The Single-Payer Omelet

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not nobody. She's the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a congresswoman from Florida. So when she's asked whether the Democrats have a plan to save Medicare, a plan that consists of something more substantive than just demagoguing the Republican plan, her answer is implicitly "No":

Set aside Ms. Wasserman Schultz's last line where she inadvertently reveals her inner nanny possessed by almost all liberals (What's wrong, exactly, with allowing mature adults to "figure it out" for themselves?). Consider instead that doing nothing means that the system goes bankrupt in a decade, and doing nothing is what the Democrats evidently plan to do.

Grandfathering everyone over 55 into the present system and then giving future retirees a voucher that enables them to buy their own insurance, which is the GOP/Paul Ryan plan, may not be the best idea, I don't know, but at least the elderly will have something. If the Democrats don't soon present a viable alternative the elderly are certain to have nothing.

I suspect, but can't prove, that Democrat opposition to the Ryan plan stems from the fact that if people are given public money to buy insurance, insurance companies will benefit. President Obama has as much as said that he wants to put insurance companies out of business in order to create a single-payer (government-run) system (see below). Thus, he and his fellow lefties will oppose anything that empowers the private market and diminishes the power of government.

The elderly are merely the eggs that have to be broken to cook this socialist omelet.

Above the Law

President Obama, with the connivance of both Democrats and Republicans, is traducing the rule of law by not abiding by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. So says George Will and so say I. Here's Will:

Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president “certifies” in writing an “unavoidable military necessity” respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war, which began more than 70 days ago.

The President has attempted to avoid the WPR's constraints by saying that our involvement in Libya is to provide a "supporting role". Will correctly labels this both ludicrous and meretricious. He goes on to add that:

Liberals are situational ethicists regarding presidential warmaking: Imagine their comportment if Obama’s predecessor — who got congressional authorization for his uses of force — had behaved as Obama is doing regarding Libya. Most conservatives, who preen about their commitment to keeping government on a short leash, seem anesthetized by the administration’s sophistries.

I suppose "situational ethicists" is accurate, but I think "hypocrites" is moreso. For an example of the absurdity of GOP spokespersons on the issue he turns to Senator John McCain who said that, “No president has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and neither do I. So I don’t feel bound by any deadline.”

This is frankly startling. It's the sort of thinking that occurs in the early stages of tyranny. When our President considers himself not constrained by any law he finds inconvenient he's arrogating to himself the powers of a despot. It's the sort of behavior we see in people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Mr. Obama has evinced such inclinations in the past, and no one is really surprised that he regards himself as unaccountable to Congress. It's a bit surprising, though, and disconcerting, to see McCain agree with him.

Meanwhile, our "watchdog" media are all aflutter, not over Mr. Obama's disdain for the rule of law, but over Sarah Palin's bus tour. Go figure.

Honoring Vets

Memorial Day seems a fitting time to show this trailer for a coming documentary on the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight. Honor Flight is a project to fly as many WWII vets to Washington as possible so that they can see the WWII Memorial before they die:

Hot Air has more details on the Honor Flight film project here.

Singer's Evolving Ethics

There's a simple and compelling argument that goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no moral duties.
2. There are moral duties.
3. Therefore there is a God.

Of course, both premises need to be defended, but I don't think it's hard to defend 1. (though 1. is precisely the assertion Sam Harris wishes to deny in his book The Moral Landscape) and denying 2. leads the denier ineluctably to moral nihilism. So, it seems that if 1. can be defended one either has to believe there is a God or be a nihilist.

Few non-believers are prepared to embrace moral nihilism so they're in an awkward position. Unwilling to accept belief in God they're also unwilling to accept the logical conclusion of their atheism.

This appears to be the predicament in which Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has come to find himself. The Guardian's Mark Vernon explains why. Here's the key graph:

[Singer] described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects [David] Hume's view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true.

At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people's preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on ... utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he "regrets" not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.

Or to put it differently, Singer seems to be recognizing that unless there exists a transcendent moral authority, an omniscient and perfectly good God, there's no non-arbitrary reason for being a utilitarian rather than an egoist. In a world without such a moral authority nothing one does can be morally wrong, and it'd certainly not be wrong to simply live for oneself or adopt a might-makes-right ethic. However we choose to live, if there is no God, is purely a matter of taste and to say that one should be a utilitarian is nonsense. The word "should" implies a moral duty and if there is no God there are no moral duties.

The only surprise in Singer's last sentence above is that it has taken someone of his intellectual stature so long to see it.

Cyber Warriors

An operation like the one which took the life of Osama bin Laden requires tough, hard, highly disciplined warriors, but much of modern warfare is being waged not by men such as these but by guys who considered themselves geeks and nerds when they were in high school.

Take, for example, what's going on in the cold war between Israel and Iran. Strategy Page explains:

Israel makes no secret of what it thinks about its Cyber War capabilities. Over the last year, Israel has revealed that its cryptography operation (Unit 8200) has added computer hacking to its skill set. Last year, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence said that he believed Israel had become the leading practitioner of Cyber War. This came in the wake of suspicions that Israel had created the Stuxnet worm, that got into Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment equipment, and destroyed a lot of it.

Recently, Iran complanied that another worm, called Star, was causing them trouble. Usually, intelligence organizations keep quiet about their capabilities, but in this case, the Israelis apparently felt it was more useful to scare the Iranians, with the threat of more stuff like Stuxnet. But the Iranians have turned around and tried to attack Israel, and are apparently determined to keep at it for as long as it takes.

This struggle between Israel and Iran is nothing new. Seven years ago, Israel announced that Unit 8200 had cracked an Iranian communications code, an operation that allowed Israel to read messages concerning Iranian efforts to keep its nuclear weapons program going (with Pakistani help), despite Iranian promises to UN weapons inspectors that the program was being shut down.

It's .... unusual for a code-cracking organization to admit to deciphering someone's code. Perhaps the Iranians stopped using the code in question, or perhaps the Israelis just wanted to scare the Iranians. Israel is very concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons, mainly because the Islamic conservatives that control Iran have as one of their primary goals the destruction of Israel.

In response to these Iranian threats, Israel has said that it will do whatever it takes to stop Iran from getting nukes. This apparently includes doing the unthinkable (for a code cracking outfit); admitting that you had successfully taken apart an opponent's secret code.

Israel is trying to convince Iran that a long-time superiority in code-breaking was now accompanied by similarly exceptional hacking skills. Whether it's true or not, it's got to have rattled the Iranians. The failure of their counterattacks can only have added to their unease.

One almost imagines teams of Woody Allen look-alikes sitting in front of their monitors saving the world from a nuclear holocaust while seasoning their successes with a little trash-talk directed at the opposition. God bless 'em.

Casey as Metaphor

People who support Israel in their effort to resist the aggressions of their enemies in the Middle East are sometimes asked why they do. There are lots of reasons which come to mind, of course - our shared democratic values, shared language, the awful treatment that Jews have suffered throughout history, their courage, their status as victims of terrorism, their admirable ability to defend themselves repeatedly against overwhelming odds, the fact that their enemies are driven by an irrational hatred and a desire to kill every Jew (and every American for that matter), and so on.

Perhaps another reason is that so much of the world, not just Arabs and Muslims, is hostile to Israel. They criticize Israel simply for trying to defend itself. They criticize Israel for using "disproportionate" force in defending itself. Israel is expected to perpetually turn the other cheek while no such demands are ever made of the Arabs who attack them with rockets every day, blow up school busses full of children, and sneak into their homes to slit the throats of entire families. The world seems to treat such atrocities as what is to be expected from Arabs, but if the Israelis retaliate, or build a wall to keep the murderers out, then they're denounced at the U.N. for "brutality".

It all reminds me of a video that was the talk of the web a few months ago. In the video an Australian boy named Casey was being punched and taunted by a little punk - an ordeal he had had to endure on previous occasions as well. Finally Casey defended himself and a surprising number of commentators sniffed that the poor kid overreacted, that he shouldn't have resorted to violence, that he could have hurt his tormenter. Casey was essentially condemned for protecting himself and giving his antagonist the thrashing he deserved.

I'm sure the Israelis sympathize with Casey:

Swinburne on the Soul

Having read several of Richard Swinburne's philosophical works over the years and having just this winter reread his book The Existence of God, I was eager to listen to an interview he did recently on the soul. Swinburne is a highly prominent philosopher of religion at Oxford, a Christian, and a substance dualist who conflates soul and mind.

By that I mean he assumes soul and mind are essentially two words for the same thing. This is not the only view of the soul a dualist(one who believes that there are at least two disparate substances comprising reality - mind and matter)could hold, but it's probably the dominant view.

Swinburne's argument against physicalism (the belief that there is no non-physical substance) is that if the self just is the material body then if my body exists then I must exist. However, there is a possible world in which a body just like mine exists, but in which I don't exist. If so, then it's possible to have a body like mine but not have me, or, in other words, my body and I are not identical.

In the course of the 17 minute discussion he touches upon the problem of personal identity, the problem of mind/brain interactionism (i.e. the problem of believing that two disparate substances can somehow interact), and makes an interesting distinction between how he came to believe in God as opposed to why he continues to believe. His reply toward the end to the interviewer's suggestion that he only believes what he does about the mind/soul because of his theological commitments is excellent.

The interview can be listened to at The Microphilosopher.

Thanks to First Thoughts for the link.

Ditchkins

Here's an amusing send-up of atheists Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens. The guy who does the composite "Ditchkins" sounds almost exactly like Dawkins:

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the link.

Palestinian Refugees

Peter Wilson at American Thinker tells us a few interesting things about the Palestinian refugee situation which was at the center of the recent dust-up between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu. Here's part of his column:

Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus -- or one should really say, the 1948 departure -- of Palestinians from Israel, is no exception. A typical formulation, chock-full of code words, appeared in a recent letter to the Boston Globe: "Generations of families living in squalor in refugee camps still await their right to return under international law to their homeland Palestine."

Many, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in his meeting with Obama, have pointed out how the "right to return" would impose an untenable situation for the Israeli democracy. The 860,000 or so who left in 1948 have grown to 4.8 million "registered refugees" living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Of this number, 1.4 million are "RRCs" -- registered refugees in camps. An influx of this magnitude, added to the 1.2 million Israeli Muslims, would create a Muslim population of 6 million, outnumbering Israel's 5.6 million Jews, potentially turning Israel into a sharia state. In other words, whatever "right to return under international law" may be asserted, as Netanyahu said, "it's never going to happen."

Describing Palestinians as "refugees" living in "refugee camps" is a further example of politicized word choice. The original group of Palestinians in 1948 left their homes in the face of an impending aggression by Arab countries and moved into canvas tents with primitive sanitation. Regardless of arguments about whether Israeli Palestinians "fled" or, as Noam Chomsky would have it, were pushed out by a campaign of ethnic cleansing, this original group can rightly be called refugees. However, to continue to call their descendants refugees sixty-three years later, as Obama did in his Middle East/North Africa speech, distorts the truth of their situation.

Sixty-three years is time enough for three, perhaps four, generations. Imagine the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Jewish refugees who came to Brooklyn or Brookline after the Holocaust referring to themselves as refugees. My own family includes a number of refugees from the Cambodian killing fields, and my nieces and nephews would never think of claiming refugee status and a right to return to Cambodia.

Wilson writes a pretty informative piece, one with whose content everyone should be familiar.

One cluster of questions that it raised in my mind is one which was implicit in Mr. Netanyahu's sermon to Mr. Obama in their presser: Why is it that the Palestinians are still refugees? There was a roughly equal number of Jews evicted from their homes in Arab countries in 1948 as there were Palestinians who fled from Israel. The Israelis were assimilated into Israel almost immediately, but the Palestinians still live in "camps" segregated from their Arab hosts. Why are the Palestinians still "refugees" but the Israelis are not? Why do not the vast Arab nations assimilate the Palestinians like tiny Israel assimilated Jewish refugees?

Is it that the Arabs really don't care about the Palestinians except insofar as they can be used as a cudgel with which to beat the Israelis over the head?

Odious Ed

Why is there so much misogyny among the people who claim to feel so strongly that misogyny is wrong? Keith Olberman at MSNBC once called Michelle Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick". I don't know what that is, exactly, but I'm sure Olby did not intend it as an expression of respect.

Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a vulgar sexual pejorative that I won't repeat, and then followed it a couple of days later by calling both Palin and Michelle Bachman "bimbos".

Now Ed Schultz, the guy MSNBC moved into Olberman's slot after Olberman grew too insufferable even for the MSNBC poobahs, calls Laura Ingraham a "slut":

What is it about so many liberal males that they so glibly insult women in such vile fashion? When will more liberal groups finally bestir themselves to be outraged? Why does the media not demand that these people be fired? Will progressives like Jim Wallis who rightly urge us to maintain a higher level and quality of public discourse have anything to say about the steady miasma of sleaze emanating from spokespersons of the Left?

Would we be asking these questions if the sleaze was coming from conservatives?

The Left's Doomsday Predictions

When religious eccentrics predict that the world is coming to an end, as Harold Camping did last week, it's the occasion for much merrymaking in the media, but as Dennis Prager points out, when it comes to failed doomsday predictions it's hard to outdo the record amassed by the Left.

In the sixties it was out-of-control population growth, written about by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, that was supposed to unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the world by 1990.

In the seventies it was the fear of nuclear catastrophe which would precipitate a "nuclear winter" that would cause mass extinctions and starvation as depicted by television specials like ABC's The Day After.

In the eighties and nineties it was the AIDs epidemic that was going to sweep the globe decimating the world's population. Heterosexuals as well as homosexuals were at risk and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to avoid it.

In the 21st century we are assured that global warming is going to raise the seas and alter the earth's geography causing widespread ecological and sociological catastrophe.

To be sure the jury is still out on climate change, although it's not looking good for Al Gore's troops, but in each of the other cases, as well as several more that Prager cites, the Left's prediction turned out to be just as wrong, and just as ludicrous, as that of Rev. Camping.

Strangely, though, there was no guffawing among the media sophisticates, like there was over Camping's silly prognostication, when the Left's prophesies of impending doom failed to come to pass. Why is that?

A Vanishing Breed

Speaking of doomsdays and extinctions (see above), Byron forwards us a piece that contains the frightening news that we're now down to our last one hundred grown-ups in the U.S. It has apparently been confirmed that adults are on the same trajectory as the passenger pigeon. I kid you not. It must be true because it's in The Onion. Here's the article's lede:

According to alarming new figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's population of mature adults has been pushed to the brink of extinction, with only 104 grown-ups remaining in the country today.

The endangered demographic, which is projected to die out completely by 2060, is reportedly distinguished from other groups by numerous unique traits, including foresight, rationality, understanding of how to obtain and pay for a mortgage, personal responsibility, and the ability to enter a store without immediately purchasing whatever items they see and desire.

"Our grown-ups are disappearing at a much faster rate than we previously believed," said Census Bureau chief Robert M. Groves, who believes the decline in responsible adults may now be irreversible. "Unfortunately, we've only recently noticed this terrible trend, perhaps because of this group's unusual capacity to endure hardships with quiet dignity instead of whining loudly to draw attention to themselves."

"If nothing is done, these wondrous individuals, with their special ability to consider the long-term consequences of their own behavior and act accordingly, will be wiped-out completely," Groves added.

According to recent data, the grown-up population has plummeted dramatically since 1950, when a Census count found that more than 24 million Americans could both admit when they were wrong and respect a viewpoint other than their own. Today, only one in three million citizens can provide thoughtful advice to a fellow human being instead of immediately shifting the topic to their own personal issues or what they had for lunch.

If you're as concerned for your country as you should be you need to read the whole thing. The article even has a remarkable photo of one of America's last remaining grown-ups.

Justified?

Here's a summary of what happened: A 53 year old woman was getting out of the shower when she saw a man in her bathroom wielding a kitchen knife. The man forced her into the bedroom where there was a struggle. The woman managed to retrieve a revolver from her night table and emptied it into her assailant who ran out of the house, collapsed and later died.

Questions: What do you suppose would have happened to the woman had she not had the means to defend herself? Should the woman have had the right to keep a loaded weapon in her home? If so, should she have the right to carry such a weapon on her person when in public? If not, why not? If you are opposed to allowing people to own and carry firearms exactly what would you say to this woman - that it would have been better had she been raped and possibly murdered than that she be allowed to have access to the means to prevent such a crime?

Only those opposed to the private ownership of handguns need respond. While mulling over your answers you might want to listen to the 9-1-1 call:

It's unfortunate that a man died in this episode, but one thing is certain: He'll never subject anyone else to the terror to which he subjected this woman.

Free Speech for Our Side, but Not for Yours

This video would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Dozens (judging from the number of signatures) of college students and adults signed a faux petition to have conservatives banned from television and radio even as they affirmed their unwavering support of the principles of the First Amendment:

"I'm for free speech," these signers are saying, "except for speech that I don't like."

It's sad enough that college students who are supposed to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the Bill of Rights and the freedoms upon which America was founded would not see the absurdity of signing the petition, but they are, after all, young and perhaps we shouldn't expect too much intellectual rigor from them.

What was really distressing about the video was the number of adults who blithely assented to sign. Presumably these people are faculty and administrators on a campus which is supposed to be a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas, and for them to sign a petition that effectively called for the elimination of the speech of people with whom they disagree is deplorable.

Is there not something hypocritical (or stupid) in educated people affirming their belief in free speech even as they happily sign a petition to ban it?

Computers and Brains

Stephen Hawking recently made the much commented upon remark that he regards the brain as a computer "which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Vjtorley has an interesting post at Uncommon Descent where, inter alia, he discusses eleven fundamental differences between brains and computers. According to vjtorley brains don't differ from computers merely in terms of the matter from which they're made, they're a completely different kind of entity altogether.

The discussion might not mean much except to those with some background knowledge of how computers work, but it's worth reading if you're interested in the debate over whether human beings are just biological machines or whether they're something unique.

Cosmic Expansion

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Some of them assume that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many modern scientists choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are remarkable.

Sobering Up

Nothing like having to make one's way in the real world to disabuse oneself of all those silly liberal ideas one picks up in college. The Daily Caller has the results of a survey of recent grads who voted for Obama in 2008. A lot of them are saying, in effect, that they won't make that mistake again:

A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.

The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.

The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by the job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.

“People have had time to reflect on how they voted in 2008, and now they’re thinking about whether they have a job or like their job,” said Maddalone. As their trust in the federal government shrinks, they’re becoming more self-reliant, as their attitude shifts from “‘yes, we can,’ to ‘yes, I can,’” he said.

In other words, these grads are becoming more conservative. They're realizing that "hope and change" doesn't pay the bills and that it doesn't make sense for a young person out looking for a job to support an administration whose policies discourage employers from hiring.

Embarrassing Tutorial

Mr. Obama's speech Thursday on the Middle East situation was fairly prosaic and unexceptionable until he drew close to the end. When he started talking about the Israeli/Palestinian difficulties he lobbed this stink bomb into the room and hence around the world:

We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

In two sentences the President managed to throw the "peace process", such as it is, into chaos. There is no way Israel is going to return to the pre-1967 borders which made the tiny country only nine miles wide at its narrowest point. To do what the President proposes would be to commit suicide.

Secondly, what does Mr. Obama mean by saying that the Palestinians should have a "contiguous" state? Right now there are two Palestinian entities, one on the West Bank and one in Gaza (See map). There is no way to make a contiguous Palestinian state unless a Palestinian corridor is created to connect the two territories, but such a corridor would bisect Israel which means that Israel's borders would then not be contiguous. Does Mr. Obama really think that cutting Israel in half is a viable proposal? If not, what alternatives did he have in mind?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited with Mr. Obama today, and on national television politely instructed him on the realities in the region. Mr. Obama appeared a bit embarrassed at having to sit quietly through Mr. Netanyahu's gentle rebuke, but the lesson, sadly, was much needed (Netanyahu begins speaking at about the 7:30 mark):

Except for the unfortunate paragraph above Mr. Obama tried to sound like a neutral broker between the interests of the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it's very hard to be neutral when the aspirations of the two parties are so different.

It is the goal of the Israelis to live securely in their homes and at peace with their neighbors. It is the goal of the Palestinians, or at least that faction of them which wields all the power, to destroy Israel and the Israeli Jews. They've said so countless times. How can one be neutral between those two objectives?

As we consider the President's proposals we need to ask whose goals would his proposals further? Would returning to the 1967 borders improve the security of the Israeli people or would it make their destruction an easier task for the Palestinians? The answer is obvious and for that reason the President's attempt to sound impartial rings hollow. He sounds either very much disposed toward the Palestinians or very naive, or both.

It's no wonder, then, that Mr. Netanyahu felt the need to give him the embarrassing tutorial.

Immigration and Assimilation

Bruce Thornton has a column at City Journal which puts into words what a lot of people feel intuitively about immigration and the multicultural enterprise. He argues that modern immigration differs in one crucial respect from earlier influxes - assimilation. Whereas early immigrants expected to adopt, or at least adapt to their new home modern immigrants often demand that their new home adapt to them.

Thornton writes:

[W]hatever the degree of assimilation, most accepted a fundamental truth: that whatever affection they had for their homes, for their native tongue, or for their old ways and customs, those cultures had in some significant way failed them. Thus they had made a difficult, costly choice: to become Americans. If America’s core principles—such as individual rights, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and religious tolerance—conflicted with those of the old country, then the latter had to be modified or abandoned.

The choice was hard, at times even brutal. Racism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice could make the work of becoming American notoriously difficult. But people understood that to have a nation composed of immigrants, there had to be a unifying common culture in the public sphere. Transmitting that common culture was the job of the schools.

My mother’s mother came from Maschito, an Albanian village in southern Italy. Many Maschitans settled in Fresno, where every year they celebrated the feast of their ancestral village’s patron saint, Santa Elia. But I never heard a word about any of this in school. We were busy learning about George Washington and the Constitution, Valley Forge and the Gettysburg Address, the nation’s history and heroes, its virtues and ideals — and, crucially, those core American principles.

It was at school that the immigrant learned American history and celebrated the leaders who had created the country, fought in its defense, and embodied its most cherished values. In short, he learned how to be what he or his parents had freely chosen to become: American.

This process has been compromised over the past 40 years as the ideology of multiculturalism has colonized schools, government, and popular culture. Today, immigrants learn to embrace a sense of entitlement and grievance and to demand that schools and government acknowledge and atone for America’s sins. School curricula have degenerated into ethnic cheerleading and feel-good symbolism. The effect is to divide, not unify, to pit group against group as each tries to out-victim the other in a zero-sum competition for political clout and slices of the public [pie].

Those who come here for whatever reason generate resentments when they demand that taxpayers pay for schools in which they are taught the history of the culture they've left rather than the history of the culture they've chosen. When immigrants refuse to assimilate, when they nurse resentments toward America and insult indigenous Americans, as the university student group called MEChA (National Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan) does*, then our nation is destined to Balkanize and our sense of community, common purpose and concern for each other is doomed to disintegrate. Our infatuation with multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration is producing a social disaster, as does almost every policy promoted by the Left in the last fifty years.

*Thornton explains:

Aztlan is the mythical territory, comprising northern Mexico and the American Southwest, that was allegedly stolen and plundered by Americans. MEChA promotes a politicized Mexican identity called “Chicanismo” that “involves a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of our cultural heritage.” As such, MEChA “is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente [people] captive.”

If you need further evidence that this ideology is hostile to American culture and identity, just read a poem published recently at California State University Fresno in La Voz de Aztlán, a state-subsidized campus newspaper that functions as MEChA’s house organ: “America the land robbed by the white savage / the land of the biggest genocide / the home of intolerance / the place where dreams come to die / the place of greed and slavery,” and so on for another two dozen lines.

It's people who think like this whom the American taxpayer is expected to welcome with open arms, grant citizenship, subsidize the education and health care of, and make eligible for public welfare. And those taxpayers are called xenophobes by the Left if they resent having to do it.

What a country.

The Limits of Knowledge

A journal called The European has an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the head man at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland.

Toward the end of the piece Heuer is asked about his thoughts concerning the interface of what we can demonstrate empirically and what we believe on other grounds, i.e. the interface of science and philosophy or theology. Here's the exchange:

The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?
Heuer: I doubt it.
The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? You want to expand the realm of knowledge but at some point, there is a definite boundary that you cannot cross. Do you simply have to accept the fact that nothing was prior to the Big Bang?
Heuer: I wasn’t saying there was nothing, I am saying that we don’t know anything about what was before – if there was a before. But here we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief. I think many famous scientists have struggled with this question and people today also struggle with it.
The European: So at the very borders of human knowledge, science and belief tend to converge?
Heuer: In the scientific community we don’t tend to discuss such things too often. But the more we investigate the early universe, the more people are trying to connect science to philosophy. That is a good thing. Since we are struggling with the limits of knowledge, maybe philosophy or theology struggle also with our research.

It's an interesting consequence of modern science that the more the field advances the more naive the claims that science has disproven the existence of God appear.

In the last few decades many physicists have come to believe that the materialist view of 19th century science is just wrong and that what we call matter is simply an illusion. Our minds process the world in such a way as to present it to our conscious selves as a substantial something when in fact its substantiality is only an artifact of our being the size we are. Were we very much smaller, say the size of an atom, a brick wall would appear to be almost entirely empty space and the atoms in the wall would have the appearance of mere concentrations of energy or forces.

Many physicists have also come around to the belief that not only is the fundamental "substrate" of reality not matter, it's consciousness.

All of this, of course, is pretty much what theologians have been saying for centuries - the universe is not only the product of a divine intelligence, like a painting is the product of the artist, but it's also grounded in that intelligence, much like an idea is grounded in a mind.

In any case, the physicalism of modern atheism seems with almost every revolution in physics to grow more and more unlikely, simplistic, and obsolete.