The Impact of Divorce

An article by Cheryl Wetzstein in The Washington Times makes the case that divorce is extraordinarily expensive for a society and tragically hard on children. Here are some highlights:

The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new single-parent family with children can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That’s $33 billion to $112 billion a year total in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.

If the U.S. “enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960,” there would be 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, about 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 few children receiving therapy and 70,000 fewer suicides every year, writes W. Bradford Wilcox in a 2009 paper, referring to research by Pennsylvania State University professors Paul Amato and Alan Booth.

Children of divorce have shorter life spans - by an average of five years - compared to children whose parents didn’t divorce, according to a new study by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin.

That longevity data is “the most devastating analysis that we’ve seen … of the impact of divorce on children. They don’t ‘get over it,’ ” said Mr. Gersten, who was a Department of Health and Human Services official in the George W. Bush administration.

None of this should come as a shock, certainly not to those who've gone through the ordeal of divorce, but it shows yet again the social disaster which was the sexual revolution, one major consequence of which was the weakening of marital commitment and, eventually, no-fault divorce. Now we're all paying for society's sexual "liberation" in a host of social programs designed to meliorate its consequences.

Marriage and divorce are not just personal issues between the principals. They're moral matters in which the entire society has a stake because the entire society is affected.

Burning Sunshine Is Evil

I know this snapshot doesn't mean much, if it means anything at all, but it's still pretty funny. I mean, wouldn't you think that if people were going to take the trouble to show up to protest something they'd at least know a little bit more about what it is they're protesting?

Maybe they did and maybe the video was edited to make them look silly, but, then again, maybe they managed it all on their own:

What Is the Good?

One of the central questions of philosophy is the question "What is the Good?" What does it mean to say that something is good?

One possible answer to this question is that good is that which conduces to happiness and well-being. If that's so, some argue, then one consequence is that God is not needed either for us to know the good or to do it. All we need do is employ our reason to determine what it is that makes human beings happy and then we can build an ethics around that. This is the argument made by naturalists, i.e. those who believe that all that exists is the natural world of material objects and physical forces. The naturalist does not believe that there is any supernature.

There's a crucial difficulty here, though. How can any ethics grounded in human reason obligate me to care about the good of other people? In other words, why would someone be wrong to be an egoist who cares only about his own happiness and well-being?

The whole point of ethics is to provide an answer to this question and to it naturalism has no answer. All the naturalist can do is define what good is. He cannot tell us why we should care about the good of others, except, perhaps, insofar as we benefit from doing so.

But this is just another form of egoism in which one tends to the good of others so as to benefit from it oneself. If there's no benefit to me in helping others, for example by contributing money to a third-world relief fund, it wouldn't be wrong to selfishly withhold my assistance. If there's much benefit to me in employing slave labor or cheating customers out of their money, then it's not wrong to do so. What's right is what's good for me. This is the reef upon which any any ethics based on the assumption of naturalism will inevitably founder.

Naturalism leads to egoism and egoism leads to "might-makes-right". It's a very bleak basis for human flourishing, but that's what you get in a world that no longer believes in God.

Old Time Rock and Roll

Readers who like "oldies" music will find this website worth visiting. It gives you your choice of year and genre and lets the music play in the background while you work on the computer. Plus it's all free.

Answering Alter

Last week Jonathan Alter wrote a column in which he challenged the president's critics to "Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president." He wanted his interlocutors to explain why, exactly, President Obama has failed, not as a tactician or as a nice guy, but as a policy-maker. In Alter’s words, “Your mission, Jim [or anyone else for that matter], should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.”

Peter Wehner at Commentary accepts the challenge with substantial gusto:

In one sense, the answer to the Alter challenge is obvious: Obama has failed by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. It’s Obama who joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought.

It’s Obama who promised to cut the deficit in half. It’s Obama who said if we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care cost curve would go down rather than up. It’s Obama who promised us recovery and prosperity, hope and change. What we’ve gotten instead is the opposite.

What makes Alter’s challenge particularly delicious is during the Bush years he spoke out about the importance of a “reality-based” presidency (as opposed to a “faith-based” one). “They [Republicans] could end up winning in November by distorting the argument,” Alter said in 2006. “But on credibility and the facts, they’ve lost.”

Wehner goes on to argue that on the basis of "credibility and facts" the president's accomplishments are deeply disappointing:

• Under Obama’s stewardship, we have lost 2.2 million jobs (and 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone). He is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.
• The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent v. 7.8 percent the month Obama took office.
• July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level, the highest since the Great Depression.
• Since May 2009 — roughly 14 weeks into the Obama administration — the unemployment rate has been above 10 percent during three months, above 9 percent during 22 months, and above 8 percent during two months.
• Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression.
• The youth employment rate is at the lowest level since records were first kept in 1948.
• The share of the eligible population holding a job has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.
• The housing crisis is worse than in the Great Depression. (Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago.)
• The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slowing growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was a sickly 1.0 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent.
• Fiscal year 2011 will mark the third straight year with deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Prior to the Obama presidency, we had never experienced a deficit in excess of $1 trillion.
• During the Obama presidency, America has increased its debt by $4 trillion. That is to say, Obama has achieved in two-and-a-half years what it took George W. Bush two full terms in office to achieve — and Obama, when he was running for president, slammed Bush’s record as being “unpatriotic.”
• America saw its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history under the Obama presidency.
• Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency.
• The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
• A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program. More than 44.5 million Americans received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, a 12 percent increase from one year ago. There is more that can be said, but you get the point.

If circumstances don't soon improve this will certainly be a tough record to run on in 2012. Historically, the economy has improved after a recession, but this time we seem to be mired in high unemployment and low growth for the rest of the decade.

It'll be interesting to see how the Obama campaign tries to deflect attention from these unpleasant facts.

Chicken Littles

Apropos the global climate change contretemps Pajamas Media discusses a few of the dozens of environmental "scares" to which we've been subjected over the years. They focus on the mercury poison scare of the mid-nineties, but the commenters mention others (the population bomb, Alar, saccharine, electromagnetic radiation/cancer, DDT/cancer, global cooling, nuclear winter, et al). In fact according to a study cited by PM there have been twenty six such alarums within the memories of those of us who came of age in the sixties.

Here's an excerpt: As these costs [of the various alleged threats] rise, people will increasingly demand hard evidence that their sacrifices are worthwhile and are not merely based on sentimentalism and opportunism.

When people learn more about an issue, the persuasion formula that initially worked so well for alarmists breaks down. People become less persuaded by appeals to trust the authorities, less susceptible to fear, less willing to accept emotional appeals from celebrities, less gullible. Trends in polls show that this is already happening with the global warming scare.

Alarming forecasts of humans harming themselves and the environment by their actions are a common social phenomenon. They become widely believed for a time, cause unnecessary anxiety, and result in costly government policies, then fade from public attention as it becomes more difficult to maintain the alarm in the face of counter-evidence and closer public scrutiny.

As if to provide me an illustration of how this works some folks on a listserve to which I belong sent a link to a short video designed to frighten the bejabbers out of anyone who cares about bird life in North America. The video was accompanied by breathless appeals to not let this happen, and was put out by a left-wing environmental group called the National Resources Defense Council.

The NRDC purports to warn us of the enormous damage that mining energy from Canadian tar sands will do to our bird species and natural beauty. I'm not saying that mining tar sands will not have an impact on the ecology of the Canadian wilderness, but nothing in this video provides evidence of that. It's simply a series of images that the viewer is supposed to subliminally connect with tar sands mining, but no evidence whatsoever of any connection between the image and the mining is given. It's pure emotionalism and quite possibly dishonest:

Assertions are not necessarily facts. What a critical thinker trying to decide on these matters should ask for is not mere assertions, but assertions backed by unimpeachable evidence. Otherwise, even if the alarmist case is true, the audience they seek to reach will just become cynical.

Meanwhile, Uncommon Descent chips in with a parable for our times fetched from the treasure trove of wonderful social commentary limned by the great Walt Disney. Any similarity between the characters in this cartoon and any person living or dead is purely coincidental:

The Difference Grandparents Make

We've on occasion tried to make the argument here that one of the many negative consequences of the modern breakdown of the family - which is itself a consequence of the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies - is that too many children are now growing up without the benefit of two full sets of grandparents.

This is a disadvantage that goes far deeper than not having someone to bake cookies for the children. Grandparents have usually worked most of their life, accumulated substantial savings and provide a deep economic resource for their children and grandchildren. Their children and grandchildren are able to enlist the grandparents' aid to buy homes, go to college, take vacations, and enjoy life experiences that the children of single parent families simply cannot. Children in single parent families often have only a maternal grandmother to draw upon for help when they need it and she herself is often not in a position to offer much financial support.

Now comes an article by Hope Yen that discusses some of these same issues. Ms. Yen has a lot of interesting things to say about the crucial role grandparents play, and, by implication, what a sociological tragedy family breakdown has been. Here are some excerpts:

America is swiftly becoming a granny state. Less frail and more involved, today's grandparents are shunning retirement homes and stepping in more than ever to raise grandchildren while young adults struggle in the poor economy. The newer grandparents are mainly baby boomers who are still working, with greater disposable income. Now making up 1 in 4 adults, grandparents are growing at twice the rate of the overall population and sticking close to family — if their grandkids aren't already living with them.

"We help out in terms of running errands, babysitting, taking the grandkids to doctors' appointments, and for back-to-school shopping," said Doug Flockhart of Exeter, N.H., listing some of the activities that he and his wife, Eileen, do for their five kids and seven grandchildren. But that's just the start.

They also pitch in with health care payments for family members due to insurance gaps, and their pace of activity has picked up substantially since their daughter, who lives three blocks away, gave birth to her first child this month. Flockhart, a retired architect, likes the family time even if he and his wife worry about their grandkids' futures.

"It's not so much the day in and day out, it's the big picture as to how these young kids will grow up and pay for a college education and buy a house," he said.

Flockhart's situation is increasingly common, demographers say. "Grandparents have become the family safety net, and I don't see that changing any time soon," said Amy Goyer, a family expert at AARP. "While they will continue to enjoy their traditional roles, including spending on gifts for grandchildren, I see them increasingly paying for the extras that parents are struggling to keep up with — sports, camps, tutoring or other educational needs, such as music lessons."

In all, there are 62.8 million grandparents in the U.S., the most ever. They are projected to make up roughly 1 in 3 adults by 2020. Nearly half the states had increases of 40 percent or more over the last decade in the number of grandchildren living with grandparents.

[T]he stereotype of grandparents who are frail, receding and dependent is changing. [U]nemployment among workers ages 25 to 34 last year was double that of Americans aged 55 to 64. U.S. households headed by baby boomers also commanded almost half of the nation's total household income, and are more likely to be college graduates than grandparents in previous generations.

These grandparents reject living in senior communities in favor of "aging in place" in their own homes, near family. In 2009, households ages 55 or older spent billions of dollars on infant food, clothes, toys, games, tuition and supplies for grandchildren, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Grandparents are supposed to be old, gray-haired people tottering around, but the vast majority are actually in the work force. There is not much doubt that the recent recession has brought grandparents and grandchildren together.

Back in the sixties and seventies we were frequently assured by feminists and others that women didn't really need a husband, that there are lots of different kinds of workable families. Perhaps, but the traditional two parent family with two sets of grandparents offers the children so many advantages that it's hard to understand why it's not more strongly held up as the ideal by liberals who profess to care about children and why we instead seem to be doing everything we can, from winking at cohabitation and premarital sex to making divorce easy, to guarantee that fewer children will be able to benefit from those advantages.

Let's Treat Climate Change Skeptics Like Racists

Al Gore has performed a useful service by calling our nation's attention to climate change, but in his zeal he seems to have lost the ability, or willingness, to make basic distinctions. In a recent interview, for example, Gore compares the attempt to "win the conversation" on climate change to the attempt earlier in our history to win the conversation on racial equality.

Mr. Gore certainly knows that the campaign for equality was a moral, not a scientific, debate. The controversy over climate change, on the other hand, is a debate over methodology, reliability and interpretation of data. To juxtapose the two is, intentionally or not, to subtly smear his opponents as the same kind of people as racists.

The second thing to which to object in his comparison is that the debate over how we should treat minorities was conducted largely by showing people how their behavior failed to conform to their own moral principles and thus essentially shame them into changing their behavior. There should be no place for shaming people in the debate over climate change unless they have behaved unethically. The debate should be conducted in the realm of empirical facts. The use of public censure, which Mr. Gore seems to endorse against his critics, is antithetical to a dispassionate scientific attempt to follow the evidence.

Third, Mr. Gore implies that the evil polluters are motivated by greed whereas the humble scientists, or at least the ones who agree with him, are motivated simply by a noble desire to find the truth. This is naive. Scientists are just as human as corporate CEOs. They may be motivated by different inducements, but they're often still driven by concerns such as the desire for professional prestige, a commitment to advancing a political ideology, lucrative book contracts and speaking engagements, etc. Mr. Gore may be correct that the polluters have selfish motives and the climatologists warning about climate change do not, but he doesn't know this or offer us reasons why we should believe it. Given our lack of insight into the motives of the players it's best to assume, pending further evidence, that one's opponents are simply mistaken without assuming that they're evil.

One further point of interest in Mr. Gore's attempt to subtly treat climate change skeptics* as the modern equivalent of 20th century racists is that his own father opposed equality for blacks and voted against the Civil Rights Act as a member of the U.S. Senate. One wonders if Gore, Jr. ever expressed toward his own father the moral opprobrium and indignation with which he says his generation challenged the older generation during the days of the civil rights movement.

Pat Gray had some fun with this yesterday on Glenn Beck's radio show. Actually, I think Gray is being a bit unfair to Gore, Jr. here since he doesn't know what transpired between father and son, but even so, his diatribe raises a pertinent question about Mr. Gore's pontification on this issue in his interview. How fervently did the young Gore press his own father on the matter of social justice for blacks?

Thanks to Hot Air for the links.

*Actually the term "climate change skeptic" is probably a misnomer. Most people I've read on this subject are not skeptical of climate change itself but rather of the claim that whatever change is occurring is 1. definitely a bad thing, and 2. man-caused.

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.