

The inclusion of illegal alliens in our country impacts our society more than anyone realizes, and is a huge drain. For every illegal, there is a legitimate citizen paying extra for car insurance, extra taxes to pay for illegal's unpaid medical bills, extra taxes for additional legal system costs and on and on.

I am friends with a local police officer, who tells me that there policy for illegal alliens caught committing a non-violent misdemeanor is to turn them loose. His department won't even enforce justice on the illegals because it is too much of a burden on their department. I guess illegals are truly free in this country - no taxes, no responsibilities and no justice. No wonder everyone wants to come here.

Indeed, and a lot of politicians in both parties want the influx to continue - the Democrats because they hope that if they can win citizenship for the illegals they'll vote Democratic, and the Republicans because the immigrants form a pool of cheap labor. Both seem to me to be extremely short-sighted, but then political horizons often stretch only so far as the next election.

Hayek and Keynes, Rappers

For those among our readers with an interest in economics I offer a couple of entertaining videos featuring a debate, sort of, between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek. The videos are very well done even if one doesn't have much fondness for the rap genre.

Economics has been called the "dismal science", but I'm not sure if dismal is quite the right word for this. Rap on:

The first video came out a year ago, the second more recently:

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Guilt and Modernity

Wilfred McClay pens an article at First Things on the role that guilt has come to play in our social economy. He also talks about the related matters of forgiveness and victimhood and the interplay among the three of them. It's a very insightful piece as these few excerpts will attest:

We live in an age in which being nonjudgmental in our dealings with others is increasingly viewed as part and parcel of being a civilized person, the only truly generous and humane stance. But without the exercise of moral judgment there can be no meaningful forgiveness, as surely as there cannot be mercy without a prior commitment to justice, or charity without a prior respect for private property.

The famous admonition from Tuesdays with Morrie that we should “Forgive everybody everything” is perhaps appealing as a psychological instruction, but it is appalling as a general dictum. It resembles the child’s dream that every day should be Christmas.

So excessive is this propensity for guilt, particularly in the developed nations of the Western world, that the French writer Pascal Bruckner, in a courageous and utterly brilliant recent study called The Tyranny of Guilt, has identified the problem as “Western masochism.” The lingering presence of “the old notion of original sin, the ancient poison of damnation,” Bruckner argues, holds even secular philosophers and sociologists captive to its logic, so that “the more [they] proclaim themselves to be agnostic, atheists, and free-thinkers, the more they take us back to the religious beliefs they are challenging.” As a consequence, most of modern Western thought is little more than a “mechanical denunciation of the West,” in which “remorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances” and has instead become “a dogma, a spiritual commodity, almost a form of currency,” manifested in the nonstop “duty of repentance.”

Notwithstanding all claims about our living in a post-Christian world devoid of censorious public morality, we in fact live in a world that carries around an enormous and growing burden of guilt, and yearns to be free of it. About this, Bruckner could not have been more right. And that burden is ever looking for an opportunity to discharge itself. Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.”

The explanation [for the contemporary fixation on victimhood] is traceable to the extraordinary weight of guilt in our time, the pervasive need to find innocence through moral absolution, to discharge one’s moral burden.... Making a claim to the status of certified victim, or to identification with victims, however, offers itself as a substitute means by which the moral burden of sin can be shifted and one’s innocence affirmed.

[C]laiming victim status is the sole sure means left of absolving oneself and securing one’s sense of fundamental moral innocence.

When one is a certifiable victim, one is released from moral responsibility, since a victim is someone who, by definition, is not responsible for his condition but can point to another who is responsible.

But victimhood at its most potent promises not only release from responsibility but an ability to displace that responsibility onto others. As a victim, one can project onto another person, the victimizer or oppressor, any feelings of guilt he might harbor and, in projecting that guilt, lift it off his own shoulders. The designated oppressor plays the role of scapegoat, on whose head the sin comes to rest, and who pays the price for it. By contrast, in appropriating the status of victim, or identifying oneself with victims, one can experience a profound sense of moral release, of recovered innocence. It is no wonder that this should have become so common a gambit in our time, so effectively does it deal with the problem of guilt.

There are many more fine insights into the modern psyche in McClay's piece. It's worth the time it takes to read.

It is strange that the more secular we become the more obsessed we've become with imputing guilt for all sorts of offenses, yet how can a secular person believe there really is such a thing as guilt? If there is no God then there is no objective moral law, and if there's no moral law there can be no violation of the law and thus no guilt. If we're merely the product of time and chance there's nothing that's wrong, there are only things we've been programmed to do by our genes and/or our environment. If our behavior is not free but in fact the outworking of such forces, forces over which we exercise no conscious control, then how can we be guilty of anything?

Guilt implies responsibility, but in a Godless world where determinism reigns there is no one to whom we are responsible and no room for responsibility, at least in a moral sense, in any event.

Modern man wants to live as if God doesn't exist, but in order to do so he has to take irrational leaps of faith such as believing that people are guilty even though his secular metaphysics rules out the reality of guilt. Then the secular man, after pronouncing his guilty verdict on greedy corporations and Wall Street bankers and those who oppressed Native-Americans, African-Americans, women, gays and so on, turns around and says that it's the believer in God who has abandoned reason.

Poverty Trap

The conventional wisdom tells us that a billion people in the world are starving, caught in a hunger-based poverty trap. They're too poor to consume enough calories to enable them to work and their inability to muster the energy to work keeps them poor.

The theory is that the world's poor need more food and cannot obtain it, but according to an article by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Foreign Policy the theory is wrong. Some excerpts:

Contrary to popular belief there's enough food available, and the poor often have enough money to purchase it.

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did....But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?

[I]t is no surprise that government efforts to help the poor are largely based on the idea that the poor desperately need food and that quantity is what matters....But what if the poor are not, in general, eating too little food? What if, instead, they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of nutrients needed to be successful, healthy adults? What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities?

The article is a little lengthy, but should be required reading for everyone concerned about third-world poverty and hunger. It may well change the way you think about them.

Among the more interesting facts in the article were these two:

1) Many of the world's poor would rather spend what little money they have on televisions than on food (I suspect cell phones are another item, judging by their ubiquity in third world nations I've visited, that are more important to people than is food.).

2) Famines are rarely caused by natural forces. They are almost always man-made: As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has shown, most recent famines have been caused not because food wasn't available but because of bad governance -- institutional failures that led to poor distribution of the available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere. As Sen put it, "No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press."

Debate on The Gathering Storm

The pair of posts we ran recently on my brother's prognosis of a coming economic calamity (see here and here) elicited feedback from several people. One of the respondents, a fellow named D.P. who has experience in the financial field, took vigorous exception to what Bill wrote. I thought it might be instructive to post his response along with Bill's rebuttal.

I've edited both slightly for clarity. Here's D. P.'s critique:

For years I have followed your blog with high regard, impressed with your sense of awareness and lack of hyperbole. Particularly on topics of philosophy and social culture your insights have been consistently keen.

Unfortunately, with your recent reflections on current economic concerns, voiced by your brother Bill and affirmed by your posts, you have wandered beyond [your] areas of expertise.

We can begin with the reflections on inflation. Inflationary trends include an incredibly diverse range of asset pricing influencers. It is ironic that Bill's ominous prophecies originate in an historically low inflationary period and find foundation in government actions, some of which are explicitly enacted to initiate inflation - in order to combat its evil twin - deflation! Recent evidence (see Japan since the early '90s) suggest this risk to our economy is at least as significant as Bill's inflation predictions.

Your post also claims to identify the value of gold as "cheap" without fundamental support. This is not surprising, as determining a value for gold is virtually impossible. Unlike other assets, including other metals, gold has limited utilitarian application. As such its value is strictly a human attribution, some might say, a human fiction. Gold can likely best be described as currency; acting, as it has for most of its human history, as our original currency. Gold's recent market behavior reflects this, for, as we see the world's currency standard, the dollar, fall, we see gold rise. The dollar's fall, though, has also been partially orchestrated by the Fed.

In general, I do not support such an active Fed and would prefer static dollar volume, allowing for truer market valuations, but the fact of these various purposeful actions suggests (as claimed by Fed leaders, and reflected by historic Fed behavior) contrary actions can be implimented as well.

My concern with Bill's prophecies of gold's gilded future is this; my professional experience suggests that any asset class which experiences extended appreciation exponentially larger than its historical norm (a bubble!) is destined for a catastrophic fall; which isn't to say it will be so, nor when it will occur.

I could critique away at the posts, pointing out the fallacy of Bill's claims "that no entity...is interested in" investing in US debt, or his "zero risk investment claim" (time-value of money risk), but the pickin's are too easy. Suffice it to say that Bill is over his head; which isn't to say he is necessarily wrong. More likely, his is a broken clock.

As for our overall economic plight, I would argue that, at the root of economic success is the person, the individual. At the individual level humans worldwide continue to prove their resourcefulness. Humans, it seems to me, find their founding motivation primarily in one thing, to live better, for themselves and their families! Therein lies my hope.

With over 25 years of expertise in the world's financial markets, I have noted that in each and every year the sirens of economic disaster have sung. In those few years in which actual relative disaster does occurs they become the darlings of the market media, and their doomsday soundbites only contribute to hightened irrationality. They are the broken clocks of my industry.

As for our overall economic plight, I would argue that, at the root of economic success is the person, the individual. At the individual level humans worldwide continue to prove their resourcefulness (see China's transition in only a decade toward free markets). Humans, it seems to me, find their founding motivation primarily in one thing, to live better, for themselves and their families! Therein lies my hope.

Bill's reply quotes excerpts of D.P.'s argument and responds to them. D.P.'s excerpts are italicized:

Unfortunately, with your recent reflections on current economic concerns, voiced by your brother Bill and affirmed by your posts, you have wandered beyond areas of expertise.

You don’t have to be an expert to see what’s coming. All one has to do is observe what real, proven experts are saying and doing, i.e Bill Gross, manager of PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world (over $1 trillion), who recently sold 100% of their holdings of US Treasuries saying:

“Unless entitlements are substantially reformed, I am confident that this country will default on its debt; not in conventional ways, but by picking the pocket of savers via a combination of less observable, yet historically verifiable policies — inflation, currency devaluation and low to negative real interest rates.”

Other experts are saying the same thing.

We can begin with the reflections on inflation. Inflationary trends include an incredibly diverse range of asset pricing influencers.

While “asset pricing influencers” may be included, they are not the cause of inflation. Inflation is ultimately defined as an increase in the money supply relative to GDP. Is it a coincidence that the Fed discontinued publishing M3, the statistic that reflected the increase of dollars several years ago?

It is ironic that Bill's ominous prophecies originate in an historically low inflationary period and find foundation in government actions, some of which are explicitly enacted to initiate inflation - in order to combat its evil twin - deflation! Recent evidence (see Japan since the early '90s) suggest this risk to our economy is at least as significant as Bill's inflation predictions.

Historically low inflationary period? So far in 2011 (3 months) we have these increases in commodity prices:

• Silver - up 37.6 percent
• Cotton - up 35.0 percent
• Oil - up 20.0 percent
• Cocoa - up 19.8 percent
• Coffee - up 19.8 percent
• Corn - up 17.8 percent
• Gold - up 4.5 percent
• Lead - up 3.8 percent

Your post also claims to identify the value of gold as "cheap" without fundamental support. This is not surprising, as determining a value for gold is virtually impossible.

Wrong again. The “fundamental support” for the claim is found in D.P.'s own words, “as the dollar falls, the price of gold rises”. If it is apparent that the dollar is going to fall further in value, it’s intuitively obvious that the price of gold is going to rise! Further, determining a value for gold is not “virtually impossible”, it’s done every day at the COMEX and in London.

The dollar's fall, though, has also been partially orchestrated by the Fed.

So what? The point is to protect one’s self from dollar devaluation, regardless of the cause. Further, at some point, the Fed is going to lose control of the devaluation and a currency crisis will occur. This is exactly what Bill Gross is saying and why he dumped his US Treasuries.

My concern with Bill's prophecies of gold's gilded future is this; my professional experience suggests that any asset class which experiences extended appreciation exponentially larger than its historical norm (a bubble!) is destined for a catastrophic fall; which isn't to say it will be so, nor when it will occur.

D.P. says it “is destined for a catastrophic fall” and then backtracks with “which isn’t to say it will be so”. At any rate, he’s correct that most if not all parabolic bubbles crash. So the question, then, is: Is gold in a bubble? Not when not one in a thousand have it in their portfolios. Not when you see people selling their gold for cash. Not when you don’t see people standing in lines waiting to buy gold coin. Not when the dollar has much further to drop.

I could critique away at the posts, pointing out the fallacy of Bill's claims "that no entity...is interested in" investing in US debt, or his "zero risk investment claim" (time-value of money risk), but the pickin's are too easy. Suffice it to say that Bill is over his head; which isn't to say he is necessarily wrong. More likely, his is a broken clock.

Maybe I should have stated: “no entity in their right mindis interested in...”. If this weren’t the case, why is it that the Federal Reserve has recently become the number one holder of US Treasuries, surpassing Japan and China? Answer: Because the Fed is the buyer of last resort. When the US can’t sell it’s debt, it has two choices: raise the interest rate paid on them to make them more attractive (lipstick on a pig) or the Fed buys them. To raise rates would be disastrous as we already pay $500 billion a year in interest. A third option would be huge spending cuts (and tax increases) – not likely.

“Time value of money risk”?! Where would D.P. suggest one put his money? In a savings account in a bank that pays a negative interest rate? Further, just how much risk of loss is there on, say, $1000 invested in items that will eventually be consumed anyway?

As for our overall economic plight, I would argue that, at the root of economic success is the person, the individual. At the individual level humans worldwide continue to prove their resourcefulness. Humans, it seems to me, find their founding motivation primarily in one thing, to live better, for themselves and their families! Therein lies my hope.

Humans worldwide will continue to prove their resourcefulness until they don’t. How resourceful were all the unprepared humans after Katrina - so disappointed by their failed faith in their government for help?

I’ve read several times that today’s is the first generation of Americans whose standard of living will be less than that of their parents.

“Hope” is not a strategy.

Bill closes with a quote from the famous economist Ludwig von Mises:

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit [or monetary] expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of the further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

Inconsistencies

One of the toxins corrupting our political discourse is the complete abandonment of objectivity and fairness in our public debates. It seems that both sides are in a perpetual state of highly selective indignation over some outrage perpetrated by the other side, but which elicits little more than a shrug when one's own side does much the same thing.

Consider a few examples of this tendency to treat similar events differently depending upon where the responsibility for them lies: First, recall the international outcry over prisoner abuse by a few soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq back in 2004 and 2005. The media was daily reminding us how America had lost its way, how George Bush should be impeached, and demanding that at the least Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld should resign or be fired. Compare that reaction to the near silence in the media about the so-called "kill team" comprised of three or four soldiers who were deliberately murdering Afghan civilians and cutting off fingers and taking photos of their "trophies".

It's hard to imagine that what happened at Abu Ghraib was actually worse than the Afghanistan atrocities, but no one seems to be too very upset about the murders of Afghan civilians. Why not? What's the essential difference that would justify media indifference to the murders of civilians but sustained outrage over the humiliation of captured Iraqi troops and terrorists? The only difference I can think of is the party in the White House which stands to suffer embarrassment from the revelations of this conduct.

The second example is the complete dissimilarity between the reaction to the war in Iraq and the war in Libya. Where are the human shields racing to Libya to protect Libyans from American bombs? Where is the pacifist Left demanding a cessation of hostilities and impeachment of a President who has involved us in a war where we had no national interest? Where are the people who were screaming that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and was no threat to us? Why are they not screaming that Qaddafi is no threat to us? Why did Iraq provoke such rage on the Left but our actions toward Libya have generated little more than grumblings? Could the difference be that Iraq was initiated by George Bush and Libya by Barack Obama?

And if Libya is a justified conflict why does not the same justification exist for bombing the Syrians who are slaughtering their people by the hundreds in the streets? Qaddafi must be wondering why him and not Assad. Why is the media not demanding an explanation for the disparity in our responses to these two situations?

The only answer I can think of that makes any sense is that policy which generates anger and indignation when carried out by a Republican administration elicits little more than a furrowed brow when carried out by a Democratic administration.

Here's the final example. The other day there was a horrible beating of a white female by two black girls in a MacDonald's. You've probably seen the video, which has gone viral, but if not you can find it here. I will warn you, though, that I was sickened for hours after watching it so please be advised. The awful behavior of the male onlookers was almost as ugly as that of the brutish thugs who administered the beating.

It turns out that the police are reluctant to call the attack a hate crime. Would they be similarly reluctant if the victim were black and the thugs were white? In the unlikely and unusual event that the races were reversed how long would it take for the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world to be demanding reparations and indicting the wickedness lurking in the white soul? How long would it be before Eric Holder would be declaiming on the virulence of white racism in this country, and President Obama would be calling for more beer summits? Every editorial page in the nation's newspapers would be gazing into the heart of white America trying to shine a light into that dark pit.

As it is there was scarcely a tisk anywhere over this horrific episode, except on the internet, until it was discovered that the victim was transgendered. Once that completely irrelevant fact was revealed the you-know-what hit the fan. Now people were incensed. As long as it was just an ordinary white girl that was beaten and kicked and had her hair pulled out until she suffered a seizure, well, no one in the media seemed too upset, but once it was discovered that this girl was actually a member of the GLBT community people in the media were suddenly horrified by the savagery of the attack.

Why does race or gender (or transgender) have anything to do with it? Why are crimes more horrific if the victim is black or transgendered than if the victim is white or female (or male)? When are we going to grow up and get past all of the PC idiocy that has been inflicted upon us by those who think of everything in terms of race, class, and gender? When will we start simply looking at all people as human beings?

Blind Faith

Someone at Uncommon Descent poses this puzzler for our Tuesday morning meditation:

How did the term “skeptic” come to mean “people who believe in multiverses, space aliens, and random creation of meaningful information?”

How did the term “fundamentalist” come to mean “people who believe based only on evidence”?

Good questions. It's a source of wonderment, at least for me, that "skeptics" often deride theism and theists for believing in God, for which belief there is much evidence, while themselves believing in such things as an infinite number of worlds, the inevitability of the emergence of life by random chance, the reducibility of consciousness to chemical reactions, the possibility of non-subjective morality without God, the inherent goodness of man, and a host of other naturalistic dogmas for which there's scarcely a shred of evidence for and much evidence against.

Atheists are often wont to say that religious faith is belief despite the lack of evidence. That's not true, however. Belief without evidence is the definition of "blind" faith, and it describes belief in such things as other worlds and abiogenesis perfectly. The faith that religious people cling to is not belief despite the lack of evidence, it's belief despite the lack of proof. As such it's completely rational, indeed more rational than the belief of those who will accept any explanation, no matter how meager the evidence, as long as it doesn't violate their commitment to a non-theistic metaphysics.