Fracking Fallacies

I'm very glad there are people who's life work it is to protect our natural lands and beautiful spaces. I'm glad that there are people concerned about habitat loss and the effects of man's activities on the ecological diversity of a region. I belong to The Nature Conservancy and have visited probably 90% or more of the nation's national parks and many of our national wildlife refuges. But sometimes some of the people engaged in the work of insuring that our natural heritage is available for our descendents to enjoy give the impression that they're just a bunch of Luddites.

A case in point is the campaign to stop the use of a technology called "fracking" which is used to mine natural gas from subterranean rock. There may be good reasons not to "frack" but according to an article at American Thinker the objections some environmentalists have raised against the practice seem either trivial or dishonest. According to the AT article:

Hydro-fracking has a long history of success. First introduced in 1908, forty years later it became a commercially viable method to safely extract America's most abundant energy from bedrock strata. Over one million gas wells have been fracked without a single incident of environmental impact. This didn't stop Ian Urbina of the New York Times from citing a case from 1984 in an August 2011 article warning of tainted water and the possibility of benzene in fracking fluid.

Urbina's article was based on the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency requires that drillers file Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for every chemical used on the drill site. Benzene, as well as a lot of other chemicals, are used in the vehicles and machinery on site, but are not part of the fracking fluid.

Ninety percent of fracking fluid is water with 9.5% sand the other half percent the secret ingredients, common household chemicals we all flush daily into the municipal gray water system.

The AP sounded the alarm highlighting three compounds that appeared on the lists because of the risks they pose to human health -- naphthalene, toluene and xylene. Eco-activists had a field day claiming that deadly BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene) in fracking fluid will poison the water, killing fish, flora, and fauna while releasing fatal concentrations of the green death into the atmosphere.

It was much ado about nothing. Scott Perry, the director of DEP's Bureau of Oil and Gas Management, accepted the blame because he provided the AP with the comprehensive list of all chemicals used at PA's well sites. Not just the chemicals pumped deep underground but also those stored or used on a well site, including fuel and brake fluid for vehicles. DEP spokesman Tom Rathbun, said of hydraulic fracturing fluids, that a fear that those chemicals will interfere with drinking water aquifers is misplaced.

"It's our experience in Pennsylvania that we have not had one case in which the fluids used to break off the gas from 5,000 to 8,000 feet (1,500-2,400 m) underground have returned to contaminate ground water," said John Hanger, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

EPA bureaucrats, however, don't seem to care about inconvenient details. Residents in a Texas suburb had natural gas in their water wells for years before any fracking took place. The methane was a natural constituent of the town's water, but that didn't hinder the EPA from closing down the wells. Fracking was going on nearby, methane was in the water, ergo fracking must be responsible for the methane. The EPA shut down the drillers and put dozens of people out of work.

Little wonder that government bureaucracies and those who staff them, particularly the EPA of the Obama administration, are the butt of so much grass-roots mistrust and contempt.

Kill Bill and Al Qaeda Succession

There's a scene in one of the Kill Bill movies where a horde of Japanese swordsmen attack the Uma Thurman heroine pretty much one at a time. As they attack she mows them down seriatim with her own exquisite swordplay until there are none left to fight. I was reminded of that scene when I read the news that al Qaeda's number two man had come a cropper at the business end of an air to surface missile in Waziristan recently.

This is apparently as big a setback for al Qaeda as was the death of bin Laden because this guy, Atiyah al Rahman, was a serious talent in the al Qaeda network:

Brian Fishman of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point calls Rahman the communications glue of the organization and says that losing him will damage AQ as much as losing Bin Laden did. If you doubt him, take 30 seconds to re-read this post from last month.

Rahman was so important that Bin Laden appointed him as the group’s official emissary in Iran, which allowed him to arrange transit through the country for AQ operatives. Rahman was also Bin Laden’s point man on a plot to attack the United States on the anniversary of 9/11 this year, which is all you need to know about how far his ambitions extended.

This was not a guy who operated locally only, against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He was thinking big. And judging by how frequently he communicated with Osama, he was clearly someone for whom the group had high hopes. Says Steve Hayes at the Standard, “If Atiyah Rahman is indeed dead, as it appears, [it's] hard to overstate how significant a blow that is for AQ. And win for us.” Indeed.

According to sources, there were two missiles fired. One at a house and one at a car carrying four suspected terrorists. Which missile took out al Rahman is unknown.

So what does this have to do with the scene in Kill Bill? It seems like every month another one of these top echelon chaps is sent to his reward and a successor rushes in to take his place, like the assassins attacking Uma Thurman, only to have himself promptly dispatched to his 72 virgins within days or weeks of assuming his new duties. Like the Japanese swordsmen, they're eager to rush into the fray, but it's hard to figure out why.

Just What We Needed

Hot Air's Green Room has us all excited about the President's new executive order:

Perhaps to counter claims that he is off vacationing while the country goes to hell in a hand basket, President Obama took time away from the golf links to attend to affairs of state.

So what matter was so important that it demanded the president’s immediate attention? Did he get sudden inspiration on ways to cut the deficit, or did he hit upon a strategy or two to add to his soon-to-be-announced jobs plan (demoted to an outline)? Nope. He signed an executive order calling for the creation of an Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

The goal of the plan, as described by Judicial Watch, is to “eliminate demographic group imbalances in targeted occupations and improve workforce diversity. To attain this, special initiatives have been created targeting specific groups, including Hispanics, African Americans, American Indians, women and gays and lesbians.”

Everyone but white males. Apparently there are already too many white males in a lot of occupations.

What this means of, course, is that this new bureaucracy will insure hiring on the basis of quotas and racial and gender preferences.

The President had this to say about his latest effort on the job creation front:

We are at our best when we draw on the talents of all parts of our society, and our greatest accomplishments are achieved when diverse perspectives are brought to bear to overcome our greatest challenges.

Actually, this is not true. We are at our best when the best people, regardless of ethnicity and gender, are performing the work, but it's perhaps too much to expect a man who himself rose to the nation's highest office with absolutely no qualifications or talent for the job to think that qualifications should matter for any other government position. If Mr. Obama was elected largely because of his minority status, well, why shouldn't others have the same opportunity?

It's a strange way to effect national healing and good feeling to tell qualified people that they're the wrong color or sexual orientation for the job they seek. It was unjust when such thinking worked against minorities and it's as unjust today when it works for them.

Ugly Americans

Hard feelings continue in Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker visited a private parochial school to read to the students, and protestors marched outside chanting superannuated slogans, bullying women and the school's headmaster, and acting like, well, like students in public schools too often act. All of this followed vandalism at the school the night before Walker's visit.

I don't know how many of these people are teachers themselves, but I sure hope for the sake of the profession that the number was zero. If this is how Wisconsin's public school teachers comport themselves it's no wonder parents opt for private schools for their children. Watching the video one can't help but be struck by the contrast between the behavior of the kids and the behavior of the adults in the street.

I wonder what would be said in the media if this sort of behavior occurred at a tea party rally. Since it was union members and their sympathizers behaving thuggishly it appears to have gone unnoticed. It is, after all, the sort of behavior the media apparently expects from such people.

HT: Hot Air

Blame the Sun for Climate Change

One of the arguments global warming folk employ is that man-caused (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas emissions are causing greater cloud cover in the atmosphere resulting in higher temperatures as those clouds trap more heat near the earth's surface. One counter-argument has been that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are a relatively insignificant cause of cloud formation and that other factors such as volcanism and solar activity play a much greater role.

Andrew Orlowsky at The Register reports on a study conducted by CERN scientists and just published in the journal Nature which offers substantial support to the view that any global climate change presently occurring is the result of factors beyond our control and that the human contribution is relatively minor. Orlowsky writes:

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

CLOUD's lead physicist Jasper Kirkby is quoted in the accompanying CERN press release:

"We've found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we've found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays."

[Test] results confirm that cosmic rays increase the formation of cloud-nuclei by a factor of 10 in the troposphere, but additional trace gasses are needed nearer the surface.

CERN's supporting literature states that:

"[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.

Orlowsky concludes:

[T]he father of the theory [of solar genesis of condensation nuclei] Henrik Svensmark says he believes the solar-cosmic ray factor is just one of four factors in climate. The other three are: volcanoes, a "regime shift" that took place in 1977, and residual anthropogenic components.

When Dr. Kirkby first described the theory in 1998, he suggested cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century."

In short, if the findings of this research are accurate, by far the most significant factor in global warming is not the CO2 and other emissions we're pumping into the atmosphere but rather ionizing radiation produced by the sun and the rest of the galaxy. The earth may be warming, but, pace Al Gore, the extent to which humans are responsible is far from a settled matter.

There are lots of links at The Register.

The Tomasky Principle

So desperate are Mr. Obama's supporters to rescue his presidency from the ash heap of historical ignominy that they're writing pieces like Michael Tomasky's recent column in The Daily Beast. Mr. Tomasky concedes that Mr. Obama has been an unfortunate domestic-policy leader, but that he can still be a great foreign policy president. How? By standing aside and letting events run their course. If things work out well then it will redound to Mr. Obama's credit and history will judge him to be exceptional.

Perhaps in years to come those who teach leadership skills will call this the Tomasky Principle: Do nothing and hope you're lucky.

Let me quote to you from Tomasky's essay:

Barack Obama hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view. And it’s a little hard to picture how he might ever be seen as such—that is to say, even if he’s reelected, he’ll probably have a Republican House or Senate (or both) that will thwart him at every turn, so the best he’ll be able to say is that he presided over a slow and very difficult economic recovery, which presumably will finally happen by January 2017. But foreign policy could be a completely different story. Here one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president.

Obama has been more in the mold of George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, Jim Baker, when the Eastern bloc was throwing off Moscow’s shackles. Offer encouragement and stability, give a few speeches about freedom, but otherwise let them do their own work.

Obama took a lot of stick for not being more forceful on Egypt in February, but he was right to be cautious—there were lots of stakeholders involved, and sorry, but the president of the United States just can’t say every sweet thing romantics would like him to say. He then, as noted, took heat for moving too slowly on Libya, but here again he was correct. The nature of the Libyan regime is not a direct national-security issue, so there absolutely had to be a specific trigger to justify acting. That trigger was Gaddafi’s threatened assault on Benghazi.

That was completely the right thing to do. It was as textbook a fulfillment of “R2P,” or “responsibility to protect,” as one could imagine.One of the best things an American administration can do when big changes are afoot somewhere in the world is stay out of the way and not act as if we can will an outcome just because we’re America.

Next comes Syria. Conservatives are pushing Obama to take stronger steps. Maybe he should. I argued back in the spring, before Obama imposed sanctions on Assad, that he needed to be more forceful. But now he has imposed those sanctions and said Assad should step down. Doing much more seems dubious. Bashar al-Assad will go. It’s a matter of when. Better to let it play out. If a true R2P situation arises, then Obama will have to make some decisions. But it’s far better to let the Syrians do this themselves, if they can. We cannot prevent every casualty.

That’s starting to sound like a doctrine to me. Call it the doctrine of no doctrine: using our power and influence but doing so prudently and multilaterally, with the crucial recognition that Egypt is different from Libya is different from Syria is different from someplace else.

This does not yet greatness make. These dramatic changes have to work out for the better, and here the United States has a huge role to play. With respect to Libya, for example, we have control of about $37 billion in assets we can dole out to the transitional council. And yes, we probably are interested in its oil. But that doesn’t have to mean stealing it. All the Western countries that backed the rebels have to play a constructive and non- (forgive me for such a dated word) imperialist role in helping the country build its future.

Mr. Tomasky makes a virtue out of necessity. There's not much an American president can do in these situations so it's the mark of greatness to not do it. Historic presidents are those who stand aside and let events play out. If things go well then whoever is in the White House at the time will be seen as a foreign policy president of the highest accomplishment.

Thus, the time Mr. Obama spends on the golf course or on his numerous tax-payer subsidized vacations should be seen as his way of implementing the Tomasky Principle. He's not doing anything to shape events and is thereby proving his extraordinary talent and foreign policy skill.

Who would have thought that greatness could be achieved so easily?

Is Targeting Civilians Ever Justified?

Was dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima morally justifiable? Could using nuclear warheads against civilian populations be justified today? These questions have been asked repeatedly for 65 years, but unfortunately the treatment they're often given in secular venues is nonsensical. The secular man can offer no moral objection to killing civilians whether by nuclear weapons or conventional weapons. For the secularist might makes right. If you can do it then you're not wrong to do it.

But for those whose moral judgments are grounded in an objective, transcendent moral authority rather than a subjective, "whatever feels right to you" ethic the questions take on serious urgency. Here are some further questions: Is the use of nukes really the issue or is the issue any type of action that results in the deliberate deaths of innocent civilians? Was the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima any different, really, than the use of incendiary bombs on dozens of other Japanese cities? Is it ever justifiable to deliberately target civilians? Isn't that what morally bankrupt terrorists do?

Joe Carter, a former Marine, meditates on the use of nukes in a very thoughtful column at First Things and describes how his thinking on this issue has evolved.

He opens with this:

As I walked along the streets of Hiroshima I tried to imagine the city on fire. Fifty-six years earlier the atomic bomb “Little Boy” had set the area aflame, killing nearly a third of the population within twenty-four hours. According to the local prefectural health department estimates, of the people who perished on the day of the explosion, 60 percent died from flash or flame burns. Most of the dead were “noncombatants”—innocent men, women, and children.

Like many Americans I had always believed that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan had been a necessary evil, the only way to end the bloody, protracted war. Now, looking into the faces of smiling children strolling down the bustling sidewalks, I wasn’t so sure. Civilians just like the ones I was watching—mothers fussing over infants, grandmothers holding the hands of little girls—had been targeted by my country in order to bend the will of Japan’s political and military leaders.

Being an American, I had heard all of the arguments for why sacrificing these noncombatants was the only way to spare the lives of thousands that would be killed in the inevitable invasion. Being a Christian, though, I struggled with a more essential question: How is it ever justifiable to target innocent men, women, and children?

Carter's evolution on this question parallels my own. My objection is not, in principle, to the use of nuclear weapons. My problem, and I confess to vacillation on this point, is with the deliberate use of any kind of weapon against civilians. Carter's thoughts on this will not settle the debate, but they'll make you think and that's a good thing.

Socially Acceptable Bigotry

For those who find political talk shows entertaining there's been ample opportunity for chuckles provided by the talking heads and media sages who've been commenting with great derision and superciliousness on the religious beliefs of those fringy, tea party-type conservatives. Rarely do any of these opinionators actually understand the people or the beliefs they smugly lampoon, but that hardly deters them. Intent on embarrassing their target they often wind up embarrassing themselves thereby affording their viewers much mirth and merriment.

Mike Gerson writes a fine piece on this very topic in the Washington Post. Gerson chooses to focus on the utter silliness of the guilt by association tactic to which a number of writes have resorted in order to smear Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. What's intended is to marginalize Perry and Bachmann as a couple of religious freaks, but what results is that, not only do the writers make themselves look silly, they manage to caricature as loony the religious beliefs of millions of Americans who believe pretty much what Perry and Bachmann believe.

Here's Gerson's take on the attempt to discredit the tea party by painting its members, particularly Perry and Bachmann, as some sort of American Taliban:

Now the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry,” argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, “understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.” A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.

The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.

So it becomes necessary to stretch the case a bit. Perry admittedly doesn’t attend a Dominionist church or make Dominionist arguments, but he once allowed himself to be prayed for by some suspicious characters. Bachmann once attended a school that had a law review that said some disturbing things. She assisted a professor who once spoke at a convention that included some alarming people. Her belief that federal tax rates should not be higher than 10 percent, Goldberg explains, is “common in Reconstructionist circles.”

The evidence that Bachmann may countenance the death penalty for adulterers? Support for low marginal tax rates.

Bachmann is prone to Tea Party overstatement and religious-right cliches. She opened herself to criticism by recommending a book that features Southern Civil War revisionism. But there is no evidence from the careers of Bachmann or Perry that they wish to turn America into a theocratic prison camp.

It is a common argument among secular liberals that the application of any religiously informed moral reasoning in politics is a kind of soft theocracy. Dominionism is merely its local extension. As always, this argument proves too much, making a Dominionist of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Obama, by this standard, would be a theonomist as well, on the evidence of his Call to Renewal speech in 2006 — a refutation of political secularism.

Such secularism shows a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. Like any ideology, this one has philosophic roots that are subject to argument. Yet secularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place. The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally. Pluralism is defined as the silencing of religious people.

In other words, when the other side has good ideas and good arguments the tactic of choice is to smear them somehow. The smear doesn't have to be true, it just has to be scary. Facts don't matter, they just confuse people anyway. It's best to just throw a bunch of empty shibboleths (like "Rick Perry is a Dominionist") at the wall and hope one of them sticks.

We see a version of this tactic in the charge that those who doubt global warming is the threat Al Gore claims it is, or who doubt that mechanistic Darwinism is the correct explanation for the emergence and diversity of life, are "anti-science". It's amusing to hear media types who know little about the reasons for doubting the global warming alarums and even less about the reasons for questioning Darwinian evolution scoff at any public figure (or I should say any Republican public figure) who's skeptical of either or both of them.

It would be fun if some politician, upon being grilled about their doubts concerning Darwinism by Chris Matthews or any of the other pomposities at MSNBC, simply asked the individual firing the questions to explain exactly what it is he means by the term "evolution", and then sit back and enjoy the ensuing stutters, stammers, and other manifestations of ignorance from across the table.

Anyway, once you've read Gerson's piece try out Rod Dreher's column at First Things. It's just as good.

Vouchers Win

A series of studies have been completed in which the performance of students who were selected in lotteries to receive vouchers to attend successful schools were compared to students who were not selected in the lottery. By comparing these two cohorts comprised of students similar in every relevant way except that one won the lottery and the other didn't the study eliminates all variables except the quality of school the student ultimately attended.

A column by Gary Jason at The American Thinker discusses the results:

Greg Forster ("A Win-Win Solution: the Empirical Evidence on School Vouchers"), reviews the literature on voucher programs, and it is quite positive. He notes that of the ten "gold standard" studies of vouchers -- that is, studies that look at the performance of kids who won the lottery to go to voucher schools versus those who entered the lottery but lost (so had to attend public schools instead) -- nine show statistically significant gains in academic performance, and the one exception did show gains, just not at the level of statistical significance.

By comparing students who got the vouchers with those who tried but didn't get them, these studies effectively rule out other possible explanations for the academic gains, such as parental or student ambition.

Forster also reports that of the 19 empirical studies of the impact voucher schools have on the surrounding public schools, 18 confirm what one would expect a priori, viz., that competition from the voucher schools would force the public ones to improve their services. The remaining study shows no impact -- but no harm, either.

Another study by Matthew Carr ("The Impact of Ohio's EdChoice on Traditional Public School Performance") provides yet more evidence of the validity of the voucher concept.

Carr's study focuses on the crucial claim that voucher schools make public schools improve their quality of service through the force of competition (what he terms "the voucher threat"). Carr found that the public schools facing the voucher threat showed statistically significant gains in reading compared with those who didn't.

Interestingly, the gains are most concentrated in the "tails of the Bell-shaped curve" -- that is, the most advanced and least advanced students. As he puts it, this suggests that the public schools facing voucher competition put their focus on improving their services to the two groups they view as most likely to flee to private schools.

Even more exciting is the recent work by researchers investigating the effects of voucher programs on such non-academic but still vitally important phenomena as graduation rates and rates of campus violence. Here the results are even more dramatic.

The 2010 study of the D.C. voucher program done by the U.S. Department of Education -- a study that President Obama shamefully suppressed while he killed the D.C. voucher system (even as he was finding the best private school for his own privileged children) -- shows that the students who went to voucher schools had a 21% higher graduation rate than students who applied for vouchers but lost the lottery (91% versus 70%).

A similar study of the Milwaukee voucher program showed an 8% higher rate of graduation among voucher students than among the voucher applicants who went to public school (77% versus 69%).

Having taught in a fine public school for thirty five years I long ago came to be of the opinion that the problems of many schools has nothing to do with money, the quality of teachers, or the schools themselves, and everything to do with courts and legislatures that have piled so many restrictions and mandates on what schools can and cannot do that it's almost a miracle that as many kids succeed as do.

The opportunity every child should have is not to escape the public school in their school district but to escape the conditions that have been created in those schools by a panoply of overbearing laws, regulations, state school boards, teacher's unions, and lawyers.

Watch the documentary Waiting for Superman and weep for the students who want desperately to escape this system but find themselves trapped with no way out.

The Greater Miracle

An article at New Scientist opens by wondering how engineers might replicate the sophistication of the human brain. It answers by noting that:

IBM thinks it's found a way, and to prove it has built and tested two new "cognitive computing" microchips whose design is inspired by the human brain.

Now imagine that. Intelligent agents have engineered a microchip based on the design of the human brain which, according to materialists, is not actually designed. The design of the microchip surely required intelligence and would never have existed without the genius of the people who made it, but the brain upon which it is patterned didn't itself require any intelligent agency and is instead just the lucky product of blind, impersonal physical forces acting randomly over the span of a billion years or so.

Which is the greater miracle, that a mind engineered brains or that blind luck and chemistry did?

Lowest Approval Index Ever

Here's some news to put a cloud on Mr. Obama's ten day vacation on Martha's Vineyard:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 19% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -26.

This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama. The previous low was -24 reached yesterday and also in September 2010. Additionally, the level of Strong Approval matches the lowest yet recorded. By way of comparison, President Bush had ratings near the end of his second term in the minus 30s.

The really disturbing part of this survey is that 19% of Americans strongly approve of the job the president is doing. Who are these people? It's understood that a lot of people want to be supportive of the president, but a person can support him while admitting the obvious that he's doing a pretty miserable job. How anyone who has not been living in a cave can strongly approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing is perplexing.

Perhaps many among that 19% are people who don't pay taxes. To those who don't pay income tax high unemployment, deficits, debt, and taxes are matters of little concern. They're unaware of being affected by any of those things. As long as the person is still receiving his check from the government every month the president, in his eyes, is doing a fine job, and if the president is trying hard to prize open the taxpayers' pocketbooks even wider to get even more cash flowing into his pocket, well, then, he's doing a great job.

For many among those who don't pay taxes a great job by the president is one in which he takes more money from those who work and gives it to those who don't.

Is the Debate Over?

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph adds her thoughts to the cornucopia of opinion that's been written over the last two weeks about the London riots. She argues that the riots have, in the minds of many Brits, decisively settled the debate between proponents of the liberal and conservative worldviews and that liberalism has come out the loser. Here's her lede:

There is no national debate about the epidemic of riots and looting that spread through our cities like a bush fire. Out there in the real world, where people go about the normal business of life, there is no sign of the heated argument that the media is so determined to air. In fact, I cannot remember a time when there has been such crushing unanimity on a matter of public importance: the answers to the questions of why this happened, what went wrong when it began to happen and what needs to follow in its aftermath are considered so blindingly self-evident as to be beyond rational disagreement.

At the margins of this consensus, there are some distant noises. They are the desperate cries of those who fear that they have lost the argument of a lifetime and who want to persuade the great mass of the population that what it saw before its own eyes, hour by hour, night after night on the television news channels was something else altogether.

The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.

What follows is an excellent commentary on both the riots and on liberalism. Check it out.

Words Are Not Just Words

Kathleen Parker politely requests more courtesy and discrimination in the language we use in public. It's a request that's as welcome as it is overdue.

Our public discourse has been debauched and degraded for over 40 years, now, and it's making us a coarser, ruder, and tasteless people. The film and music industries have been in the vanguard of our culture's race to the bottom of the cesspool, and other institutions, like public schools, have largely given up trying to stanch the flow of noisome swill emanating from the mouths of so many of our youngsters.

Liberals, of course, never met a symptom of cultural decay which they didn't approve and sneer that those (like me) who have a problem with foul language should just get over it. It's just words, after all, they tell us, but of course this is absurd coming from people who would shriek in moral outrage if someone used the "N-word" or "faggot" in their presence.

Words are not just words. They have enormous power to hurt, to offend, to debase and to cheapen. Vulgarity, like the spray from a manure spreader, befouls not just the source but also whatever else is within range. The language people use is an indicator of their character and class, and to be in the presence of someone whose speech is a kind of moral halitosis is even more unpleasant than being in the presence of someone whose breath is foul. The latter is a symptom of inattention to the hygiene of one's mouth, but the former is a symptom of inattention to the hygiene of one's soul.

Anyway, here's Parker's lede:

Scene: An elevator in New York Presbyterian Hospital where several others and I were temporary hostages of a filthy-mouthed woman who was profanely berating her male companion. It wasn’t possible to discern whether he was her mate or her son, but his attire (baggy drawers) and insolent disposition seemed to suggest the latter.

Every other word out of the woman’s mouth was mother------, presumably a coincidental reference to any familial relationship. Finally, she shared with us bystanders her belief that said mother------ would not be welcome in her house (Hark! Good news at last!) and that he could very well seek shelter at his mother----ing father’s house. Aha, family ties established.

At this point, in a variation of deus ex machina, the elevator doors opened and we, the numb majority, were able to escape our too-close quarters, but not the diatribe, which continued unabated down the hallway, through the exit and onto the sidewalk.

A few of us made eye contact and returned the stare of recognition common among hostages. The understood sentiment is helpless indignation. What, really, can one do under such circumstances?

It was comical in a way. Seven or eight adults standing at attention, eyes forward, pretending that nothing is amiss or untoward, figuring we’d just get through this and thanking the stars and the moon that no children were on board and that this woman would not much longer be part of our lives.

Do read the rest of her meditation at the link.

It's Not Over 'Till It's Over

In the wake of the rebels' march into Tripoli yesterday the folks at debkafile ask a number of pertinent questions:

1. Where are the six government special divisions whose loyalty to the Libyan ruler and his sons was never in question? None of the 15,000 trained government troops were to be seen in the way of the rebel advance into the capital. The mystery might be accounted for by several scenarios: Either these units broke up and scattered or Qaddafi pulled them back into southern Libya to secure the main oil fields. Or, perhaps, government units are staying out of sight and biding their time in order to turn the tables on the triumphant rebels and trap them in a siege. The Libyan army has used this stratagem before.
2. How did the ragtag, squabbling Libyan rebels who were unable to build a coherent army in six months suddenly turn up in Tripoli Sunday looking like an organized military force and using weapons for which they were not known to have received proper training? Did they secretly harbor a non-Libyan hard core of professional soldiers?
3. What happened to the tribes loyal to Qaddafi? Up until last week, they numbered the three largest tribal grouping in the country. Did they suddenly melt away without warning?
4. Does Qaddafi's fall in Tripoli mean he has lost control of all other parts of Libya, including his strongholds in the center and south?
5. Can the rebels and NATO claim an undisputed victory? Or might not the Libyan ruler, forewarned of NATO's plan to topple him by Sept. 1, have decided to dodge a crushing blow, cede Tripoli and retire to the Libyan Desert from which to wage war on the new rulers?
6. Can the heavily divided rebels, consisting of at least three militias, put their differences aside and establish a reasonable administration for governing a city of many millions? Their performance in running the rebel stronghold of Benghazi is not reassuring.
7. Debkafile's military and counter-terror sources suggest a hidden meaning in Qaddafi's comment that Tripoli is now like Baghdad. Is he preparing to collect his family, escape Tripoli and launch a long and bloody guerrilla war like the one Saddam Hussein's followers waged after the US invasion of 2003 which opened the door of Iraq to al Qaeda? If that is Qaddafi's plan, the rebels and their NATO backers, especially Britain and France, will soon find their victory wiped out by violence similar to – or worse than – the troubles the US-led forces have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If Qaddafi is still alive and has forces at his disposal it would not be surprising to see him wait until the rebels start fighting among themselves, which they almost assuredly will, and then gradually pick them apart. The rebels wouldn't stand a chance without outside help, and how long that help is going to be available to them is unclear.

There's a lot of celebrating going on in Tripoli today, but if Qaddafi is still on the loose it might all be quite premature.

The Difference Faith Makes

A half dozen or so years ago British novelist and columnist A.N. Wilson abandoned atheism and made his way back to Christianity. He talks about his spiritual odyssey here. I mention this because knowing it helps to understand the column he wrote in the MailOnline in the wake of the London riots. In that essay he puts the blame for the wanton destruction and bloodshed squarely on the secularism and materialism that have dominated British society since WWII.

To make his point he contrasts the barbarous, anomic rioters with some of their victims. He introduces us, for example, to the father of one of the three men killed by the thug who deliberately ran his car into a group of men trying to protect their stores from looters:

Raw with grief, in a voice steady but tight with emotion, his appeal for calm on Wednesday was a beacon of hope amid the tumult and carnage of a horribly dark week for Britain.

Hours before he spoke, Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack. No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry.

Yet Mr Jahan had the dignity, the compassion and the common sense to demand an end to the violence that had shattered his life. ‘Blacks, Asians, whites — we all live in the same community,’ he said. ‘Why do we have to kill one another? Why are we doing this? Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home — please.’

There was no mention of feral rats or of the sickness in our society. There were no calls for revenge. If he had screamed for retribution, if he had chosen the emotional occasion of his son’s death to denounce whole swathes of the community, there could easily have been an unspeakable outbreak of racial violence.

Instead, Mr Jahan made an open and straightforward declaration of his faith. ‘I’m a Muslim. I believe in divine fate and destiny, and it was his destiny and his fate, and now he’s gone,’ he said. ‘And may Allah forgive him and bless him.’

It was a solemn, peaceful message that will make everyone who stereotypes Muslims as terrorists and fanatics feel ashamed of themselves. Tariq Jahan is a deeply impressive man, and like the great majority of Muslims in this country, he is hard-working, clean-living, guided in his conduct by religious belief, and unshakeable in his devotion to the ideal of family life.

But it's not just Muslims like Tariq Jahan Mr. Wilson wants to praise:

In London at the height of the riots, we saw another clear expression of faith when more than 700 Sikhs lined up to defend their temples from potential arsonists in the suburb of Southall to the west of the capital. The Sikhs have a proud tradition of valuing each human being, male and female, as equal in God’s eyes. Theirs is a religion in which family is paramount.

We do not know the size of the bank balance of those Sikhs, any more than we know how wealthy are the Muslims of Winson Green. From looking at the streets and houses where they live, and the shops where they buy their food, it is safe to assume that they are not rich.

It is probable, too, that their teenagers would like to have large-screen televisions and fashionable trainers and BlackBerries. But you can pretty well guarantee they would not have been among the looters.

So what makes the difference between these good people and the looters, destroyers and murderers? Here's Mr. Wilson's answer:

Instilled into them would have been the importance of working hard for money to buy these things, rather than hurling a brick through a shop window to help themselves.

Paramount among their moral values would be concern for others, a sense of altruism that could not be more different from the sense of self-entitlement that has been so grotesquely on display this week. The reason for this is that they are from religious families.

All the main religions are unshakeable when it comes to self-evident truths about right and wrong; about stealing, harming others, coveting goods, instant gratification and so on.

There's much more in Wilson's column to reflect upon, but his message is basically that secular materialism offers society no basis for what most would regard as moral behavior. A secular society is one that produces young people who kill, rob and destroy just for the fun of it, or because they feel somehow entitled to do it. A society that no longer believes in objective, transcendent moral values will soon believe in no moral values at all and significant portions of it will devolve into nihilism as we saw in London a week or so ago.

I wonder how Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, two writers who have loudly and insistently made the absolutely fatuous claim that religion is the source of most of society's problems, would explain the difference between the behavior of the Sikhs or Tariq Jahan and the young secular savages that destroyed so much that was precious to their victims.

"But," someone will object, "not all secularists would behave in such debauched fashion. It's unfair to generalize from the fact that these rioters have been raised in a Godless world to the assertion that secularism itself is the reason for their execrable behavior and lack of values." This objection, though, is a bit like saying that just because not everyone who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day dies from respiratory disease that it's unfair to argue that smoking is harmful.

Secular, materialist worldviews offer no grounds whatsoever for thinking in terms of right and wrong. They tell us that we're really nothing more than animals and that the only values are power, survival, and the gratification of our appetites. They offer no basis for thinking that burning, looting and killing are in any way morally wrong. They have no concept of sin, and consequently they're a moral carcinogen to a society.

You can read the rest of Wilson's thoughts on the riots at the link. They're worth pondering.

The Book on Perry

Pesky Truth has a very well-researched, very even-handed piece on pretty much all of the substantive criticisms, along with responses, that have been leveled at Texas Governor Rick Perry. In all, there are seventeen criticisms examined in the post, and now that Perry's in the race for the presidency you might want to bookmark this site since these criticisms will surely be given wide circulation by the Democrats and their media allies in the months ahead.

The seventeen include:

• The Gardisil controversy
• The trans-Texas corridor controversy
• The fact that he was formerly a Democrat and Al Gore's Texas campaign manager
• The secessionist controversy
• The charge that Texas jobs are mostly low-wage
• The charge that Texas' education system is sub-par
• The charge that Perry supports in-state tuition for illegals
• The charge that Perry is gay
• The charge that Perry is squishy on immigration

There are more at the site. Pesky Truth treats these allegations seriously and strives to give both sides of the story. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about Rick Perry at this point, but I think that what the Left and other of his political opponents are already trying to do to him is shameless.

Yesterday, for example, the left-wing site Salon.com had an article titled, "Does Rick Perry Have a Porn Problem?" The title implies that Perry has a personal addiction to pornography. It turned out that his problem was that in 1995 he owned stock in a chain of video stores which carried pornographic videos among their other titles. It may be that he didn't even know he owned the stock or what type of merchandise was in the store's inventory.

This type of smear is pretty low, but it's typical of the sort of thing we can expect during the campaign, so it'd be wise for anyone interested in fairness and decency, whether they support Perry's candidacy or not, to at least know the facts about the more common allegations that'll be brought against him.

There are links at the site to other information on Perry as well.

Double Standard

A report at debkafile on NATO plans to ship arms to Syrian resistance forces contained an interesting detail:

Debkafile's military sources affirm that contrary to earlier reports, the Syrian missile ships cruising offshore took no part in the attack on Latakia. Their function is to blockade the port against arms smuggling. Nevertheless the weapons used by Palestinians fighting in Latakia Sunday came from Lebanon aboard smugglers' boats. There are almost daily incidents of Syrian ships firing on suspect vessels.

In other words, Syria is maintaining a naval blockade designed to prevent arms from reaching Palestinian fighters in Syria and firing on boats that try to run the blockade. Where's the moral outrage at this atrocity that we witnessed from the Left when the Israelis did essentially the same thing except without the gunfire? Where are the flotillas of European peace-workers organizing to run this blockade?

Perhaps for the Left it's only heinous to blockade the Palestinians when Israelis do it. When Syrians do it, well, they probably have good reasons.

Compressing the Spring

An article in the Washington Times talks about the decision the State Department has to make regarding whether to go ahead with construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to pump oil from Canada to Houston. It begins with this:

Here’s what [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] should say: Even if the U.S. government adopts stringent policies to cut oil use, the United States will be dependent on crude for decades. Oil demand across the world, meanwhile, is rising, which applies upward pressure on prices — and makes it economical to extract oil from Canada’s tar sands. Canada will produce its oil.

We will burn a lot of it, no matter what, because there’s still spare capacity in existing U.S./Canada pipelines. But when Canada produces more oil than it can send south, the Canadians won’t just leave it in the ground; they will ship it elsewhere. And America won’t be kept from importing and refining more low-grade crude oil; the United States will just get it from the Middle East, the Energy Department has concluded.

[W]e asked John Baird — Canada’s new foreign minister, who was in Washington recently to speak with Ms. Clinton — which nations would buy oil that America decided not to take. His answer was quick and unequivocal: the Chinese. New pipeline infrastructure will transport oil between the tar sands and Canada’s west coast from which tankers can ship it across the Pacific Ocean.

Building the pipeline would not only create thousands of jobs, it would help reduce our dependence on foreign oil and improve our balance of payments just as drilling offshore would do. Indeed, unleashing our energy industry would have an enormous impact on job creation and economic growth, yet the Obama administration, despite assurances that they really do want to create jobs and enable the U.S. to become energy independent, continues to drag its feet on doing what we could do to accomplish this. It's a head scratcher.

Here's another puzzler:

In a column by Steve Milloy in the same paper we learn that the EPA is going to impose draconian ozone emission standards on American industry that would cost as much as $1 trillion annually and the loss of more than 7 million jobs by 2020.

Milloy talks about the rationale for this regulation and argues convincingly that it's based on very dubious science, but the EPA plans to go ahead with the new standards anyway. Why? Why impose standards that are going to depress jobs even more when there's no compelling health reason to do so?

Switching the metaphor, the economy is like a coiled spring upon which Mr. Obama is placing the weight of the entire government. The burden has compressed the spring flat, and it'll stay flat until the President eases up on the downward pressure. He thinks that all that's needed to make the spring expand is a little stimulus lubricant sprayed onto the coils, but no amount of lubricant will make the spring uncoil until the crushing weight of taxes and regulations is removed.

For reasons Mr. Obama is unwilling to forthrightly explain, he won't do that, and that mystifies me.

Getting Enough Exercise

A study published in Lancet this week has great news for exercise-phobes and those too busy to do a regular workout:

Current recommendations call for adults to do at least 150 minutes, or a total of 1.5 hours, of physical activity weekly.

But the new study finds that doing even half that — 15 minutes daily is about 105 minutes a week — still provides benefits.

The study included more than 400,000 people in Taiwan who were followed for an average of eight years.

The people in the low-activity group exercised for an average of 92 minutes per week, or just under 15 minutes a day. Compared to those in the inactive group — who did almost no physical activity — those in the low-activity group were 14 percent less likely to die from any cause, 10 percent less likely to die of cancer, and had a three-year longer life expectancy, on average.

Every additional 15 minutes of daily exercise beyond the minimum 15 minutes further reduced the risk of all-cause death by 4 percent and the risk of cancer death by 1 percent.

I wonder if moving the recliner back and forth while pressing the tv remote counts as exercise.

Infiltrating the White House

From The Blaze: A liberal Marxist activist and devout Muslim (isn't there a contradiction in there somewhere?) named Tarek Fatah makes the unsurprising claim that the Muslim Brotherhood has a fascist agenda, but, more shocking, he also asserts that The Brotherhood has infiltrated our government all the way up to the White House:

The Blaze article goes on to suggest who Fatah is probably referring to. Fatah is very concerned that the Brotherhood and other radical Islamists are embarked on a program to destroy Western culture. That ambition is the nexus between radical Islamists and the Left and presumably, as a Marxist, Fatah would have no problem with that. His concern seems to be that it's the goal of organizations like The Brotherhood to impose Islam by force, and as a liberal he finds that alarming.

Anyway, read the rest of story at The Blaze. It has lots of supporting links.