Where's Waldo

Libyan rebels and NATO intelligence services have been frustrated in their search for Muammar Qaddafi. Now Debkafile reports that his whereabouts is known but that he's in a desert oasis virtually inaccessible to the rebels with the resources they have available to them. I don't vouch for debkafile's accuracy, but their report makes sense:

In a world exclusive, debkafile's intelligence sources reveal that Muammar Qaddafi, two of his sons and several thousand fighters have gone to ground at Targan. This dot on the vast Saharan map lies several hundred kilometers southwest of the remote desert town of Jiffra which, too, is more than 1,500 kilometers from rebel-held Tripoli and Sirte, where his loyalists are holding out against Libyan rebels.

Western intelligence sources believe that if Qaddafi feels threatened there too, he will use a prepared escape route to Burkina Faso, whose president Blaise Compaoré and prime minister Luc Adolphe Tiao, despite their official denials, have promised him sanctuary. Burkina Faso is a member of the CEN-SAD (Community of Sahel-Saharan States) which still acknowledges Qaddafi as ruler of Libya and refuses to recognize the rebel regime.

Targan is a vast oasis covering hundreds of square kilometers with lakes and connecting streams wreathed in densely-growing palm trees and papyrus rushes. This hideout has so far eluded US spy and aerial satellite searches for the fugitive Libyan ruler. In case he is run to ground, he is believed to have prepared more than one escape route, some of them burrowed underground in places hidden by vegetation.

With him almost certainly are two of his sons, Saif al Islam and Moatassem-Billah and a part of the 32nd Khamis Brigade....

NATO and rebel forces have two major problems before they can catch Qaddafi:

Getting to the remote and vast Targan area is one. Another is controlling it. A very large military force would be required, inured to combat in the extreme climatic conditions of the Sahara which neither NATO nor the rebels have available. They would also need to find out which of the dozens of nomadic tribes in the region have given their allegiance to the Libyan ruler, because without the cooperation of some of those tribes no military operation has a chance of succeeding.

Read the rest at the link.

Our Media Watchdogs

Why is it, we wonder, that when Michele Bachmann gets her history confused, suggesting that the Founding Fathers worked to end slavery or that the "shot heard round the world" was fired in New Hampshire, the media erupts in spasms of derisive hilarity. They just can't get enough of the buffoonery of Michele Bachmann, but when Barack Obama commits a similar error there's utter silence. Not only is there nothing to be heard but the chirping of crickets, some media organs feel it necessary to actually cover up the mistake to keep the President from suffering the kind of mockery which should only be visited upon the likes of Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and George Bush.

As an example, consider that in his speech last Thursday night the President said this:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future -- a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad ....

In fact, so far from being a founder, Lincoln only joined the party in 1856, two years after it was founded, but you won't hear any hearty guffaws from the usual suspects on the Left who would be rolling on the floor had Bachmann said this.

Now, don't misunderstand. I don't think the President's misstatement is a big deal, nor did I think it was necessarily indicative of any mental shortcoming when he claimed to have campaigned in all 57 states, but neither is it a big deal when Republicans commit the same sort of blunders. If people are going to hold a laugh-fest when Bachmann or Palin says something untoward they should do the same thing when Obama does it, and if, as I think, they shouldn't deride the President for his historical solecisms neither should they deride Republicans for theirs.

What I do think is a big deal, though, besides the contrast in the reaction to Republican goofs and Democrat goofs, is that PBS went so far as to scrub the Obama flub from their transcript of his speech. Here's what the PBS transcript said:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future.

What would have been treated as an uproarious gaffe if a Republican had said it was actually expunged from the transcript by a media outlet that's subsidized by our tax dollars. PBS, behaving like Izvestia under the old Soviet regime, deliberately edited out anything which would make the president to whom they're emotionally wedded look ill-informed. Nor have I seen anything in any liberal media source chastising PBS for this shameful breach of professional ethics.

Little wonder that so few people trust the media to be fair and honest.

Update: PBS has inserted the missing words into the transcript at their website. Perhaps it was all an honest mistake, but that's rather hard to believe. PBS called their rendering of the speech a "transcript" which, unlike a "prepared text" from which the president might have deviated, is a word for word record of the actual speech, and it would just be astonishing if the one thing they missed in preparing that transcript was the very blooper that would embarrass the President.

Tom McGuire at Just One Minute offers another interesting sidenote. He quotes Time magazine as they set the record straight:

He gives a good speech, but he’s loose with the facts. He called Abraham Lincoln the “founder” of the Republican Party. Nope. Lincoln was not the founder of the party; he wasn’t even the first Republican nominee (John Fremont was, in 1856). Lincoln was, of course, the first Republican to be elected president.

McGuire then adds:

Ooops, my bad - that was Time ... writing about Mike Huckabee [who made the same error] back in 2008. The author of that immortal and transportable wisdom? Jay Carney, who now famously flacks for Obama. I still can't find Time's mention of the Obama gaffe.

Maybe Carney, President Obama's current press secretary, will be quizzed about all this at the next press briefing. Or not.

Why Muslims Are Angry With America (Pt. II)

This is Part II of Why Muslims Are Angry With America. Part I was posted yesterday. The posts are based on an essay for CNN by Steven Kull who is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of the recently released book, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America.

His article addresses what he believes to be the reasons for Muslim resentments of America.

I've excerpted the article and added comments. Kull writes:

A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces.

This is not simply imagined. Currently in Congress there are efforts to ensure that U.S. funding of democracy promotion in Egypt only benefits liberal, secular parties and does not in any way benefit Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

To most Muslims this American perspective on Muslim society is simply incorrect and American efforts to choose the winner is really about America seeking to impose its Western secular model of governance and to eradicate the role of Islam in the public sphere. Since to Muslims Islam is, by definition, meant to be in the public sphere, American efforts are seen as seeking to undermine Islam itself.

It needs to be asked why it's wrong to seek to encourage ("impose" is a bit too strong of a word) the adoption of the Western model of governance? If we want those parties more favorable to our way of seeing the world to prevail why should we not support them? Indeed, is it not the case that many conservative Muslims in the West work very hard to encourage the spread of Islam and Sharia in the West? As long as they do it lawfully they should be permitted to promote their beliefs.

Why, then, would Muslims take umbrage that the West seeks to promote it's values in their world? There's a double standard at work here. Muslims feel they should be free to spread their views and values throughout the West, but that the West, including Christians, must not be allowed to promote their views and values in Muslim lands.

Overwhelming majorities endorse liberal principles including that the will of the people should be the basis of governance, government leaders should be chosen through free elections and that there should be full freedom of religion. At the same time, equally large majorities say that Sharia should be the basis of government, that all laws should be vetted by Islamic scholars to ensure they are consistent with the Koran and that Muslims should not be allowed to convert to another religion.

Obviously there are some serious contradictions here. But these contradictions are not primarily between sectors of Muslim society but rather within Muslim individuals. This could be described as an “internal clash of civilizations.”

So it is particularly infuriating to Muslims when America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side .... America’s interventions produce a backlash, making Muslims feel that they need to do more to defend their Islamic foundations and making advocates of liberal ideas suspect.

Kull makes a good point here, but he also highlights a serious problem. It's very difficult for the West to formulate a coherent policy toward a part of the world in which the mass of people live with such a profound contradiction. No matter what the West does it is bound to offend one side or the other of the Muslim psyche.

There are reasons to believe that this effect was al Qaeda’s intended goal of the 9/11 attacks. By provoking America into military action against Muslim targets, al Qaeda hoped to revive the age-old narrative of the crusading West and to drive the Muslim people into the arms of al Qaeda’s vision of a purely traditional Islamic society devoid of liberal or Western elements.

Al Qaeda did not succeed in drawing in most Muslims. Al Qaeda’s terrorist methods are seen as wrong and its vision as too extreme. The hold of liberal ideas is not easy to shake. However, al Qaeda did succeed in pulling the United States into a position in the Muslim world that has alienated much of Muslim society.

The reason al Qaeda is seen as wrong, I suspect, is because they were, or are being, defeated. If al Qaeda had prevailed in Iraq and elsewhere they would be seen as great heroes in the Muslim world, carrying out the will of Allah in humiliating the crusaders. Bin Laden himself said that Muslims favor the strong horse, and if that had turned out to be him he would have been seen as the modern Saladin. Many Muslims doubtless reject al Qaeda, not because of their horrific bloodshed, but because al Qaeda has failed to fulfill its promise.

By intervening in ways that have enhanced the polarization of secular and Islamist forces the United States has also made it more difficult for Muslims to build a political space within which they can find a middle ground that integrates these elements into a more coherent whole.

How much political space would there have been in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or in Iraq under Saddam? The idea that American interventions make finding a middle ground between secularists and Islamists more difficult is hard to credit. America poured a lot of money into Mubarak's Egypt and although he was a tyrant there was more of a middle ground there than there is in Syria or Pakistan where our influence is minimal.

As America begins to gradually disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan there is the potential for negative feelings toward the United States to begin to abate. Muslims generally perceive U.S. military forces in the region as a threatening presence designed to keep the region the way America wants it to be .... But perhaps most fundamentally, America’s relationship is most likely to improve as it comes to understand, accept and embrace the whole of Muslim society and the course of development that it has chosen for itself.

Muslims believe that they are on a different path than the West. This path is central to their notion of their freedom to practice their religion. When they feel that America is threatening their religion and their aspirations, they grow resolutely hostile.

As Americans we may believe that it is not possible to blend such a form of religiosity and liberal values. Maybe Muslims will conclude this too. But only when Muslims perceive America as no longer being an obstacle to their endeavor will they be able to move forward in their discovery. And it is only then that America’s relationship with the Muslim world will become more amicable.

America will no longer be an obstacle to the Muslim endeavor when it becomes clear that that endeavor no longer includes the destruction of Israel and a worldwide caliphate. If Muslims abjured these two goals and resolved the contradiction Kull talks about between a desire for a more liberal polity and a deeper desire to live under Islamic law, the relationship between the West and the Muslim world would indeed become less antagonistic.

Is the West not in any way at fault for the strained relations? Certainly in one regard it is, at least in that part of the Muslim world which lies in the Middle East. The bulk of the problem is that we depend on their oil, and as long as we do Western culture will infiltrate their world. The best thing we could do would be to develop our own energy resources which would allow our national interest to be much less intertwined with what's going on in the Middle East and allow us to leave them alone. That would make us both happier.

Unfortunately, developing our own resources in any meaningful way is not something the current administration is willing to do.

Why Muslims Are Angry With America (Pt. I)

Steven Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of the recently released book, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America.

He's written a very thoughtful piece for CNN on the reasons for Muslim resentments of America. He's no doubt correct that many of the world's Muslims think the way he says they do, and perhaps some of those attitudes have justification. Even so, some of the views Kull believes Muslims hold are, in my opinion, at least, simply unwarranted.

The article is very insightful, and I urge readers to peruse the original, but I'd like to share some reflections of my own on it today and tomorrow as we draw close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Kull writes:

Muslims have much they do not like about how America treats them. But there is one thing that is the most fundamental: their perception that America seeks to undermine Islam - a perception held by overwhelming majorities. The fact that many Americans blithely brush off this accusation without really understanding it is one reason this anger persists. To understand it one must go deeper into the Muslim worldview.

Western cultural products are seen as seductively undermining Islamic culture. More importantly, Western powers have gained extraordinary military might that is seen as threatening and coercively dominating the Muslim world and propping up secular autocrats ready to accommodate the West. U.S. support for Israel, sometimes described as ‘America’s aircraft carrier in the region’, is seen as integral to U.S. plans for domination. All this is seen as also serving Western economic interests, such as in securing oil, which dovetails with the agenda of keeping Islam under foot.

Muslims overwhelmingly believe that the 9/11 attacks, and any attacks on civilians, are contrary to Islam. However, many Muslims do believe that America must back away from the Muslim world.

Many Muslims, with their penchant for conspiracy theories, even wonder if the United States somehow engineered the 9/11 attacks to justify this advance [into Iraq and Afghanistan]. When George W. Bush, in what has to go down as one of the greatest public diplomacy missteps of all time, announced a “crusade” against terrorism, the assimilation of American actions into the long-standing narrative of Western hostility to Islam was all but complete.

Many Americans agree we should "back away" from the Muslim world, but, given current realities, it's hard to see how it could happen. First, to demand that the West back away from the Muslim world while Muslims continue flooding into the West, influencing Western culture, laws, and politics as they do so, makes their demand seem awfully one-sided.

Second, much of the Muslim world is absolutely dependent upon Western markets for their oil. If they're going to depend on the West to develop and purchase this crucial resource, there's necessarily going to be a level of interaction between the two worlds that makes backing away highly impractical.

Third, as long as the Muslim world harbors an existential threat to the West, like al Qaeda and its various epigones, Western military forces will of necessity be serving in Muslim lands. There may be some truth to the claim that the reason terrorist groups exist is because we're there and they resent us for it, but the assumption that if we left terrorism would dissipate is naive. Terrorism will not fade if we leave the Middle East. It'll just move closer to home.

Kull continues:

[F]or many Muslims [American pluralism and tolerance] masks a ... narrative that is actually quite oppressive. This narrative is one that some Muslims think they see even more clearly than Americans themselves.

According to this American narrative - which Muslims perceive as arrogant and dismissive - human society naturally and inevitably evolves through the stages that the West has gone through. As in the Renaissance, religion is largely banished from the public sphere, thus allowing pluralism and diversity of beliefs in the private sphere while maintaining a secular public sphere. This leads naturally to the elevation of individual freedoms and the emergence of democratic principles that make the will of the people the basis of the authority of law rather than revealed religious principles.

From this assumed American perspective, Muslim society is seen as simply behind the West in this evolutionary process. Retrogressive forces in Muslim society are seen as clinging to Islamic traditions that make Sharia the basis of law, not the will of the people, and inevitably keep women in their traditional oppressed roles and minority religions discriminated against.

I don't think any thoughtful American (except maybe some Marxist determinists) sees the stages the West has gone through as inevitable for any culture. Indeed, many Christian scholars would argue that these stages could only have happened in a society that was immersed in a Christian worldview. It's not that Westerners think Muslims will go through this evolution or reformation, it's that they think they should.

If that sounds chauvinistic, so be it. If one believes one's values are genuinely superior to the values of others then one should want others to adopt them. Muslims themselves certainly feel this way. They desire that the whole world convert to Islam and live according to the principles found in the Koran. If Muslims feel this way about Islamic culture they can hardly complain that Westerners feel the same way, mutatis mutandis, about Western culture.

Moreover, a society that lives according to "revealed religious principles" is actually living, not according to the law of God so much as according to the interpretation of that law by a relatively few clergy. A theocracy is really a form of oligarchy. That sort of thing might work where the masses of people are uneducated, but it won't work well in a society with a vast educated class, and having a vast educated class is certainly more to be desired than vast ignorance. Muslims, to the degree they yearn for strict theocratic rule must also, if they're consistent, repudiate most non-theological learning.

Muslims see this narrative as being used to justify America actually violating democratic principles in relation to the Muslim world. Even if it is contrary to the will of the people, the United States props up autocratic governments on the basis that they are relatively more progressive - according to the assumed Western narrative - than what the people would do if they had their way.

When the Algerian military in 1991 overturned the results of a democratic election when it appeared that an Islamist party would prevail, America and other Western governments turned a blind eye. When democratic forces arose in Tunisia and Egypt, Muslims perceive that the United States only joined the parade when the outcome was irreversible. Still, America supports autocratic forces in Bahrain in the face of pro-democratic forces calling for change.

There's truth to this, but the truth is not as simple as it sounds. The view that America supports autocrats because they're more progressive is not quite right. America supported and supports people like Mubarak, the Shah, and even the early Saddam not because they have (or had) a more liberal view of the status of women than do traditional Muslim societies, or even because they tended to be more secular than the masses of their people.

Rather, they enjoyed American support, rightly or wrongly, primarily for three reasons: Policy-makers believe that the autocrat will bring stability to the country and to the region; most autocrats tend to be more helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism; and, frankly, there is widespread distrust of the democratic bona fides, not of those who seek to depose the autocrats, but of those who will ultimately accede to power once the autocrat has been deposed.

We're seeing signs in Egypt and Libya that the people who'll eventually hold power in these countries may well turn out to be theocratic tyrants like those who seized control in Tehran after the fall of the Shah. The U.S., and probably every other country, holds to the doctrine that it's better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't. That may not always prove to be the right course, but it's certainly understandable.

More on Kull's essay tomorrow.

The Candidates' Debate

For a fine concise overview of last night's GOP presidential candidates' debate check out Michael Barone's piece at The Washington Examiner. He evaluates not only the candidates' performance but also that of the moderators, particularly Brian Williams, who sounded as though his questions were written for him by the Obama campaign.

Some of the folks at MSNBC that I've heard today seem to have been scandalized by Rick Perry referring to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, but I have yet to hear anyone explain why he's wrong. The only criticism I've heard anyone make that addressed the appropriateness of his characterization was by someone on the radio who pointed out that it's actually worse than a Ponzi scheme for three reasons:

• In a Ponzi scheme participation is voluntary, in SS it's mandatory.
• In a Ponzi scheme when the money runs out the scheme collapses, in SS the government just raises your taxes.
• In a Ponzi scheme all investor contributions go to providing benefits for other investors, whereas in SS contributions go to support a massive bureaucracy and for other governmental expenses.

Anyway, despite the two moderators' attempts to trivialize the debate and to shield Mr. Obama from criticism, it was clear that everyone on that stage is more qualified to serve as president than was candidate Obama.

Banned Books Week

Students of karate hone their skills by performing a ritual series of moves, a kind of dance called a kata, against an imaginary opponent. It's like fighting someone who's not really there. Somewhat amusingly, political liberals also have katas during the performance of which they fight against opponents who don't really exist. One of these phantom fights will be conducted at the end of this month. It goes under the name of Banned Books Week, an annual ritual celebrated every September since 1982.

Jonah Goldberg describes the exercise at TownHall.com:

It's an exciting time. There are going to be special readings of "banned books" not merely in bookstores (where the banned books will, tellingly, be for sale) but online as well. This year, explains BannedBooksWeek.org, "readers will be able to proclaim the virtues of their favorite banned books by posting videos of themselves reading excerpts to a dedicated YouTube channel." It's all so very brave and subversive!

Already, news outlets are dusting off familiar stories about the scary climate of censorship in the land. Indeed, it's a staple of nearly every major newspaper to at least let the American Library Association air its dire warnings about the growing threat to the freedom to read. Last year, on the eve of Banned Books Week, the ALA's official magazine, American Libraries, ran a story headlined, "Book banning alive and well in the U.S."

It's a storyline the American left in particular seems to desperately want to be true. Recently, an American writer penned a lengthy online piece for the British newspaper The (London) Guardian headlined "The Tea Party moves to ban books." The left-wing activist group Think Progress announces, "Censorship On The Rise: U.S. Schools Have Banned More Than 20 Books This Year."

The problem: None of this is remotely true. Banned Books Week is an exercise in propaganda.

Indeed, stout-hearted liberals don their martial arts attire, cinch their symbolic black belts, and, like a Monty Python troupe, march forth to fight courageously against an imaginary opponent. Goldberg explains:

For starters, as a legal matter no book in America is banned, period, full stop (not counting, I suppose, some hard-core illegal child porn or some such out there). Any citizen can go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and buy any book legally in print -- or out of print for that matter.

When the American Library Association talks about censorship of books, it invariably refers to "banned or challenged" books. A "banned" book is a book that has been removed from a public library or school's shelves or reading lists due to pressure from someone who isn't a librarian or teacher. In practice, this means pretty much any book that's pulled off the shelves of a library can be counted as "banned." Even so, that's very rare, which is why the ALA lump "banned" and "challenged" together. Moreover, it's crazy. If the mere absence of a book counts as a "ban," then 99.99 percent of books have been banned somewhere.

Meanwhile, a challenge happens when someone -- usually a parent -- questions the suitability of a book. If you complain that your 8-year-old kid shouldn't be reading a book with lots of sex, violence or profanity until he or she is a little older, you're not a good parent; you're a would-be book-banner. The preferred tactic of the BBWers is to highlight a stupid decision by one school somewhere in America and hype the anecdote as a trend. So when a school in Missouri recently removed Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" from its shelves, it was immediately decried as the harbinger of a national trend. (The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library immediately offered all the school's students free copies of the "banned" book)

To get a sense of how overhyped these sorts of stories are, consider that reported challenges have dropped from 513 in 2008 to 348 last year. The historic norm is a mere 400 to 500 bans or challenges.

Well, there are almost 100,000 public schools in America (98,706 in 2009) educating roughly 50 million students. (There are 33,000 private schools. And some 10,000 public libraries). So if there were, say, 500 parent-driven "bans or challenges" in a given year in public schools, that would mean for every 200 public schools, or every 100,000 students, at least one parent even complained about an age-inappropriate book. What an epidemic!

But perhaps Goldberg is being too harsh. Why make such a big deal about the facts if progressives feel good pretending to smite the dreaded foe hip and thigh?

Like the karate student whose practice of the kata makes him more formidable in actual battle, perhaps some day we'll see these staunch defenders of free speech stand athwart the school board doorway when a mob of outraged Muslims shows up to demand that a book critical of Islam or the Prophet be removed from a school library. I'm sure the practice our mighty freedom warriors received against their make believe opponents will empower them to mount fierce resistance when confronted with the real thing.

The Higgs Boson

Those who do a little reading in modern physics will probably be aware that one of the grand hopes behind the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (below), a huge atom smasher near Geneva, Switzerland, was that it would be able to accelerate particles to such high energies that the Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle", would be revealed.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Higgs is predicted by string theory, and if the Higgs isn't found it would be devastating to those physicists who have invested the last four decades of their lives in trying to demonstrate that string theory is correct. Moreover, since string theory is the fundamental support for other theories like the multiverse, parallel universes, and extra dimensions, these ideas, too, might be rendered less tenable should the Higgs not appear in the LHC experiments.

Here's a good video on the role that the Higgs plays in contemporary subatomic physics:

Recently, the news coming out of Geneva has been disappointing to those who hoped to find the Higgs. Tests that should have confirmed its existence haven't. According to an article in Wired if it's not found by 2013 scientists will have to reassess their models of how the universe works.

Who Are You?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one, which one are you? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might partially resolve this problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it possesses. But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve it?

No Good Explanation

There are basically two schools of thought about President Obama's leadership of the American economy currently in circulation. One is that our economic doldrums are due to the fact that though the president really wants the U.S. to have a thriving economy, he just doesn't know how to bring that about. This school of thought entails that Mr. Obama is totally unqualified for the position he's in, incompetent, and/or not very smart.

The second school of thought is that President Obama is actually very bright and very competent and our economy is on precisely the trajectory he wants it to be on. His ambition is to "fundamentally transform" this country, eradicate the capitalist system that has created so much prosperity, and replace it with a big government socialist state similar to those which are failing so spectacularly in Europe. Economic stagnation prepares the ground for that change by making it appear that capitalism is a failed system, and Mr. Obama is masterfully leading us to that denouement.

Either the President wants to fix the economy but can't, or he can fix it but won't. Of the two possibilities I don't know which is the more likely. Certainly neither is attractive. To deny that he can't fix it is to imply that he's malevolent. To deny that he won't fix it implies that he's not up to the office to which he was elected.

There is a third possibility, of course, one toward which I incline. Perhaps Mr. Obama really does want to dismantle American capitalism and replace it with big government euro-socialism, not because he's malevolent but because he really believes socialism is the more just economic arrangement. He sincerely believes that it is unjust for some people to have more of the world's goods than others. If this is the correct explanation, then questions arise, at least in the minds of those not on the fringe left, about his wisdom and judgment.

In any case, none of the alternatives are pleasant to contemplate. Maybe there's a fourth possibility that I'm just not seeing.

750 Thousand on Brink of Starvation

Once again the long suffering African people are besieged by various of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. At present it is Famine and War which stalk the land, Somalia in particular, and that part of Somalia controlled by the Islamist al Shabab most specifically:

"In total, 4 million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the coming four months in the absence of adequate response," the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) says. Half of those who have already died are children, it says.

In Africa drought is only the proximate cause of famine. The ultimate cause is the inability to live in peace and to manage a country effectively. This is certainly the case in Somalia where the al Qaeda affiliated al-Shabab has created a hell on earth for its people.

Kenya-based Somali journalist Fatuma Noor, who traveled through al-Shabab territory last year,says the famine has damaged the group's credibility. "Al-Shabab are losing support. People are saying that the drought in the region was caused by a lack of rains, but the famine was man-made. They are asking - why has it been only in al-Shabab's areas?"

It's not as if there isn't Western aid available to the victims of al Shabab's stupidity, cruelty, and/or indifference.

Noor says many Somalis are blaming al-Shabab for the severity of the crisis because of the ban it imposed on the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and some other Western agencies in 2009. "There have been warnings of a famine since last year, but there was no proper planning to prevent it," says Ms Noor.

In other words, there is aid available to the victims of this famine, but the Islamist leaders won't let it in to the areas where it's most needed. Instead, according to the article, they tell the people that Allah has caused the drought and that they should pray for rain. Meanwhile, until Allah gets around to answering these prayers, hundreds of thousands of Somalis are beginning to look like the little boy in the photo above.

The New Civility

Teamster president James Hoffa demonstrates for our edification the new rhetorical tone Democrats have been demanding in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting. The rhetoric coming from the left, we can expect, will be full of this sort of brotherly love, kindness, and civility in the coming campaign season (50 sec. mark):

The new tone will unify us, heal our partisan divisions, and bring us together as a nation. Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters, for her part, can't wait for the healing to begin (20 sec. mark):

Democrat Rep. Andre Carson's sweet reasonableness is on display in the following video as he does what he can to promote unity by refusing to question the motives of his opponents (33 sec. mark):

In this clip President Obama himself exemplifies how as a post-partisan president he rises above crass political divisions as he cordially invites, sort of, those Republican SOBs to work together with him in harmony and unity to solve the country's problems:

Frankly, I'm not sure questioning the peoples' patriotism is the best way to put them in a cooperative mood, but I'm pretty sure that he better not use a line like that Thursday night when addressing the joint session of Congress. If he does I wouldn't be surprised to see the GOP caucus get up and walk out en masse, and they should, even if it puts a damper on our new civility.

Cohabitation and Child Welfare

An article in the Washington Times highlights what some researchers have been saying for a couple of decades now about the social consequences for kids living in homes where the adults are living together without benefit of marriage:

Cohabiting is an emerging threat to the health of children and society, two new research reports say.

In the latter half of the 20th century, “divorce posed the biggest threat to marriage in the United States,” sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox and 17 other scholars said in a report released this week by the Institute for American Values’ Center for Marriage and Families and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. That is no longer the case, they said.

“Today, the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives,” the scholars said in “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions From the Social Sciences.”

Cohabiting relationships are prone to instability, with “multiple transitions” and breakups. Children are less likely to thrive in such homes and may even be exposed to abuse from unrelated persons in their homes, the report says.

“The growing instability of American family life also means that contemporary adults and children are more likely to live in what scholars call ‘complex households,’ ” it added. There is scant research on homes in which children live with half-siblings, stepsiblings, stepparents and stepchildren, “but the initial findings are not encouraging.”

Mr. Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project, and his colleagues cautioned that while cohabitation is associated with increased risks of psychological and social problems for children, “this does not mean that every child who is exposed to cohabitation is damaged.”

Still, the risks are real, they said: In one study of children aged 6 to 11, about 16 percent of children in cohabiting homes had “serious emotional problems.” This was true of 4 percent of children living with married biological or adoptive parents.

One thing this article doesn't mention is the threat to a child's physical safety posed by mom's cohabiting boyfriends. David Blankenhorn notes, in his book Fatherless America, that most child abuse, including sexual abuse of teenage girls, is at the hands of live-in boyfriends, and that, statistically speaking, girls are nowhere more safe than when they are with their biological father.

Editorial Hari Kari

There's a puzzling article by Richard Black at the BBC on the resignation of the editor of the science journal Remote Sensing.

The back story is that Remote Sensing published a peer-reviewed paper by two climate scientists who are skeptical that computer models which project dire global temperature increases are correct. It's their view that a negative feedback is being interpreted as though it were a positive feedback resulting in temperature projections that are excessively inflated.

The paper, written by Roy Spencer and William Braswell, has been heavily criticized by the climatological community for not taking into account counter-arguments that had appeared in other journals allegedly addressing the very complaint they raise.

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing, says he agrees with those who have taken him to task for publishing the Spencer/Braswell paper and is stepping down, presumably as an act of professional contrition.

This resignation strikes me as odd because nowhere in the article is there reference to any specific error in Spencer and Braswell's work. It's never made clear what it is about publishing this paper that's so egregious as to warrant the editor's decision to fall on his sword.

In fact Spencer is so confident of the science in his paper that he's challenging anyone who thinks they've found an error or evidence of shoddy methodology to publish a peer-reviewed critique. In essence, he's telling them to put up or shut up.

A second thing that's odd about the BBC article is that the caption of a photo of Spencer accompanying the article states that he's "a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist." What does his religion have to do with this? What's the purpose of mentioning it? Is this intended to be some sort of smear? Is the implication supposed to be that Christians can't do responsible climate science? Would a photo of a proponent of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming be accompanied by a caption declaring him to be an atheist, if indeed he were one?

It's all very strange.

Krugman's Nincompoopery

One might think that an economist who writes for the New York Times and whose most recent distinction was to aver that an alien invasion from outer space would solve our economic woes would be a little more careful not to give his critics another reason to snicker, but not Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman boldly uses his perch at the august Times to declaim upon how much of a rube Rick Perry is and the imminent danger he poses to modern science and manages, in the event, to get egg on his face yet again.

The putative proof that Mr. Perry is an utter yahoo is that a few days ago, according to Mr. Krugman, he actually:

[M]ade headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists.

When his readers are done tsking and chortling at how such a benighted man could be a serious contender for the presidency they might reflect on the fact that what Mr. Krugman seems blissfully unaware of is that Perry was correct and almost every biologist acknowledges it. Biophysicist Cornelius Hunter elaborates:

In fact, evolution does not explain how mammals arose. Nor does it explain how reptiles, birds, amphibians or fish evolved. It doesn’t explain how species evolved abruptly in many cases. It doesn’t explain how the DNA code evolved or life itself first arose. In fact, evolution cannot even explain how a single protein could have arisen. There are 27 orders of magnitude between evolution’s expectations and reality. And that is going by the evolutionist’s own reckoning (in reality it is 100+ orders of magnitude). Indeed, practically all of evolution’s major predictions have turned out false.

Hunter might have added that no one, including evolutionary biologists, can explain how sexual reproduction arose or how lepidopteran metamorphosis evolved, nor can anyone explain how material brains developed consciousness. These and dozens of examples like them are enormous explanatory gaps in evolutionary theory, and Mr. Krugman, like so many other media lefties, has no idea what he's talking about when he assays to mock Republicans like Perry for mentioning them. Instead he just seems to enjoy making a fool of himself, as he did when he wished for a space invasion to spur government spending.

At any rate, we might now wonder who'll be the first journalist to press President Obama for his views on evolution, or is the media only interested in the opinions of a potential president and not the views of the actual president?

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: