Fatherless America

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

On this Father's day weekend it might be good to remind ourselves of some of the salient points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers tend to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers tend to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent they exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Happy Fathers' Day.

The Democrats Predict the Rapture

The bad news is the misery index (the sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate) is the highest it's been since 1983:

When it comes to measuring the combination of unemployment and inflation, it doesn’t get much more miserable than this. In fact, misery, as measured in the unofficial Misery Index that simply totals the unemployment and inflation rates, is at a 28-year high, reflective of how weak the economic recovery has been and how far there is to go.

The index, first compiled during the soaring inflation days of the 1970s by economist Arthur Okun, is registering a nausea-inducing 12.7, 9.1 percent for unemployment and 3.6 percent for annualized inflation, a number not seen since 1983. The index has been above 10 since November 2009 and had been under double-digits from June 1993 through May 2008.

The good news is that it's all Bush's fault and that the Hope and Change we were promised with the election of Barack Obama is just around the corner. At least that's what they've been telling us, rather like Harold Camping predicting the end of the world, since Mr. Obama's accession in January of 2009.

This ad features DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on Meet the Press doing a pretty good Camping impersonation:

Well, where's the evidence that the administration has "turned the economy around"? Are we just supposed to accept this on faith? Is there any empirical reason why we should believe Ms. Wasserman-Schultz when she tells us that the rapture .... I mean the economic recovery .... is immanent?

A Few Interesting Facts

Joseph Farah, an Arab-American journalist, has a column in the Washington Times that presents an interesting picture of the history of the plight of the Palestinian people. If Farah is correct then perhaps a lot of what we believe about this troubled region may not be historically accurate. He makes the following claims, for example:

The idea of giving the Palestinians their own state is not new. The plan actually dates back to 1948 when Israel was re-created. At that time, so-called "Palestinian" Arabs got their own state – but they rejected it along with the rest of the Arab world.

Prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, there was no serious movement for a "Palestinian" homeland. In the Six-Day War, Israel captured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. But they didn't capture these territories from the "Palestinian Authority" or Hamas. They captured them from Jordan's King Hussein.

The name Palestine was assigned to the region by the Romans in 70 A.D. after they committed genocide against the Jews, smashed the Temple and declared the land of Israel would be no more. From then on, the Romans promised, it would be known as 'Palestine.' The name was derived from the Philistines, a Goliathian people conquered by the Jews centuries earlier. It was a way for the Romans to add insult to injury.

"Palestine" has never existed – before or since – as an autonomous entity.

There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.

Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of 1 percent of the landmass.

Farah also argues that Jerusalem's status as Islam's third most holy site has no basis, at least not in the Koran.

[T]he Quran says nothing about Jerusalem. It mentions Mecca hundreds of times. It mentions Medina countless times. It never mentions Jerusalem. With good reason. There is no historical evidence to suggest Muhammad ever visited Jerusalem.

Whatever the degree of agreement among scholars over the points Farah makes it's a fascinating fact that modern Israel occupies a land area about the size of Belize and yet it has been the focus of the world's attention and Arab animosity ever since it was carved out of Jordan in 1948. Why? What makes Israel different from all the other countries in the world, almost all of which were created by displacing and/or assimilating far more people over far more territory than was Israel?

Moreover, why is it that Arab nations have so much land at their disposal, yet they refuse to assimilate the original Palestinian refugees and their descendents, instead keeping them confined in miserable refugee camps? Moreover, why is it that Arabs are better off living in Israel as Israeli citizens than they are in almost any majority-Arab country?

One last question: Does anyone really believe that there would be peace between Israelis and Palestinians if the Palestinians had their own state?

More on Fast and Furious

Bob Owens at Pajamas Media lays out the details of Project Fast and Furious (also called Gun-Runner) that we talked about yesterday. After explaining what the Iran-Contra scandal was about back in the 80s, Owens outlines the basic contours of Gun-Runner, a scandal he concludes, with very good reason, to be far worse than Iran-Contra.

Owens takes the following from a 51-page report based on testimony of ATF field agents released by Darrell Issa's congressional oversight committee Tuesday. The report consists of testimony from ATF field agents, states Owens, who objected to orders from their supervisors that directly conflicted with their primary order: to always follow the suspect with the gun and always interdict to keep the weapon from being used in a crime. Here's owens' summary of the report's findings:

• DOJ and ATF inappropriately and recklessly relied on a 20-year-old ATF order to allow guns to walk.” The agencies misrepresented the intention of the order to justify their actions.
• Supervisors told the agents to ‘get with the program’ because senior ATF officials had sanctioned the operation.” At least one agent was cautioned that if he didn’t stop complaining about the dangerous nature of the operation, he would find himself out of a job, and lucky to be working in a prison.
• Operation Fast and Furious contributed to the increasing violence and deaths in Mexico. This result was regarded with giddy optimism by ATF supervisors hoping that guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico would provide the nexus to straw purchasers in Phoenix. ATF officials were seemingly unconcerned over the deaths of Mexican law enforcement officers, soldiers, and innocent civilians, noting that you had to “scramble a few eggs” to make an omelette, in a callous disregard of human life.
• Senior ATF personnel including Acting Director Ken Melson, and senior Department of Justice officials at least up to an assistant attorney general, were well aware of and supported the operation.
• Department of Justice officials hid behind semantics to lie and deny that they allowed guns to be walked across the border.
• When asked by the Oversight Committee how many of 1,750 specific weapons that “walked” under orders of the ATF and DOJ could have been interdicted if agents were allowed to act as they were trained, the agents answered they could have stopped every single one.
• The more than 2,000 weapons that the Obama Justice Department allowed to be delivered to Mexican narco-terrorist cartels are thought to have been used in the shooting of an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers battling the cartels. Two American law enforcement officers have also presumably fallen prey to these weapons, along with an unknown number of civilians on both sides of the border.
• President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has purposefully armed narco-terrorist drug cartels that have been accused of bombings, ambushes, mass murders, public executions, and the assassination of police, politicians, and civic leaders.
• Obama’s Justice Department armed the enemy of our neighbor and ally, providing enough arms to equip ten infantry companies, or two battalions, of violent drug dealers.

So when will our media stop talking about the Anthonys (Weiner and Casey) and start talking about this?

Lying's No Big Deal

Anthony Weiner finally resigned his seat in congress today after having disgraced both himself and his office. Fox News commentator Alan Colmes, who is a liberal, argues that he should not have. Colmes argues that character doesn't matter as long as the congressman votes the way he wants him to vote, and that lying to the American people is not sufficient reason to relinquish one's power.

This is pretty stunning, I think. Is it not the case that if someone lies to his employer in the private sector it's grounds for firing? Is it not the case that our elected representatives, whom we remunerate with six-figure salaries and handsome benefit packages, should be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average American? Any elected official of whatever party who did what Weiner did should have resigned or been thrown out of office. Why should taxpayers be compelled to continue to pay people like this?

Colmes takes a stab at rationalizing Weiner's lying by saying that he was trying to preserve his dignity and marriage, but everyone who lies has some self-serving motive for doing so. Preserving one's personal dignity hardly justifies lying to the American people and further eroding the trust we have in our political class. When one believes that the greatest good is advancing one's political agenda (Weiner and Colmes are both left-liberals) then anything which accomplishes those goals is morally acceptable. This reasoning, though, puts us on course to agreeing that if lying would have enabled Weiner to ride out the scandal then lying is no big deal, and this leads inevitably to the conclusion that lying is almost never wrong.

People criticize Rush Limbaugh for asserting that it's in the nature of liberals to lie, but Colmes, to the extent that he's representative of the left, gives us a pretty vivid confirmation of Rush's claim.

Parenthetically, Colmes seems to have momentarily forgotten that he was on Fox News when he said that if we're going to demand Weiner's resignation we should also have demanded President Clinton's resignation for lying to the nation about his tryst with Monica Lewinsky. I think most Fox viewers watching that exchange were vigorously nodding their heads in agreement with that conclusion.

Fast and Furious

For those who may have missed the story the Department of Justice via the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was apparently running an operation named "Fast and Furious" that allowed criminals to smuggle guns from the U.S. to gangs in Mexico.

The ostensible purpose was to track the weapons to drug cartels to ascertain their hideouts, but several ATF agents complained about the operation, arging that it was illegal and predicting that allowing guns into the hands of criminals would not turn out well. Several of the guns subsequently turned up at the scene of violent crimes including the murder of an American border patrol agent and now the DoJ is on the hot seat.

Congressman Darryl Issa is holding hearings on the operation, and it looks as if some DoJ officials may have lied to his committee. If so, there will be contempt citations and more pressure on Attorney General Holder to resign.

Hot Air has the details. The evening news probably won't.

Bypassing Stem Cells

Science Daily is reporting another fascinating development in the quest to reprogram skin cells to build other kinds of tissue:

A research breakthrough has proven that it is possible to reprogram mature cells from human skin directly into brain cells, without passing through the stem cell stage. The unexpectedly simple technique involves activating three genes in the skin cells; genes which are already known to be active in the formation of brain cells at the fetal stage. The new technique avoids many of the ethical dilemmas that stem cell research has faced.

For the first time, a research group at Lund University in Sweden has succeeded in creating specific types of nerve cells from human skin. By reprogramming connective tissue cells, called fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, a new field has been opened up with the potential to take research on cell transplants to the next level. The discovery represents a fundamental change in the view of the function and capacity of mature cells. By taking mature cells as their starting point instead of stem cells, the Lund researchers also avoid the ethical issues linked to research on embryonic stem cells.

In experiments where two further genes were activated, the researchers have been able to produce dopamine brain cells, the type of cell which dies in Parkinson's disease. The research findings are therefore an important step towards the goal of producing nerve cells for transplant which originate from the patients themselves. The cells could also be used as disease models in research on various neurodegenerative diseases.

There's more at the link. The article doesn't talk about all the applications of this research, but if fibroblasts can be turned into nerve cells the implications for people who have suffered spinal cord and brain injuries are staggering. Permanently paralyzing injuries might become as rare as polio. It sounds too good to be true.

Long, Hot Summer

Bill sends along a link to the following video of a recent CNN broadcast. CNN is very supportive of the Obama presidency, so if their people are talking like this the president is in serious trouble. More importantly, if what Jack Cafferty says is true the nation is in serious trouble:

We could be in for a long hot summer and it won't have anything to do with global warming.

Plenty of Greenhouse Gas but No Warming

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News. He has a column in Forbes in which he makes an interesting claim and poses a tough question to global warming "alarmists":

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade.

The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures show absolutely no warming during the past the past 10 years. This is the case for the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, including the United States. This is the case for the Arctic, where the signs of human-caused global warming are supposed to be first and most powerfully felt. This is the case for global sea surface temperatures, which alarmists claim should be sucking up much of the predicted human-induced warming. This is the case for the planet as a whole.

If atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or primary driver of global temperatures, then where is all the global warming? We’re talking 10 years of higher-than-expected increases in greenhouse gases, yet 10 years of absolutely no warming.

Taylor does not object to what he calls global warming theory, but he does think the alarmists have gone too far with their extrapolations and concerns. His brief column offers some helpful data on this issue.

Is Syria Next?

There are indications that the Obama administration has had enough of the massacres in Syria and is about to do something to stop it. At least that's what a report from debkafile suggests:

Debkafile's military and intelligence sources report that Monday, June 13, the US deployed the USS Bataan amphibian air carrier strike vessel opposite Syria's Mediterranean coast with 2,000 marines, 6 war planes, 15 attack helicopters, including new V-22 Ospreys, and 27 choppers for landing forces aboard. Also this week, US naval units went operational in the Aegean, Adriatic and Black Seas as part of the joint US-Ukrainian Sea Breeze 2011 exercise.

The USS Monterrey cruiser armed with Aegis surface missile interceptors has additionally been stationed in the Black Sea. Western sources additonally report a build-up of ship-borne anti-missile missile strength in the Mediterranean basin.

This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria.

Moscow, Tehran and Damascus, in particular, are taking this exceptional spate of American military movements in and around the Mediterranean as realistically portending American intervention in Syria.

That Obama would initiate yet a fourth major conflict in the Middle East is hard to believe, especially since the Libyan imbroglio seems to have sputtered to an inconclusive and embarrassing stalemate, and since Congress is now demanding that he secure their approval for continued military action in Libya as called for by the War Powers Act, and since any action against Syria will almost certainly elicit some sort of retaliation by Iran.

On the other hand, it costs a lot of money to move those naval assets around so there must be some reason for doing it.

Parenthetically, it seems peculiar that such portentous military preparations are apparently happening below the media radar. At least I haven't seen anything in the American press about them, but to be fair, the media have had a lot on their plate lately what with the Casey Anthony trial, Anthony Weiner's lewd text messages, Sarah Palin's emails, and other matters of equal importance for our nation's future. I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

Correction

In last Saturday's post Chasing Down Dawkins I mistakenly attributed the video to William Lane Craig's organization Reasonable Faith. The actual creator of the video is a talented fellow by the name of Peter Byrom (He's the gentleman asking the question in the clip below) who promises more great entertainment in the months between now and Craig's trip to England in October. We're looking forward to it.

My apologies to Peter.

Hitler's Ethic

A brief review of a new book by Richard Weikart is posted at Evolution News and Views:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, new in paperback), which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

Once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral standard at all. This leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity, i.e. what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if they a) had the power and b) were logically consistent. Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The consequences were completely predictable.

Cartesian Theist makes a similar point in this video:

Pro-Life Progress

Elections have consequences and the election last November has had more than most. One arena in which this is especially the case is the matter of abortion legislation. This interesting article by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra explains why:

The Oregon bill is one of 576 measures related to abortion that have been introduced so far in 2011 in 48 states, according to Elizabeth Nash, public policy associate for the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

[B]y early April, 142 abortion-related provisions had passed at least one chamber of a state legislature, compared with 67 in 2009. More than half of the 142 bills (57 percent) introduced this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38 percent in 2010.

About 40 new anti-abortion laws were on the books by mid-April. They include:

• expanding the waiting period requirement in South Dakota from 24 hours to 72 hours, and requiring women to visit a crisis pregnancy center in the interim.
• requiring a physician who performs an abortion in South Dakota to provide counseling on all risk factors related to abortion.
• allowing any hospital employee in Utah to refuse to "participate in any way" in an abortion.
• making it a felony in Arizona to perform or provide money for abortions sought because of a baby's race or sex.
• prohibiting insurance plans that participate in the state insurance exchange from including abortion coverage in Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
• prohibiting the abortion of a fetus capable of feeling pain in Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma.

Republican victories in the 2010 mid-term elections account for much of the legislative surge. Republicans....took 29 governorships and 680 seats in state legislatures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The November elections brought huge change in the state houses," said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life.

The legislation has been snowballing since the Republican sweep: "Just in the first three months of this year, we've provided testimony on 17 life-related legislative matters," she said. In previous years, the average number of testimonies provided was two or three for the entire year.

Restricting abortion through new state laws seems to be highly effective in reducing abortion rates. "We see that the number of abortions has gone down by 22 percent between 1990 and 2005," said Michael New, political science professor at the University of Alabama. "An important reason is the restrictions that more and more states are passing."

There's much more at the link. One interesting aspect of this that's not mentioned in the article has to do with how the rhetoric in the debate has changed. Back in the decades after Roe v. Wade (1973) we were often told by those who wanted to liberalize abortion laws that the majority of people in the country were pro-choice. We seldom hear that claim anymore. It'd be hard to explain, after all, why pro-choice majorities keep electing pro-life legislators to their state governments.

Politically Correct Beauty Pageants

I have very little interest in beauty contests, but I do have an interest in the suffocating miasma of political correctness that seeks to envelop all of American culture and social life, including beauty pageants. According to an article at Fox News Miss USA pageant contestants are now being required to answer questions about their beliefs concerning teaching evolution in schools and posing for nude photos:

According to Paula Shugart, President of the Miss Universe Organization (MUO), which also operates Miss USA, these “topics are very relevant and in the news.”

That they're in the news may be so, but what relevance does a young woman's opinion on teaching Darwinism in schools or her views on public nudity have to her qualifications for winning a beauty contest? None that I can see, so why ask about them? How would her answer affect her chances of winning?

A cynical observer might be forgiven for suspecting that these questions are intended to isolate and eliminate contestants who have strong religious commitments and values. Who else, after all, would be expected to object to either of these proposals?

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Hitler Plays Dawkins

On Saturday I posted on the difficulty debate organizers have had persuading atheist Richard Dawkins to debate philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God.

Here's a funny You Tube video that uses a film clip from a movie about Hitler - a clip that's been put to many similar uses over the last year or so - to make the point.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Interracial Crime in Chicago

Chicago has recently been rocked by gang violence and crimes against innocent victims ranging in age from 14 to 68, and people are wondering why the Chicago Tribune omitted mention of one of the salient facts of the story. There was no mention in the original news reports of the races of the perpetrators and their victims and readers wanted to know why not. In response to their queries Times editor Gerould Kern offers an explanation, and several staff writers state their views on the matter here.

Kern writes:

We do not reference race unless it is a fact that is central to telling the story.

By all indication, these attacks were motivated by theft, not race. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that the victims were singled out because of their race. Therefore we did not include racial descriptions in our initial news reports.

There are circumstances when race may be relevant, such as describing a criminal suspect being sought by police. But this description must be accompanied by other detailed information, such as height, weight, scars, clothing, etc. By adhering to this practice, we guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion because of the color of their skin.

I'm afraid this all seems a little lame to me, as did the thoughts of the paper's staffers on the matter.

There are at least two more plausible reasons Kern might have given as to why the Tribune does not mention the races of the thugs and their victims:

First, it'd be superfluous. There are certain crimes that one knows within a high degree of certainty when one reads about them the racial identity of the perps. If a report concerns white-collar crime or serial murder one can be fairly confident that the criminal is white. If the report is about violent gang crime, say, girls beating a victim in a MacDonald's or on a school bus, one is reasonably sure that the girls are black. Anyone who denies this simply isn't familiar with the logic of induction.

A second more plausible explanation is that the perps were in fact black, the victims were white, and newspapers feel a subliminal obligation to downplay black on white violence. I can't prove what I'm about to allege, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that were the thugs in these crimes white and the victims black the Tribune would have shown much less reticence about mentioning the races of the people involved. Indeed, if they didn't mention the races they'd have been accused of covering up an obvious instance of white racism. If a gang of whites had beaten a 68 year old black man I suspect the races of the parties would have then been "a fact central to the telling of the story."

Liberals, however, don't believe that there is any such thing as black racism, even though most of the racial animosity in this country today is directed against whites, and so when whites are victimized it simply doesn't occur to a liberal to think that race was a factor. Thus, there's a deep reluctance among liberals to call attention to black thuggery directed against whites but no corresponding reluctance to call attention to the racial nature of white aggression directed against blacks. Indeed, such crimes, on the relatively rare occasions in which they occur, often become national stories.

We have several serious social problems in this country, one of which is black violence (which stems largely from the breakdown of the black family which is largely a consequence of the Great Society welfare programs of the 60s and 70s). Pretending that race is irrelevant and sweeping it under the rug does nothing to help ameliorate the problems. The first step in any solution is clearly and definitively describing the nature of what we are up against. Violent crime in the U.S., including interracial violent crime, is largely minority generated, and we shouldn't cover it up or ignore it just because it's minorities who are doing it any more than we should cover it up if it were whites who were responsible.

Indeed, to treat people differently because of their race is the essence of what it is to be racist.

Chasing Down Dawkins

About a month ago we posted on the difficulty Christian philosopher William Lane Craig is having getting atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, to debate him.

Evolution News and Views has a very interesting promotional video, put out by Craig's organization, which summarizes the attempts to lasso Professor Dawkins into a debate:

A man who writes books and articles on atheism, who gives speeches on the fraudulent pretensions of religious belief, but who refuses to defend those beliefs against an able challenger, even though he has declared publicly that he welcomes such challengers, is tacitly admitting his lack of confidence in the intellectual defensibility of his convictions.

Dawkins surely realizes that the credibility of the entire "New Atheist" movement would rest on his shoulders were he to assent to debate Craig and that defeat would do the movement irrevocable harm. It would be the modern equivalent of the Bishop Wilberforce/ Thomas Huxley debate, or the Scopes Trial, and should he lose he'd be forever remembered as the atheist counterpart to William Jennings Bryant.

Dawkins apparently would prefer not to carry that burden. He'd rather be instead the childhood bully who liked to push around all the smaller kids until, confronted by someone who wasn't afraid of him, he backed down and slunk away.

Weiner's Problem: Christian Conservatives

I hope Chris Matthews is not typical of how most liberals think. According to Matthews Congressman Anthony Weiner's behavior - which I'm sure by now needs no description from me - is immoral, indiscreet, embarrassing, and gross. Yet, Mr. Matthews opines, the only people offended by such behavior are those culturally backward Christian conservatives. If only there weren't so many of them, Matthews seems to be suggesting, Weiner and the Democrats would be home free:

Evidently Matthews believes that immoral, indiscreet, embarrassing and gross behavior is no big deal to liberals. I wonder how many of them watching his show were offended by the implication.

In any event, it now turns out that the police are questioning an underage girl about contacts she had with Congressman Weiner, who being a liberal, is probably wondering why all the fuss. It's only culturally backward Christians who would be offended if it turns out that Weiner was sending lewd messages to this teenager.

Weiner, who's married, sent lewd photos of himself to various women on taxpayer time, lied about it to all and sundry, and refuses to resign his congressional seat. Nevertheless, in the morally bizarre world of Chris Matthews, where every night's Hardball show is like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, it's only the culturally backward Christian conservatives who find this appalling. Alec Baldwin, a real liberal's liberal, all but dismisses the behavior as a consequence of being a "high- functioning" man in the political pressure cooker of Washington.

My question for Messrs. Matthews and Baldwin is, what does a congressman have to do, besides be a Republican, for liberals like them to be disgusted by his behavior?

Shocking Revelations

Anticipating being parodied by John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion, The Washington Post yesterday launched a pre-emptive self-parody of the media feeding frenzy over the 24,000 Palin emails that they're sifting through hoping to find something with which to pillory Palin. At least I think it's a self-parody, but maybe not. Maybe these people are actually this shallow:

In one e-mail, written weeks before Palin was chosen as a running mate by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Palin praises a speech by the man who would be McCain’s opponent in the 2008 presidential race.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama “gave a great speech this morn in Michigan—mentioned Alaska,” Palin wrote to aides. In a speech in Lansing, Mich., Obama had spoken of the need to complete the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline, and open more oil and gas drilling in Alaska. “So.... we need to take advantage of this [and] write a statement saying he’s right on.”

A year before, in February 2007, a staffer recommended to Palin that she meet Pete Rouse, “who’s now chief of staff for some guy named Barack Obama,” when she was in Washington, D.C. on an upcoming trip.

“I’m game to meet him,” Palin wrote back.

Other e-mails make clear that Palin relied on her husband, Todd Palin, for advice on policy issues. In a March 2008 e-mail, for instance, the governor makes clear that he also weighed in on how to deal with Alaska’s burgeoning wolf population, a topic of debate at the time among officials and environmental experts.

The governor told her fish and game commissioner in blunt terms that she opposed using state helicopters to hunt wolves and preferred paying private hunters.

“We have to act quickly on this as predators are acting quickly and rural families face ridiculous situation of being forced to import more beef instead of feeding their families our healthy staple of alaskan game. Nonsense. Unacceptable - and not on my watch,” she said.

Her source of information? “Todd interviewed buddies who live out there... Some confirmation that state intervention isn’t first choice w/the locals,” Palin said.”We need to incentivize here,” including providing money for trappers.

The e-mails also reveal Palin’s sensitivity to the way she was portrayed in the media, even at a time when the coverage came mainly from local outlets in Alaska. Palin’s contentious relationship with the national news media has become a major theme of her political persona in the years since the end of the 2008 campaign.

In 2008, for instance, one of Palin’s press aides sent her an essay about Jane Swift, the onetime governor of Massachusetts, who raised young children while in office. Palin responded with a barb about a recent column from a writer at the Anchorage Daily News.

“Pls remind Julia Omalley that ‘they’ said the same thing throughout my career- ‘too young,’ ‘pregnant,’ ‘kids’...’She won’t be able to do it,’ ” Palin wrote. “This coming from good ol’ boys who don’t like change...And so far along in my career we’ve proved them wrong at each turn.”

In another e-mail from 2008, an aide asks about a tanning bed at Palin's house. A Web site, he said, was implying that the state had paid for it--which had set off a flood of calls from other media.

“The old used tanning bed that my girls have used a handful of times in Juneau?,” Palin wrote back. “Yes, we paid for it ourselves.”

Wow. This stuff is amazing. It just about dooms any thoughts Palin might have had of ever being President, don't you think? It's great that our media is on the case making sure that corruption and incompetence among our (Republican) politicians is exposed to the light of day.

Next up at the WaPo this headline: "Media Demands Release of Barack Obama Emails From His Days in Illinois and U.S. Senate."

Just kidding.

New Low

Just when you might think our public intercourse couldn't get any more ridiculous, just when you think we've sunk to the lowest possible levels of sanity in our political discourse, word comes that the New York Times and the Washington Post are recruiting readers to help them pore through Sarah Palin's emails from her tenure as Governor of Alaska.

Apparently, these media titans can't wait to find something, anything, that'll make Palin look bad and they're willing to conscript hundreds of citizens to help them do it. The Washington Post is offering "micro-updates" as the revelations unfold. AOL offers viewers the chance to follow a "live email blog" as the damning documents become available. It's absolutely ludicrous, especially since the media has shown no interest whatsoever in learning anything at all about the man whom we have elected to the most powerful office in the world.

When some were asking for proof not so long ago that Mr. Obama was actually born in the U.S. the media was interested only to the extent they could deride those who were curious about the presidential provenience. When Mr. Obama refused to unseal his college transcripts the media said that that was just fine with them. When evidence mounted that Mr. Obama had in the past associated with some pretty unsavory characters the media just yawned and said "so what?", but when Sarah Palin's emails became available they're pushing and elbowing each other to be the first to discover some juicy tidbit they can hold up as proof that she's a whacko or a fraud.

Meanwhile, a complete unknown sits in the Oval Office with his hand on the tiller of the ship of state and the media couldn't care less. Is it a lack of common sense, a lack of intelligence, or a lack of maturity among American journalists that causes their priorities to be so absurdly inverted? Or is it that they're so psychologically blinkered by their emotional investment in the "first black president" that they've abandoned any pretense of journalistic objectivity and are simply unwilling to hold him to the same standards of scrutiny they apply to everyone else?